How the director and writer of 'Whalefall' created father-son closure in a survival story

SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the plot of the movie Whalefall, based on the novel by Daniel Krauss. A funny joke that Whalefall director Brian Duffield tried to sum up the 20th Century Studios and Imagine Entertainment film, which opened in theaters this week, was that "men prefer to be carried by a […]

SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the story of the movie Whalefall, now in theaters based on the novel by Daniel Krauss.

The funny joke that Whalefall director Brian Duffield intended to sum up the 20th Century Studios and Imagine Entertainment film, which opens in theaters this week, was that "men would rather be swallowed by a sperm whale than go to therapy."

Just as Austin Abrams' director Jay Gardiner finds himself in the dire predicament of being trapped in a whale's belly after an encounter with a squid, the cast, crew, and filmmakers of Whalefall found themselves in the difficult position of bringing the premise of Daniel Krauss' novel to the big screen.

Jay's decision to search for the body of his dead father, Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin), who committed suicide by drowning in the Pacific Ocean following a diagnosis of mesothelioma, is what lands him in this position. Just as he has to use anything he can find to escape, those behind the film must be in constant communication about what it takes to pull off such intense scenes, many of which were staged inside a life-size whale's belly. Watch on Deadline

"It takes a village to make a whale, and I think it takes a really great village to survive," Duffield said when Deadline visited Radford's studio in Los Angeles in September. And that was really one of the most gratifying parts [of the production]. In an early tank scene where Abrams meets the whale for the first time. "It's a new and unique challenge that I think we hired the right people because a lot of us were scratching our heads trying to figure out how to shoot every day."

Several whale stomach models were made by Weta Workshop in New Zealand, with the head, throat, esophagus and larynx made in California because they were too large to ship in time. The 12-foot and 18-foot whale heads are made by StudioArt & Technology.

"It's an intertwined set," says Duffield. "I've never made a movie, and I can't imagine making a movie where every part really has to talk to each other at every stage." “For the stomach, our production designer Ramsey [Avery] [had to] figure out how to make it, and then we [had to] figure out how to put the cameras in it, but then we also had to figure out how to light it, and then the lights would be bioluminescent.

Visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, who worked on Jordan Peele's Nope, created the LED light in the stomach to eventually become the bioluminescent light that then helps illuminate Jay's environment.

Some colors do not show the same color in LED lights. "So our costume designer had to make the sleeve based on what the LEDs were showing. Against whale skin, to see what colors would appear."

Cameras and lenses were broken during the "non-stop" filming. The crew ended up building scenes around the point where the camera could actually fit in the tight space and working backwards from that vantage point. If that wasn't claustrophobic enough, Abrams also had the added challenge of feeling behind the face mask and scuba gear that Jay wears.

We redesigned the regulator to make it as small as possible, because regulators aren't really meant to be worn out of the water. And yet, the air inside the whale's stomach is poisonous. "It doesn't necessarily kill him, but it's full of methane and things that make him a little high," Duffield said. So we redesigned the adjuster to give him maximum mouth shape. He actually talks to himself or to other characters throughout the film. "It's been a challenging learning curve."

These formidable aspects of the film's creation reflect Krauss's overall approach to writing the book. He now has over 30 under his belt.

"I like to create new problems and have to fight through solutions — I try to start with an impossible [narrative], where I'm just throwing obstacles in front of me that I don't know," Krauss told Deadline on set. So I have to relearn how to write a book every time.

Whalefall was inspired by a viral video in which a kayaker ended up in a whale's mouth. When Krauss heard about the clip, he started discussions with friends about whether it could actually happen. He couldn't stop thinking about it.

After an email to author friend Mary Roach, author of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), and correspondence with three whale experts she recommended, Krause found the "high concept" hook for the book, which hit shelves in 2023.

"I didn't want to do it if it couldn't really happen—being swallowed by a whale was forever considered a myth and a biblical story. I was interested in, can you do this in a scientifically accurate way?" Krauss said. "And at the end of the day, I lost all systems. All the whale experts were so excited to help, and they think about whales all day, but never in this context. We were off to the races."

Both Duffield and Krauss interacted with the science fiction genre in different ways, and Krauss developed an interest in whales during the upcoming research process for the book, which took about three months.

"I became more and more ... fascinated by whales," he said. There's a lot of things I've been doing with this whale biology, but I unexpectedly started to be fascinated by whales as a creature, as a force of nature.

"Sperm whales are incredibly intelligent. They are one of the most mysterious animals on the planet. Everything about them is strange. They really feel like strangers. Even in the depths of the ocean, which is full of alien creatures, whales are almost like a master alien. They are not their aggressors, they are very peaceful animals. "Sperm whales help humans time and time again, like divers in trouble."

