Brian Duffield has made a realistic film about surviving inside a sperm whale

The writer and director of "Whalefall" tells IndieWire about his approach to making his new and exceptional trailer as engaging and frightening as possible.

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Writer/director Brian Duffield was perusing X (then still Twitter) a few years ago when he came across an intriguing post from a writer he followed, Daniel Krauss. The novelist tweeted that his next book, "Whale Pressure," tells the story of a diver who is swallowed by a sperm whale and has only an hour of oxygen to keep him alive as he tries to escape — as an aficionado of cruel ideas, Duffieldos immediately realized.

“We had never talked to each other before, we were just a bunch of bad guys,” Duffield told IndieWire in an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. Duffield kept in touch with Krause as the author finished his book, eager to both read the story and gauge its potential as a source material. When Duffield read the novel, he knew he wanted to make the film. I called him and basically said, "I'll do anything to be a part of it, and if I can't be a part of it, I'll be miserable." RELATED STORIES Why Georgia Oakley didn't want to modernize Jane Austen for her new film Zendaya to star in Alex Garland's new sci-fi film on A24

Duffield and Krauss collaborated on the screenplay, which helped alleviate many of Duffield's concerns about his work. "Every step of the way, you're with the guy who made the thing, so I always knew where I stood to screw it up or not," Duffield said. Although the scripting process went smoothly, Duffield knew he had his work cut out for him to make the extraordinary story believable on screen.

"I get really excited about ideas that seem ridiculous," Duffield said. "A lot of my favorite movies are movies where you raise your eyebrows when you hear the concept, but in the end you're really transformed by it." In an effort to convince audiences that his hero's struggle was actually possible, Duffield, along with production designer Ramsey Avery and the visual effects team tasked with creating the whale's belly, did extensive research and consulted as many whale experts as possible.

"It was a really fun and terrifying process trying to make it as realistic as possible, but also figuring out how to film something that naturally isn't supposed to be filmed," says Duffield. He and the crew spent a lot of time watching things like autopsies and endoscopy videos. "There was a beached sperm whale that they [one of our consultants] flew in to dissect before they had to beach it, and we watched it many times."

Duffield also watched a video of a giant squid being dissected to figure out how to approach his main character's encounter with a squid, a similar creature in the early stages of his nightmare. "Ramsey and I and the crew watched it a lot, just trying to figure out how to make it work," Duffield said. He quickly realized that the key was to accept the extreme nature of the situation, but make the details as specific, relevant and realistic as possible.

"For us it was about leaning into it," Duffield said. "There's no way around the craziness of the premise, and I think that's the selling point. Our job was to really push you to be realistic. So, although there are obviously liberties that — usually for safety reasons — we wanted to feel like it could happen to you. It probably won't. But if too many things go wrong in this movie, what could happen."