The Descent director Neil Marshall

The Descent director Neil Marshall

By Daniel Robert Epstein
Aug 2, 2006

Neil Marshall has created a very scary movie with The Descent. It is a classic story of a group of people going someplace they shouldn’t and encountering monsters. This time it is a group of women who go spelunking and confront cave dwelling monsters. Marshall first made a name for himself in the horror genre with his hybrid Rio Bravo meets werewolves movie Dog Soldiers.

Check out the official site for The Descent

Daniel Robert Epstein: It’s funny that people are so surprised that The Descent is actually scary, what’s it take to scare an audience now?
Neil Marshall: It is tricky. Audiences are a hell of a lot more jaded and used to horror film tricks. But the one thing that they never get used to, which is rarely used these days, is building suspense slowly and getting under their skins that way. Everybody’s used to the loud shocks and the loud bangs and all that stuff so by the end of the film you’re completely numb to it, you just don’t care anymore. Wolf Creek also did the same thing. They took it slow. You take your time with the characters, invest in them and ramp up the tension slowly but surely until it becomes unbearable and then you let loose. Then you can sustain that for the last 30 minutes of the film or whatever and put them through the ringer then so they will walk out of the film totally shell-shocked.
DRE:
At what point did all the actors’ cycles start to be in tune?
Neil:
They were in tune before we started filming because we’d had about three or four weeks prior doing climbing training and whitewater rafting and caving and all that stuff.
DRE:
How many arguments did all five of them win when they teamed up on you?
Neil:
None. I went in with my eyes open and thought, “Shit, I’m doing something with six women here, this could end in tears.” But they were actually a blast and they never ganged up on me at all. Well, they did one time because I kept the crawlers a secret from them. I didn’t let them see anything about the crawlers until the moment they did in the film and it was in front of the camera. So there was a time when they ganged up on me and said, “When are you going to let us see the crawlers?” They were certain that I was just going to stick one in the cave with them at some point and they were right, but I didn’t let them see them [laughs].
DRE:
The American commercials for The Descent show the money shot of the crawlers, what do you think of that?
Neil:
I wasn’t too troubled about it.

[Marshall suddenly taps his left hand on his chair]
DRE:
That’s a poker tell, you’re definitely not happy about it.
Neil:
[laughs] Yeah, I wasn’t too pleased about it because the moment that they show is one of these big shot moments in the film. It would be like showing the head falling moment in Jaws in the trailer. But at the end of the day Lionsgate has a pretty good track record. Who am I to argue with what they do because they know their stuff.
DRE:
What was the inspiration for the crawlers?
Neil:
The physicality of Iggy Pop. That muscular but also sinewy and scrawny physique but most of it was based on the logic of the concept of what if there was this offshoot of the human race that stayed in the caves and evolved to live there. They would have gone blind, their skin would have gone all pallid, they’d become great climbers and they’d have to have sonar to navigate in the pitch black. I was also adamant to have good actors with the right physicality to do it and very little makeup so that they could express themselves. I didn’t just want it to be a big rubber mask so we used this silicone makeup which is incredibly flexible and allowed them to give their performances.
DRE:
Feminist themes in this movie are very subtle but were they on purpose?
Neil:
To me it was more important that the story didn’t hinge upon them being women. What was important to me was to have nothing in the story about them being six women. They could just as easily be replaced by six men and it’d be exactly the same film.
DRE:
What made you want to put in that twist towards the end?
Neil:
The inspiration for that was total audience manipulation. The audience is totally behind her and then she turns around and she does something that is a complete fuck up. The audience is left gasping and as a director that is incredibly satisfying.
DRE:
With Dog Soldiers and now The Descent you are twisting genres. But you don’t do it in a post modern way or deconstructionist way.
Neil:
Deliberately so. I’m just trying to tell the story in a more classic way which is why Dog Soldiers has references to Howard Hawks and John Ford movies throughout. I loved their way of telling stories. It was not post modernism; they were just telling it the way it was. With Dog Soldiers I wanted to do a siege, monster, soldier, werewolf movie.
DRE:
Was The Descent the idea of people going to a place they shouldn’t but the twist might be they’re all women?
Neil:
The Descent was purely a desire to do what I hadn’t done or what I felt I hadn’t done in Dog Soldiers, which was make a really scary movie.
DRE:
Did you feel that Dog Soldiers was unsuccessful?
Neil:
I feel like I ended up making more of a horror comedy. I watch it now and I still laugh at the jokes but I never found it scary. I don’t know that many people did.
DRE:
Was it a conscious decision to ramp down the humor with The Descent?
Neil:
No, the majority of the humor in Dog Soldiers came from the fact that they were soldiers and it was soldiers’ humor. There’s something about soldiers where when they are put in a life threatening situation they make humor out of it and that was the humor that I wanted in Dog Soldiers and that’s what I got and it worked. But these weren’t soldiers, they were regular people who are climbers therefore the same humor wouldn’t apply to them. There was also the desire not to make a funny film. There had to be little elements, just comic relief to counteract the horror but mainly it was a very different concept and aesthetic. I set out with a single-minded determination to make something as terrifying as possible.
DRE:
I no longer ask horror directors what they’re being offered; I ask them what remakes they’re being offered.
Neil:
So far I haven’t been offered any.
DRE:
Would you be interested?
Neil:
In Fangoria I said that I’d be interested in doing a remake of The Car. That’s a James Brolin movie with this big black car out in the desert that comes around and starts killing people. It’s like Jaws with a car. It is one of the films that I enjoy watching because it’s hokey but it could be done vastly better.
DRE:
Would you pull out the hokiness or make it straight up horror?
Neil:
Make it straight up horror but I think you can only be so un-hokey when you’re dealing with a killer car. I’m only half serious about that. When I was asked that question The Car was the first thing that came to mind. I’m not in a big hurry to make remakes. More often than not the ones that they do want to make remakes of were masterpieces in the first place. I don’t mind if they’re making remakes of something that wasn’t particularly good or had flaws. I really liked The Hills Have Eyes remake.
DRE:
Were the Universal monsters touchstones for you?
Neil:
Certainly the first monster movies I ever saw were Frankenstein and The Wolfman and that’s part of the reason I wanted to do a werewolf movie first thing out. I like the classic ones but I’m sick of seeing vampires. There are way too many vampire movies and I thought that werewolves hadn’t been really done that much or done that well for a while and that’s what we needed so I went back to the classics for that. But with The Descent I just thought that we needed something completely fresh and new.
DRE:
What are you writing now?
Neil:
I’m just about to start work on a new film called Doomsday, which is a post apocalyptic sci-fi adventure movie.
DRE:
With monsters?
Neil:
No monsters. Plague victims, things like that.
DRE:
Zombie-esque?
Neil:
Not really, it’s Escape from New York meets Mad Max.
DRE:
Will you shoot that overseas?
Neil:
We’re probably going to shoot it in South Africa.
DRE:
What movies have you liked recently?
Neil:
I enjoyed Superman Returns. I appreciated that it wasn’t made for kids. It was actually intended toward my generation a bit. It had moments for kids but you had to appreciate Superman I and II in order to really get it and they had the sense to use the right music and all that stuff. The next movie I’m excited about is The Prestige.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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