The inside-out experience of a whale adds layers of complexity to Whalefall's story, even when it comes to the father-son relationship at its heart.

Basically, how do you fall in love with a character through their guts? It's definitely awkward, but what are the ways we can fall in love with this animal because Austin is in such a unique position and I think there's something interesting about his character being so passionate about animals and nature. But they both have this love of nature, and because of that, they give Austin moments where he can really, for lack of a better way to put it, realize how good things are—while being fearless and thinking he's going to die at almost any moment—that was part of its skill.

Duffield apparently had a similar fear. For him, the stomach trick that underlies most of the film was balancing the claustrophobic feeling of Jay's plight with distance from the tight space.

“It's challenging for several reasons. First, it's a long movie, and a lot happens while he's in the stomach, but it was also to keep it fresh and interesting, so that after 30 minutes, people weren't just, Duffield said, "Okay, I hate this stomach." [J] has different side adventures. He spends some time in the second stomach, which is very different visually, and then also in the whale's esophagus. "The different animals that are in the belly and the different problems that he has for MacGyver, so it's just trying to figure out how to keep it visually fresh, which, to be honest, Daniel did a lot of in the book."

Whalefall executive producer Doug Merrifield, whose credits include the Free Willy films, joined Duffield, Krause and Imagine Entertainment's Alan Mandelbaum in insisting that the whale is not the film's villain. It is the orcas that attack the sperm whale Jay, who ultimately provide the antagonists and catalyst for the film's climax.

"The whale is not a bad person. A whale is just an animal that does what it has to do. The whale is not interested in [J]. "This movie is trying to get a squid, and Austin is on the way," Duffield said. "The film ultimately establishes a direct relationship between Josh Brolin and the whale, and is part of Austin's journey to peace with his father, who is dead at the beginning of the film."

One of the main themes of the book that drew Duffield to direct this adaptation was the father-son relationship at its core. His own son was 4 years old at the time of the meeting. In Whalefall, Mitt and Jay didn't always know how to communicate. The ocean is where they find common ground

"The magic of the book and hopefully the movie is that by the end, you're primarily talking about relationships, and then the whale is the third or fourth build, which seems impossible for a movie that takes place almost entirely inside a whale, but somehow [Cross] pulls it off," Duffield says. As you get older, you start looking at things from different perspectives. I think before I was a dad, I was probably overwhelmingly from Jay's point of view, and then now I'm on the other side of it and I have a son—of course, my son just turned 4, so it's very different than the relationship between [Jay] and [Mitt].

Krauss, who grew up in conservative small-town Iowa, leaned into the personal when it came to straining Mitt and Jay's relationship. His father was a hunter, not as extreme as Mitt, but still the inspiration for the character.

"I'm a product [of where I grew up], meaning I've avoided therapy. I'm a product of a culture where you don't express yourself and you don't show your feelings about interpersonal things," Krauss said. "Mitt is a very emotional man when it comes to the ocean, like he'll fight tooth and nail for every living thing in there. He'll do whatever it takes to protect the ocean. But when it comes to dealing with his son, he's completely clueless. He's much better at interacting with a human. Whale than his son. And finally, Mitt becomes the whale in a sense, and through the whale, they're able to communicate.

As Jay battles nitrogen narcosis—a condition in divers in which certain gases have an anesthetic effect on the nervous system, resulting in a sort of hyperactivity—and methane in the whale's stomach, he has flashbacks that help him gather the information he needs to survive. These memories often involve his father imparting pearls of wisdom to him, whether Jay thought so at the time or not.

“The challenge was really, the book has probably 50 flashbacks that are constantly jumping back and forth. "In this movie, [we had to] scatter all the information that Jay needs to know in all those flashbacks and find ways to pack it into a lot fewer flashbacks," Krauss said. "That was really the biggest challenge."

A small creative detail further enhances the moth and the whale speaking as characters in Krauss's book.

"The whale's heart beats and the stomach reacts to the whale's heartbeat. So this is the sound that makes the stomach a puppet. There is water in it that moves from it. Duffield, who came up with the idea, explained that on top of all that, just to show how it comes full circle, the whale's heart is the same as Josh Brolin's.

These details are consistent with Kraus's thematic view

"When I came across the concept of whalebone, when a whale dies and its body sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and as its body decomposes, it creates a wave of life, generations of life are born from the remains," says Krauss. The idea that when a whale dies, or someone we know and love dies, was very emotional and moving, their death gives life, their memory, their impact.

Sometimes being stuck inside a whale is necessary to provide perspective.

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