If Jaws scared you from ever going into the water again, Whalefall may keep you away from the beach entirely. Based on a book by Daniel Kraus, the new survival thriller pits Resident Evil star Austin Abrams against a super-sized sperm whale that inadvertently swallows him whole. Trapped in the sea mammal’s giant belly, Abrams’s scuba diver, Jay, has exactly one hour to find a way out before he’s digested like so much plankton.
To be clear, though, Abrams didn’t come out of this experience holding any grudges against the whales that populate our oceans. “I feel like this movie is a love letter to whales more than anything,” the actor told a rowdy New York Comic Con crowd during a Friday afternoon Whalefall panel, calling the movie a “beautiful experience.”
“I wanted to do something that had never been seen before and something that I wanted to see,” Abrams said about his reasons for signing onto the film. “I found the whole thing mythological and compelling, and I couldn’t not do it.”
Abrams was joined on the NYCC stage by writer-director Brian Duffield, author and co-writer Kraus, and Josh Brolin, who plays Jay’s late father, Mitt, who had a complicated relationship with his son prior to his passing. Here are five things we learned about the film ahead of its Oct. 16 opening.
Daniel Kraus assumed his book was “unfilmable”
Whalefall started with a viral video — specifically one involving a seafaring adventurer’s close encounter with a humpback whale. “What inspired the book was that this happens,” Kraus recalled. “I don’t mean the swallowing part, but divers and kayakers do end up in the mouths of humpback whales. I saw one of those videos and thought, ‘Is there actually a way that some whale could swallow someone? And if so, is there a way that person could survive?'”
The author took that question directly to some expert marine mammalogists who confirmed that certain whales — mainly sperm whales — could swallow someone whole. But Kraus still had to figure out what scientifically accurate things would happen to that person next. “I had no interest in writing a fantastical story,” he noted, tossing out the Book of Jonah and Pinocchio as two such examples. That fact-based approach, combined with the production demands, led him to assume that his book would never be turned into a big-screen experience. “I thought it was unfilmable,” he confessed candidly.
But after mentioning the project on Twitter, he received a private DM from Duffield, who was eager to take on the challenge. “I thought that everyone was going to want to make it,” recalled the director of Spontaneous and No One Will Save You. “I told Daniel that I needed to read it as soon as possible … A couple of months later, he sent it to me, and it changed my life.”
Abrams trapped himself in a tent for his audition
He may be the star of two box office smashes — Weapons and Resident Evil — but those movies hadn’t hit the zeitgeist when Abrams first heard about Whalefall, so he had to audition for the role of Jay. “It was a long process,” he recalled, adding that the casting directors wanted to see the candidates in person due to the intense demands of the part. “A month would go by and I’d do another one, another month would go by and I’d do another one. I remember towards the end doing an audition in a tent to try and recreate the whale’s stomach.”
It was only after he landed the gig that Abrams learned he wouldn’t be getting much of a break from those tent-like claustrophobic confines. “I remember talking to Brian and being like, ‘Okay, so we’ll do a couple of days in [the stomach] and then a couple days [on land] to go back and forth,” he said, referring to the terrestrial flashback sequences that flesh out the narrative. “And he was like, ‘No, we’re shooting all of the land stuff first and then we’re only going to be in the whale, and we’re going to shoot that stuff chronologically. So there weren’t any breaks, which was good, but that was a bit of a surprise.”
Brolin’s got heart
Let the record show that Brolin actually plays two roles in Whalefall; in addition to being Jay’s combative father, he also provides the sperm whale’s heartbeat. “Brian had this great idea,” the actor recalled. “Along with me recording a few things for Austin to hear on set [in between flashbacks]… he said, ‘Hey, can I record your heart and play that without telling him what it’s going to be?’ So when he hears the heartbeat [in the stomach], he thought, ‘That’s the whale’s heartbeat.’ But Brian told him, ‘No, that’s Josh‘s heartbeat.'”
That’s just one of the evocative ways that the Whalefall team sought to ground the movie as a father-son story first and foremost. “It’s the most extraordinary setting for a movie, and it’s the most universal story possible about a father and son who haven’t quite figured how to gel,” Duffield noted. “I talked to my own son, and thought about my relationship with my father,” Brolin added. “I have these moments after watching the movie where I go, ‘Man, time is precious.’ So take full advantage of it now, because you never know.”
Duffield stumped the Weta Workshop wizards
The F/X masters at Weta Workshop can imagine everything from rampaging hoards of Middle-earth Orcs to one very large Wicker man. But Duffield happily boasted to blowing their minds when he pitched them on creating a biologically accurate whale’s stomach. “Richard Taylor was giddy, because he’s never had to do anything like this,” the filmmaker said, referring to Weta’s Oscar-winning founder and Peter Jackson’s valued collaborator. “That was the energy I tried to take into the movie.”
Duffield said that a lot of “trial and error” was involved in building the 360-degree interior set of the whale’s stomach as they figured out how to squeeze necessary film equipment like lights and cameras into that space. “We were also trying to support Austin on his journey, because he had two months of performing by himself,” the director added. “He’s in this weird trash bag working his ass off! The rest of the crew really stepped up their game because they saw how hard he was working.”
Tattoo you
Speaking of Middle-earth, just as the Lord of the Rings cast came out of that experience with matching tattoos, Brolin revealed that Whalefall inspired a lot of fresh ink among the cast and creative team. “Daniel has a whale on his arm, and I have a full nautical back tattoo,” he shared. “Everybody get ready to get a tattoo after you see this movie.”
For his part, Duffield took home some stranger souvenirs. “I have an entire storage unit full of whale pieces,” the director revealed. “I have tentacles, whale teeth, beaks and random bits of whale meat.” Maybe don’t attend a dinner party at his house anytime soon.
