THE DEEP HOUSE Directors Talk Making an Underwater Horror Film
For The Deep House, directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo have done something extraordinary. Almost the entire film was shot underwater. It will be released in French theaters next week. Blumhouse has bought the right to U.S. distribution. It will be released through Epix domestically. Also, you might not know Maury and Bustillo, but you’ve probably seen their work. They directed Leatherface, the prequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was an okay film.
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Synopsis:
A few YouTubers who dive into a remote French lake discover a house submerged in deep waters. Their adventure becomes a nightmare when they understand the house harbors atrocious crimes and find themselves trapped with hardly any oxygen left. Their presence has awakened a dark spirit haunting the house.
Variety recently sat down and talked with the directors about the challenges of filming underwater, also, how their idea wouldn’t be easy, even pre-pandemic. “We were drawn by the idea of combining these two sub-genres. We just wrote down four sentences with our concept and illustrated it with a photo of a diver, and Clement Miserez, our producer, went for it,” Maury explains. Bustillo agrees, “He had the flair and the craziness to come on board with just this concept of aquatic horror film.”
Filming The Deep House underwater was a tremendous challenge. “Shooting a film underwater is like making a movie for the first time. All the technical aspects had to be done differently there, and it forced us to reinvent the mise en scene process and the way shots are organized,” says Bustillo. Maury chimes in, “Every sequence underwater takes three times longer to shoot than a sequence above it – even a shot reverse shot takes a long time to set up.”
Directing actors underwater for The Deep House proved to be an incredibly taxing challenge. “There’s not wi-fi down there. We had an engineer who took months to create a system where we had antennas placed in the water which were connected to one another. This unique system required us to work with unusual crew members and allowed us to see the dailies on the monitors above water.”
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The explanation for how they got a whole house underwater is frankly astonishing. They sunk an entire house. “We couldn’t leave the whole house in the water for days at a time because the decors would have been ruined, so we would immerse only parts of the house underwater, and were shooting scenes floor by floor; we could only immerse one meter per hour, which represented six meters,” explains Bustillo.
Maury chimes in, “The whole process was crazy, and we owe it to Jacque Ballard, who is a master of underwater filming. Ballard notably created Beyonce’s aquatic music video ‘Runnin’.” Obviously, shooting underwater comes with an inherent danger. The directors were not allowed to go down in the water. They were following and directing the action via 6 monitors. Actors with diving masks can’t get across lines with their faces covered. This is something Maury and Bustillo were prepared for.
“We needed the actors to be able to let strong emotions be reflected in their eyes, which we found with Camille Rowe and James Jagger.” The directors are promoting The Deep House and working on three projects. “We’re ready to dive back in soon in an exotic location.“
The Deep House doesn’t have a U.S. release date just yet. Deep water scares the hell out of me. How do you feel about it? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram! I’m Jans. I write news. Find me on Twitter @HorrorPlayed.
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