Neil Marshall, writer\/director<\/p>\n
I was introduced to Christian Colson at Celador Films off the back of [2002 horror film] Dog Soldiers, and I pitched them a project \u2013 actually a feature-length version of my student graduation film \u2013 about zombies on an oil rig. They liked it but said it was too expensive, so on the train back to Newcastle I was asking myself what would make a really scary horror film that could be contained and so made on a budget. I was thinking of things set in the dark and was like, well \u2026 caves. At the back of my mind was a school trip to a lead mine where the guide had said, \u201cOK, everybody, turn your lights off\u201d and, for the first time, I experienced a darkness that I just couldn\u2019t fathom.<\/p>\n
We wanted the film to feel as realistic as possible: when you\u2019re caving, the only lights you have are what you take with you. There are no beautiful shafts of light making everything look pretty. It meant having huge portions of the screen in total darkness, so only when a character turns around and shines a light you finally see what\u2019s in the shadows.<\/p>\n
double quotation markAlex said her lines with an ice pick through her neck. Then I caved her head in with a stone<\/p>\n
Darkness was definitely my friend, but it did mean a lot of planning because each character had to have something they could light the scene with, even if it was just a box of matches. Sam McCurdy, the director of photography, and I discussed lighting sources that we could potentially use, and I structured the film around who had which light at which time. This gave us a lighting scheme: if you\u2019re with the fire, it\u2019s Sarah. If it\u2019s a torch, it\u2019s Juno.<\/p>\n
There isn\u2019t a single real cave in the whole film. It was a mixture of amazing sets by Simon Bowles, a couple of matte paintings and a miniature set built by Leigh Took \u2013 the water pouring down the waterfall wasn\u2019t water, it\u2019s salt.<\/p>\n
For the crawlers, I wanted something very basic-looking, not too many lines or details. The challenge was how to make them scary but keep them human, because the notion is that these are the cavemen who stayed in the cave rather than those who left the dark and started building cabins in the open. Visually they were a hybrid of Nosferatu and Iggy Pop, but movement-wise I thought we should make them like spiders \u2013 the way they\u2019ll stop and be perfectly still before suddenly going off at 100 miles an hour and then stopping again.<\/p>\n
I conceptualised the film as Sarah\u2019s descent into being this primal savage: her undergoing a rebirth in order to survive, even though you\u2019re not sure she\u2019s going to be able to go back to society afterwards.<\/p>\n
\u2018I was being leapt at by a really scary man, basically naked\u2019 \u2026 a crawler in The Descent. Photograph: PatheShauna Macdonald, played Sarah<\/p>\n
This was the era of FHM, Loaded and all those lads\u2019 mags, so I initially thought it was going to be girls looking sexy in tight spaces covered in blood and gunge. I wasn\u2019t interested in that. When I read the script, though, it was excellent. It was about a grieving mother and I also needed to be physically strong and brave. I thought, \u201cI have to do this part because I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll be able to pull it off.\u201d<\/p>\n
We weren\u2019t allowed to see the crawlers or even any pictures of them. I was the first to see one because we were shooting chronologically once we got into the caves. The others were all asking \u201cwhat does it look like?!\u201d but I didn\u2019t really know because it was quite far away. I just knew it was grey or white and slimy, and it looked a bit like Gollum.<\/p>\n
I think Neil was right to keep us apart, because when we were faced with them, I was being leapt at by a really scary man, basically naked, who\u2019d been training for months and months \u2013 that really focuses the mind. When we came to fight them, they were so animalistic it was really unnerving. The actors had figured out how the crawlers\u2019 system worked and their different characteristics. You felt like you were fighting a pack with all its dynamics, and that was pretty intimidating.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
That whole sequence where Sarah goes into survival mode was great. First I had the dying scene with Alex Reid, who played Beth, just making it look really easy. It was like, \u201cOK, Alex, you\u2019ve had an ice pick through your neck, but it\u2019s really important that you tell these plot points \u2026\u201d And she was, \u201cYeah, cool, no problem.\u201d And then, of course, I cave her head in with a stone. Then I get leapt on by a child crawler. He was only like 11, bless him, and I crushed his head with my boot, which was actually me stamping on a cauliflower. Then the mother finds out, and we have this fight sequence where one mother has to kill another to survive. The eye-gouging was very, very satisfying. Then another crawler comes along and I bash his head in too. Afterwards I\u2019m submerged in this pool of blood, which was a Jacuzzi that they\u2019d overflowed. This amazing stunt girl had to do the run and jump, because the pool was so shallow they couldn\u2019t insure an actor to do it. All I had to do was emerge and take the glory.<\/p>\n
In the press, it was all about \u201cgirl power\u201d. But we were like: \u201cHave you seen what we do to each other?!\u201d What was very girl power was how fiercely we actors supported each other and we continue to do that. The only way you can really show love is by turning up for your friends, and the six of us have done that repeatedly for the last 21 years or so. We\u2019ve got a WhatsApp group and still meet regularly. I do wonder, if we\u2019d met on a different project, would the same thing happen? Or was it the film? If you throw a group of people in a cave, maybe you all come out bonded for life.<\/p>\n
The Descent is available on 4K UHD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Neil Marshall, writer\/director I was introduced to Christian Colson at Celador Films off the back of [2002 horror…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-770656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}