SPOILER ALERT: This story spoils the plot of the film Whalefall, now out in theaters, based on Daniel Kraus‘ novel.
A running joke Whalefall director Brian Duffield had going to summarize the film hailing from 20th Century Studios and Imagine Entertainment and hitting theaters this week was that “men would rather get swallowed by a sperm whale than go to therapy.”
Just as Austin Abrams’ Jay Gardiner finds himself in quite the harrowing predicament trapped in a whale’s stomach after a tangle with a squid, the cast, crew and filmmakers of Whalefall also found themselves in the tricky situation of bringing the premise of Daniel Kraus’ novel to the big screen.
To back up, Jay’s decision to seek out the remains of his dead father Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin), who has committed suicide by drowning in the Pacific Ocean following a diagnosis of mesothelioma, is what really landed him in this situation. Just as he has to get scrappy and use anything he can find to escape, those behind the making of the movie had to be in constant communication about what it would take to pull off such intense scenes, many of which took place inside a life-sized whale stomach built specifically for the film.
“It takes a village to build a whale, and I think it takes a really great village to survive it. And that’s been really one of the most gratifying parts of [production],” Duffield said when Deadline visited the set of the movie at Radford Studios in L.A. in September, during an early tank scene where Abrams encountered the whale for the first time. “It’s such a new and unique challenge that I think we hired the right people, because it was a lot of us all banging our heads together trying to figure out how to shoot every day.”
Multiple whale stomach models were built by Weta Workshop in New Zealand, with the head, throat, esophagus and larynx constructed in California because they were too big to ship to set on time. The 12-foot-tall, 18-foot-long whale head was manufactured by StudioArt & Technology.
Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner in 20th Century Studios’ ‘Whalefall’
20th Century Studios
“It’s such an interlocked set. I’ve never made a movie, and I can’t imagine ever making a movie where every single department really has to be talking to each other every step of the way,” Duffield said. “For the stomach, Ramsey [Avery] our production designer [had] to figure out how to build it, and then we [had] to figure out how to put cameras in it, but then also we had to figure out how to light it, and then the lights become bioluminescence.
Visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, who worked on Jordan Peele’s Nope, rigged the LED lighting in the stomach to eventually render as the bioluminescence that then helps illuminate Jay’s environment.
“Some colors do not show up the same color in LED lights. So, our costume designer had to build Austin’s costume around what the LEDs would show up with,” Duffield added. “So we would take neoprene samples to New Zealand, where we built the stomachs, to show them under the lights, against the whale skin, to see what colors show up.”
Cameras and lenses were broken “nonstop” during filming; the crew ultimately constructed scenes around the one spot the camera could actually fit into the cramped space and worked backwards from that vantage point. If that weren’t claustrophobic enough, Abrams also faced the added challenge of emoting behind a facemask and the diving equipment Jay uses.
“We redesigned the regulator to make it as small as possible, because regulators are not really meant to be worn outside of water. And yet, the air inside the whale stomach is toxic. It won’t kill him, necessarily, but it’s full of methane and things that make him a little high,” Duffield said. “So we redesigned the regulator to give him as much mouth shape as possible. He actually does talk throughout the movie to himself or to other characters in the stomach. That has been a challenging learning curve.”
Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner
20th Century Studios
These formidable aspects of the film’s creation echoe Kraus’ general approach to writing books; he now has 30-plus under his belt.
“I like to create new problems and have to fight through the solutions — I try to start with an impossible [conceit] where I just throw hurdles in front of me of things that I don’t know,” Kraus told Deadline on set. “So I have to relearn how to write a book every time.”
The impetus for Whalefall came from a viral video in which a kayaker ended up in the mouth of a whale. Once Kraus heard about the clip, it spawned discussions with friends about whether it could actually happen. He could not stop thinking about it.
Following an email to author friend Mary Roach, author of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), and correspondence with three whale experts she recommended, Kraus had found the “high concept” hook for the book, which hit shelves in 2023.
“I didn’t want to do it if it couldn’t really happen — being swallowed by a whale has been treated like a fable and Biblical stories forever. My interest was, could you do it scientifically accurately?” Kraus said. “And by the end of the day, I was all systems go. All the whale experts were super-excited to help, and they think about whales all day, but never in this context. We were off to the races.”
Both Duffield and Kraus drew connections to the science fiction genre in different ways, with Kraus developing an interest in whales during the frontloaded research process for the book, which took about three months.
“I became more and more … obsessed, you might say, with whales,” he said. “There’s a lot of what I was doing with this biology of a whale, but I also unexpectedly started to get really enamored of whales as a being, as a force of nature.
“Sperm whales are extraordinarily intelligent. They’re one of the most mysterious animals on the planet. Everything about them is strange. They really feel like aliens. Even in the deep ocean, which is filled with alien-like creatures, the whales almost feel like a master alien. They’re not aggressors. They’re very peaceful animals. Sperm whales have been witnessed helping humans many, many times, like divers in trouble.”
Experiencing a whale from the inside out adds complicated layers to Whalefall‘s story, even when it comes to the father-son relationship at its heart.
