Scott Derrickson Talks the Audacity of The Gorge and Teases Black Phone 2

On February 14, Apple TV+ is releasing the most action-packed, effects-driven, high-concept love story you’ve probably ever seen. It’s called The Gorge and stars Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa, The Witch) and Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick, Drumline) as two snipers on opposite sides of a massive gorge that may be the gateway to hell. Their job is to protect it but, when they begin to fall in love, they lose track of their goal and they’ll have a hell of a fight to save the world.

The concept is big, bonkers, and helmed by Scott Derrickson, a director who made a name for himself dabbling in multiple genres. He’s done superheroes (Doctor Strange), he’s done straight horror (Sinister), and he’s done psychological thriller (The Black Phone), all of which and more come into play in The Gorge, which is really just a big sprawling adventure wrapped in a romance.

Before The Gorge comes to Apple TV+ next week, we spoke to Derrickson about that and more. How The Gorge blends so many genres and tones, how he was able to get the legendary Sigourney Weaver for a role, if all the films it feels like The Gorge is paying homage too are on purpose, and we even got a very interesting tease about his next film, this fall’s sequel to The Black Phone. Read about all that below.

Germain Lussier, io9: So I want to start with tone and genre. This movie has got lot of both, and I think you do a great job of making it all work together. I’m wondering, are there any specific techniques you used to make sure it stays cohesive as it jumps from action to sci-fi to romance, etc.?

Scott Derrickson: Yeah, you know, it plays with as many genres as any film I’ve ever seen. It’s romance, it’s sci-fi, it’s action, it’s horror, it’s political thriller. It’s all these things. But I think that what I realize is that there has to be a glue that holds it all together, and the glue is the romance. You invest all that time in the romance early on, get to really care about those characters, care about that relationship and their connectivity. And then that becomes the thing that the audience stays invested in that can sort of tie together all the other crazy things that happen in the second half of the movie.

io9: Part of what makes that romance work is that it’s very intimate. Basically it’s just two characters for the entire movie. But you also have this huge set, and this world-ending premise. So talk about balancing this epic story on such an intimate scale.

Derrickson: I mean, those are the kinds of big movies that I tend to like. Things that have an intimacy at a mass scale. I mean, this isn’t as good as these films of course, but Lawrence of Arabia and Apocalypse Now, when I think of those two movies, I think of incredible epic scale and incredible character intimacy as the soul of it. And those kinds of films are hard to get made now because that’s not typically what happens in a franchise, sequel, or IP. You have to tell an original tale about an original character to do something like that.

io9: In addition to those movies, I felt like The Gorge is a love letter to a lot of movies that we all know and love. There’s a little Aliens in there, Resident Evil, Indiana Jones. Are those any of the homages on purpose or are those the kinds of things that are just built into your DNA as a film lover?

Derrickson: Boy, I don’t know if I could parse them out on the spot, but it’s both. Certainly, there are some things that are direct homages where I’m like, “People are going to know right where I’m getting this from and that’s good.” But also, I’m oftentimes surprised in the process of making a movie and sometimes years after making a movie where I’m like, “Oh, that’s where I took that from.” And I’ll see something, a movie I haven’t seen since I was a teenager or something, I’ll be like, “Oh, god, that’s where I got that scene from.” So sometimes you’re aware of where you’re stealing from and sometimes you just don’t.

io9: Oh, totally. One homage that’s certainly clear is the casting of Sigourney Weaver [as a mysterious corporate leader]. You don’t cast Sigourney Weaver in a sci-fi movie without knowing what you’re doing. Talk about how she came onto the film?

Derrickson: Well, she was my first choice for the role because I think she’s an incredible actress, and in fact when I met her I asked her, I said, “I bet you can’t guess my favorite of your films besides either of the Alien films.” And she thought about it for a second and she said, “The Year of Living Dangerously.” And I was like, “Oh my God, you’re right. How’d you get that?” So she brings horror credibility, but I also felt like there was something about the role that she was going to understand and relate to her ability. I’ve seen her play some very flawed characters. I love this movie Copycat that she’s in and I really love Death and the Maiden, and I just felt like she was going to bring a humanity to this character who could otherwise be played in a two-dimensional way.

