As Something In The Water dives into cinemas, we chat to director Hayley Easton Street about the challenging shoot.
With so many shark films in production at the moment, director Hayley Easton Street and writer Cat Clarke give us something a little different with their brand new shark thriller.
Something In The Water, which is in cinemas now, takes the tried and true structure of a survival thriller, but this isn’t a film about a shark, it’s a film about a group of women in an unfathomably difficult situation.
You can read our chat with Hayley below as she tells us about creating that prickly dynamic within the characters and the gruelling shoot that had the cast and crew at the mercy of Mother Nature.
What drew you to the story in Something In The Water?
It was brilliantly written by Cat Clarke. She’d done a really good job of making these amazing characters. I loved the strong female cast, of course, but I just believed their friendship. I cared about them, even on the page. I felt invested in them, I felt like that was something that you don’t really see a lot in this shark genre, particularly.
There’s a lot of these films, shark thrillers, and I think our film is completely different, because it’s a friendship movie, with sharks. It’s really about the characters and if you can’t connect with the characters, if you’re not emotionally invested, it doesn’t matter what happens to them. That was the thing that really drew me to this.
From a technical perspective, there’s a lot to achieve on quite a tight budget and schedule. That leaned into my experience, I felt quite comfortable taking on the challenges of special effects, visual effects and stunts and action and all of that stuff.
Like you were saying, it is more about these women and their dynamic than it is about the shark in the water. Surely casting is the most crucial bit of the process?
Definitely. We auditioned loads of actors. Because we had to find women and they needed to be friends, it ended up being quite an organic process. It all came together very naturally. But you’re right, that’s the absolute crux of the whole thing. You’ve got to believe these women and they need to be able to pull off not only their own character, but this really tight friendship that they’ve got with the others.
The film opens with this quite horrifying attack. And what I found really interesting is that it was women attacking women. How did you work on that scene?
It was a written element of the script, it came from Cat, ultimately. But I really liked it. I like subverting those stereotypes. This happens, it actually happens, so it just felt real and believable. [It’s] not only the sort of subversion of those traditional views, that it’s men that do this, and women that do that, but it is a really strong female friendship film. And I didn’t want to demonise men either, it’s not about that. I never questioned that.
You mentioned subverting expectations. These kinds of films, it does sometimes feel like there are certain plot points that you have to hit. So how much did you want to subvert those as well?
Obviously, it comes from Cat ultimately. You’re restricted in a certain way, because there’s only certain things that can happen when they’re stuck in the water, but actually, what was interesting to me was how they all reacted in that situation. In some films, it becomes more of people thinking of themselves. It’s survival of the fittest, in a way in a lot of these stories. Whereas in this film, when you’ve got this amazing group of friends, even though they might argue, or they might have different opinions, in the end, they’ve got each other’s backs, and they care about each other. That’s different from anything else I’ve seen.
And this, again, comes back to that dynamic, and especially this dynamic in a group of women, but there’s a lot of finger pointing and blaming each other, but these women also consistently overcome those differences when they’re in the water or in the boat. Can you talk about that element a bit more?
We’re put in these sort of situations when you’ve got friends that have been friends for years, you do kind of take the piss out of each other, and you do argue and complain about each other. But when it comes down to it, and someone’s life’s on the line, you come through. That’s really what Cat was saying in the script, [that] you’re there for each other. That’s the heart of it.
You shot some of this on location, but I assume a lot of it was also in a big tank. How gruelling was the shoot?
It was quite full on. We were in the Dominican Republic, so we’re on location there, but there’s Pinewood Studios with a tank and horizon tank there. So you’ve got this big tank and then when the water finishes in the tank, beyond it, you can see the ocean. That’s all great but before we went out there, I was like ‘Well, nothing’s quite like the ocean.’ We’ve got this time in the tank, but let’s do loads of it in the ocean, because it’s so real, so brilliant. And I don’t want to do loads of visual effects. We got there and in prep, we had a hurricane. It just completely messed up everything that was going on in the ocean. The hurricane was one thing, and then add a couple of weeks of grey weather, and then the sun came back.