“How do you fall in love with a character through its guts, basically? It’s definitely gross, but what are the ways that we can fall in love with this animal, because Austin is in such a unique situation, and I think there’s something interesting about his character, who is very fond of of animals and nature,” Duffield said. “One of the things that differentiates his character and Josh’s character is Josh is very hard and Austin’s very soft. But they both have this love of nature, and so giving Austin moments that he can really, for lack of a better way to put it, appreciate how cool the situation is — while also being scared sh*tless and thinking he’s going to die pretty much at any given moment — that was part of the craft of it, too.”
Duffield evidently shared a similar awe. For him, the trick with the stomach being the setting for a majority of the movie was balancing the claustrophobic feeling of Jay’s plight with breaks from the cramped space.
“It’s challenging for a couple reasons. One, it’s such a long stretch of the movie, and quite a lot happens while he’s in in the stomach, but it was also about keeping it fresh and interesting so [that] after 30 minutes, people weren’t just like, ‘Alright, I’m sick of this stomach,’” Duffield said. “[Jay] does have different little side adventures. He spends some time in the second stomach, which is very visually different, and then in the esophagus of the whale as well. Different animals that are also in the stomachs, and different problems he has to MacGyver his way out of, so it’s just trying to figure out how to keep it fresh visually, which Daniel honestly just did a lot of in the book.”
Whalefall executive prodcuer Doug Merrifield, whose credits include the Free Willy films, joined Duffield, Kraus and Imagine Entertainment’s Allen Mandelbaum in emphasizing that the whale is not the villain in the movie. It’s orcas that attack Jay’s sperm whale that ultimately provide the antagonists and the catalyst for the film’s climax.
“The whale is not a bad guy. The whale is just an animal that’s doing what it’s meant to be doing. The whale is not interested in [Jay]. It’s trying to get a squid, and Austin is in the way,” Duffield said. “The movie makes a very direct correlation, eventually, between Josh Brolin and and the whale, and part of Austin’s journey is making peace with his dad, who is dead at the start of the movie.”
L-R: Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner and Josh Brolin as Mitt Gardiner
20th Century Studios
One of the main threads of the book that drew Duffield to directing the adaptation was the father-son relationship at its core; his own son was 4 at the time of the set visit. In Whalefall, Mitt and Jay didn’t always know how best to communicate with each other; the ocean is where they find common ground.
“The miracle of the book and hopefully of the movie is, when it ends, you primarily are talking about the relationships, and then the whale is third or fourth build, which for a movie that’s set almost entirely inside of a whale feels impossible, but somehow [Kraus] pulls it off,” Duffield said. “As you age up, you start viewing things from different perspectives. I think before I was a dad, I probably would have been firmly in Jay’s point of view, and then now being on the other side of it and having a son — granted, my son just turned 4, so it’s a very different than the relationship between [Jay] and [Mitt] — [I’m] really starting to feel for Brolin’s character, and understand him to some extent.”
Kraus, who grew up in conservative small-town Iowa, leaned into the personal when it came to building the tension of Mitt and Jay’s relationship. His father was a hunter, not as extreme as Mitt, but still an inspiration for the character.
“I’m a product of [where I grew up], which is to say, I have avoided getting therapy. I’m a product of that culture where you don’t express yourself and you don’t show your feelings when it comes to interpersonal things,” Kraus said. “Mitt is a very emotional guy when it comes to the ocean, like he will fight tooth and nail for every living creature in there. He’ll do whatever it takes to protect the ocean. But when it comes to dealing with his son, he’s absolutely clueless. He would be much better at interacting with a whale than he would be his son. And ultimately, Mitt becomes the whale, in a sense, and through the whale, they are able to have the conversation.”
As Jay fights nitrogen narcosis — a condition in divers in which certain gases take on an anesthetic effect in the nervous system, resulting in a kind of high — and the methane in the whale’s stomach, he has flashbacks that help him piece together info he needs for his survival. The memories often involve his father imparting pearls of wisdom, regardless of whether Jay though of them that way at the time.
“The challenge really was, the book has probably 50 flashbacks where it’s constantly hopping back and forth. In the movie, [we had] to take all that information that Jay needs to know scattered across all those flashbacks, and find ways to pack them into vastly fewer flashbacks,” Kraus said. “That was really the biggest challenge.”
A small creative detail further merges Mitt and the whale, who speak as one character in Kraus’ book.
“The whale’s heart is beating, and the stomach is reacting to the beats of the whale’s heart. So that’s sound puppeteering the stomach. There’s water in it, which is moving from that. And then, on top of all of that, just to show how full circle it starts to go, the whale’s heart is Josh Brolin’s heartbeat,” explained Duffield, who came up with the idea. “We’ve recorded Josh’s heartbeat, and then our sound guys made it a whale heartbeat that is playing.”
L-R: Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner and Josh Brolin as Mitt Gardiner
20th Century Studios
This detail also fits in with Kraus’ thematic vision.
“When I came across the concept of a whalefall, which is when a whale dies and its corpse sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and its body, as it decomposes, sets off a shock wave of life, generations of life are born from its remains,” Kraus said. “ I found that very emotional and touching to the idea that when a whale dies, or somebody we know and love dies, that their death sort of begets life, the memory of them, the influence of them. It goes on, and it goes on for generations, and even when I talk about it now, I get goosebumps, it’s just such a beautiful thought.”
Sometimes it takes getting stuck inside a whale to provide some perspective.