And so when we Zoomed and talked about it, I told her that and when she realized that I wasn’t trying to create an arch-villain or anything like that, but a character who had pure motives and really believed in the goodness of what she was doing, even though it is abjectly immoral. There was something about the complexity of that that she, as soon as I told her that, she said, “Okay, I’m in. As long as you want to play the character that way, I’m interested.” And I think she liked the whole movie. I think she also wanted to be a part of the project because I think she thought it was good.

io9: Yeah. It’s such a cool idea. And part of it is you have this third character of the gorge itself, right? This thing that you just want to learn more about thankfully we get to. Clearly, it’s made mostly with CGI when you’re looking at the wide shots, but was there ever a moment where you considered looking for a real location?

Derrickson: I’m going to correct you, actually. It’s not made with CGI. What it is, it’s CGI stitching of real plate photography.

io9: Oh, okay.

Derrickson: So we went to Norway and shot canyons and shot rock walls, shot the forest, shot the sky, and then stitched that together in a digital construction. But when you’re looking at the gorge, most of what you’re seeing is real photography. And that is what makes it look good. It makes it look real. It looks real because, for the most part, it is real. It’s just been manipulated into the shape that I needed it to be, but the elements themselves are actually photographed real material.

io9: Oh, that’s awesome. Well, there you go. My apologies.

Derrickson: Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t mean to correct you. I just think it’s one of the things that makes the movie work because that’s a hard way to do it. That’s a more challenging, more difficult way to do it. But I was insistent about doing it that way because if it was a CGI background, you could tell. It wouldn’t feel realistic. Now, you know that’s not a real place on Earth but not because it doesn’t look real, at least in my opinion. And so using the real photography as the plates is the key to an environment like that.

io9: Oh absolutely. Now, usually, a movie of this scale, directed by someone who has dabbled in franchises like yourself, with huge stars such as Anya and Miles, you’d assume it’s a franchise starter. And I love that this isn’t. Of course, the story could continue but for the most part, it really ties up all the loose ends that you’re curious about. How important was it to you that it was a cohesive story and it did stand alone?

Derrickson: Everything. That was everything. If I didn’t feel like that was fundamentally there from the beginning in Zach Dean’s Black List script, I wouldn’t have said yes to it. There were things about that that I wanted to work on and make better and did some rewrites on it. But for the most part, the script and the story that Zach wrote is the movie. And I felt that the originality of that and the audacity of that script to blend as many genres in such interesting ways really, really worked.

io9: For sure. It makes it stand out in a lot of great ways. It also stands out because it’s an Apple TV movie and not a theatrical release. How, if at all, did that change your kind of thinking when approaching the movie, knowing that its main release would be streaming?

Derrickson: Well, I didn’t know if it was going to be streaming or theatrical.

io9: Oh, okay.

Derrickson: And I shot it in a way that it would work equally well in either situation. But honestly, I didn’t really care much because there are pros and cons for a filmmaker in a situation like that. It’s such an original, again, audacious and daring movie, that Zach wrote and that we shot. And when Apple decided just to make it a streamer, I felt relieved that I wouldn’t have to worry about that opening weekend. The movie is not going to be judged as a success or failure depending on how much the marketing worked and will it get past a certain number to where it becomes profitable. That’s all gone. But of course, every filmmaker wants their movies in theaters. The theatrical experience is unique and special and, you know, is not the same thing as watching a movie at home. But I love both and I’ve watched probably more films at home than I have in theaters in my life. And it doesn’t make those films any less special to me. So in this case, I think it ended up with the release format that it was meant to have and I feel really good about it.

io9: This is going to be my last thing, and maybe you can’t say anything about it, but obviously The Black Phone 2 is next for you. If I’m not mistaken, we killed the Grabber at the end of the last one. So I’m wondering, what can you tease us about what we can expect to see when that hits theaters?

Derrickson: I mean, I’m not going to tease anything about the story. What I’ll tell you is that I didn’t feel obliged to make a sequel. And Joe Hill came up with an idea that I thought was really interesting and we built off that idea for the screenplay. But what I got interested in fundamentally was I realized after making The Black Phone if I went and made a big movie, like The Gorge, which I did, by the time I finished, all those middle school kids would be in high school. And what we wrote was a high school coming-of-age movie in the way that the first movie was a middle school coming-of-age movie. And those were two very different kinds of films.

io9: Definitely.

Derrickson: And so the maturity of the movie and the intensity of the movie even is much more suited to high school coming of age than middle school coming of age.

The Gorge drops on Apple TV+ on February 14. The Black Phone 2 is currently scheduled for release on October 17.

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