irector David Twohy is probably best known for his recent science-fiction horror film, Pitch Black, which featured a then-unknown Vin Diesel as an escaped convict trapped on a planet inhabited by monsters. Although this notoriety has just come about within the last two years,
Twohy has been working steadily since 1988 as both a writer and a director. His resume includes a
number of science-fiction genre projects, such as Warlock, Waterworld and Impostor, as well as non-genre fare, including The Fugitive and GI Jane.
Twohy's latest feature, Below, takes the familiar submarine action-adventure genre and adds a supernatural twist. It stars Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams, Scott Foley and Matt Davis as terrified crew members trapped aboard a World War II sub that may or may not be
haunted by the vengeful spirit of their recently deceased captain. In making the film, Twohy sought to create a style that was fresh and original, while seamlessly blending the various genres it represents.
Science Fiction Weekly recently spoke with Twohy (pronounced "Too-ee") about the challenges he faced during the production of Below, and his attraction to the science-fiction genre as a whole.
This film has actually been finished for some time. Why the delay in releasing it?
Twohy: It doesn't matter too much to me when it comes out as long as it does come out. We were originally going to come out in February and then saw a couple of the films that were pushed because 9/11 fell on their date, Rollerball and Collateral Damage. For whatever reason, the studio felt they had to run from those. In retrospect, they didn't have to run from those.
Darren Aronofsky, who directed Pi and Requiem for a Dream, was originally set to direct this film, but eventually handed it over to you. How did you two collaborate on the development of the script?
Twohy: Darren's a cool guy. I had seen Pi, but not met him. He had seen Pitch Black, but not met me. He did the first couple drafts of the script with his writing partner, Lucas Sussman. And he was, I think, getting ready to go off and do Requiem, and the studio wanted to move ahead anyway on the project. They didn't want to wait a year or whatever for him to get back to it. And both the Weinsteins had seen Pitch Black and liked it and thought that was the kind of movie they should be doing for their genre label, Dimension. So they invited me aboard.
They showed me just about everything in their slate, but this was the one. They just said, "We've
got this, we've got this movie, we've got this movie, we've got a haunted submarine, we've got this
movie." [And I said,] "Whoa! Back up to haunted submarine. Hasn't that been done before?" Because it sounds so simple that it had to have been done. And they said, "No. We checked it out. Nobody's done it." I said, "All right, that sounds interesting." And they let me read the script. And they put Darren and I together after I'd read the script. I think there was some sort of monster component that had crept into his second or third draft. And I said, "Look, I just did Pitch Black. I did monsters. Why don't we do something else?" And he was all for that, because his original concept was to do something just entirely psychological. So I said, "Look, let's go to the studio and tell them we want to strip it out." And strip it out we did. And we did not write side by side. I just took over the writing chores myself. But Darren was giving me thoughts on my drafts as they came in. And he was giving me thoughts on the cuts of the movie as they came in.
What are the challenges of doing a submarine genre movie? Because there've been so many made in the last few decades.
Twohy: Yeah. Truly. First of all, I can make it fresh in terms of story content by pursuing
this dual approach of everything that's wrong that's happening on the boat, is it happening because of mechanical reasons or is it happening because of supernatural reasons? And to me that was a challenge and a delight in the scriptwriting process, to carry both those tracks forward simultaneously and almost give you hopefully a rational explanation for why these strange things come about.
One difference about your film is that you actually have a woman in the cast. How does that affect the dynamic?
Twohy: I was leery about it. A female shows up in Darren's early work and I was leery about it because I'd seen Operation Petticoat from the '50s. It was clearly a different film. ... And I said, "I don't know if we can pull this off." Because, you know, as a hard-core action guy, a horror guy, a woman aboard a submarine, what's that all about? I was worried about that. Then again, as soon as I realized, and researched it and found out that women were historically bad luck on submarines. When I found out that I could use her as a lightning rod for some of the criticism and suspicion early on, that felt good. And then I could turn her around and turn her into my protagonist, to be the stranger who looks back on the Americans with suspicion. All that felt good. And so it just tipped the scales in favor of having a woman aboard.
Did you actually go down in a real submarine prior to shooting?
Twohy: Yeah there were two boats on Lake Michigan, one on the Michigan side and one
on the Wisconsin side. And we actually used one, the U.S.S. Silversides, for our opening of the movie. I went down on the sub, the sub didn't go down. You know what I mean. So we did our tours and
felt what it was really like down there. Amazingly small, even though the American boats at the time
were the Cadillacs of submarines. And then the German boats were smaller and then the Japanese boats were smaller still.
So much of this film is in the sound design. What kind of thought went into that aspect?
Twohy: Once upon a time, I wasn't going to have any score, any music at all. I thought, "Well, how creepy would that be?" Music, it can help sometimes, but it can also tip an audience off to what's coming, what's about to come. And so I said, "What if there is no music? Wouldn't that be cool if it was just all sound effects?" And I looked at the movie, I put my cut together and looked at it with that in mind. It may have helped certain scenes, but other scenes just sat there. They just sat there. So we went the music route as well. But the sound effects are very important, and I knew they would be very important and that's why I had them rigged to the set on the day.
How did you use them on the actual set?
Twohy: I had these hidden speakers built into the set. And off-screen or offstage, when
I was watching them from [the] monitors, I had a bank of sound effects that I could play, and a trigger right in my hand so that, any given time during a rehearsal or in the scene itself, I could trigger a whale call. I could trigger sort of a ghost shiver to run through the boat. I could trigger depth charges.
Did the cast know you were doing this?
Twohy: In rehearsal, it was a surprise to them, but every once in a while, I'd throw something new into the take. After I knew I had what we'd rehearsed in the can, yes. Every once in a while, I threw a new sound effect at them to see how they reacted to that. And after a while, they just got so tired of these reactions, I must say, it was like, "Oh, another one of those." I'd say, "Let me tell you, it's all about those kinds of reactions." Or a gunshot for instance ... and you get 10 quick reaction shots of people just turning their heads. And the actors felt like idiots doing that stuff because I'm just asking them, "Turn your heads. Turn your heads. Turn your heads." But when they see it on film, they get it. And they know what it was in service of.
What do you like about the sci-fi genre?
Twohy: What I like is that it knows no boundaries. And for somebody who has a wild imagination like I sometimes do, it doesn't make me claustrophobic. Some people are terrified of
not having rules to impose on your writing, or boundaries to impose on your writing. But science fiction—go anywhere, do anything, there are no boundaries. Except for the ones you create within the context of the story, right? So all that's very cool for somebody who likes to dream as much as I do and spends as much time doing that as I do.
How did writing films like Critters 2 and Warlock prepare you for this?
Twohy: I tried to drop Critters 2 off from my resume a long time ago, but every
once in a while ... I'd just about forgotten that I'd written it. Critters was a work-for-hire gag, and then Warlock was really the first original piece that I ever got. And I saw it on TV
the other day and I find it almost unwatchable, to tell the truth. I think it's a good story, I just think the execution is so weak.
What effect did your early work have on what you're doing today?
Twohy: Well, you know, they just set a tone for the kinds of things that studios now look
for me to do. Just because I wrote Warlock, it didn't mean it was the only thing I was interested in writing, or the only thing I could write. But it kind of set a tone for me being a genre guy. Science fiction or horror or anything in between. That said, I wrote The Fugitive, I wrote GI Jane, which is as much a drama as anything else. I enjoy the genre pieces, and it would be great to do it every other time out. I'd like to mix it up with other things, too.
Also in this issue:
Terry Brooks.