But then the oceans were very rough and unpredictable for quite a while afterwards and the visibility on the water especially. We had loads of days we were meant to shoot underwater [and] we couldn’t, you just couldn’t see far enough. The [ocean] swell was really unpredictable. We went out in boats one day to film, there was an eight foot swell. I think about five people were spared of this, I was one of them, luckily, but almost the entire cast and crew were throwing up, everyone was seasick. It was a carnage, it was honestly really hardcore conditions. Then we were like, ‘Okay, let’s do it all in the tank’.
The second unit shot in the open water with the stunt doubles quite a lot for drone shots and some of these underwater shots and some boat shots. We had the cast in the open water for a bit but we did the majority of the lead cast in the tank. It was great [but it] had its own challenges. Of course, it’s so much more controlled and safe, everyone was a bit more comfortable.
But for the actors, it’s just a big metal tank, and the water isn’t heated, so they were getting cold, which you wouldn’t expect on a tropical island. They had that to deal with, we had wave machines, we made the water as rough as we needed as well for them. And then you have to embrace the fact that the water doesn’t look really believable afterwards, so we had to marry up that little strip of ocean in the background. We had to use visual effects to blend it with the tank in the foreground to make it look real.
Sounds very challenging. Has that put you off from ever trying anything similar ever again?
You think it would. It was really challenging, but it was such a brilliant experience. I wouldn’t change it at all. Actually, I’ve just written a film that’s set in the ocean. I think I’m a glutton for punishment!
You’ve mentioned the VFX a couple of times, you come from such a strong background in that. How much is that on your mind already on set or when reading the script?
It’s kind of second nature now to be planning that stuff. I love the problem solving that comes with directing something as well. When I was doing visual effects and art directing, a big part of my job would be like, ‘We need to shoot this, how are we going to do it?’ And I’d work out how we would shoot something. The moment I read something, I just instantly have a plan. Mostly anyway, hopefully.
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You worked on some huge, huge productions in VFX. You had a more limited budget with Something In The Water, how did you find the experience? Are the challenges exactly the same?
I suppose it is, you just got less money and less time to play with. I was doing these big, very high budget movies as a visual effects art director, but then I went off and shot my own next to no budget short film and music videos and all that sort of thing, so I knew the other end of the spectrum as well. It is all just a game of solving these problems. Whether you’ve got a lot of money to throw at that or not, sometimes you’re more creative when you haven’t.
This is not really a horror film, it’s more of a thriller, but what’s the balance of, I want this to be effective, and I want the shark attacks to be scary, versus I want as many people as possible to be able to go and see this?
I never, ever considered it a horror. Lots of people have [said], since we made it, [that] it’s a horror, because it has sharks. We do have a little bit of blood and gore in it, but not much compared to some films and it was more about what was going to happen. I think if you show it all too early, you’re sort of done and there’s no way to really ramp that up. Again, it goes back to wanting it to be about these characters, rather than about the shark.
Also I wanted the shark to not be a monster. They’re not serial killers. Sharks are in this decimated [position] where there’s trash, and there’s not much fish, and they need to eat. But they’re not like the Megalodon, just killing everyone. It was never going to be like that and I was very conscious of [what]happened after Jaws where loads of people went out and hunted sharks. I love sharks, I’m a big environmentalist, so that was so horrific. They’re not the devil, they’re just sharks.
It’s a female led film, which is still unfortunately rare. Do you feel like you’re still part of a movement? Is it still an uphill battle to get films like this made?
The film industry has always been very male dominated. It still is, if we’re honest about it. To work on a film like this, where we already knew we had this female cast and they’re these really strong women, it’s great to portray that in a movie. But we [also] had very heavily female heads of departments and crew and everything. It was really refreshing, really great to have this production with loads of women. It was like a breath of fresh air because I’ve never had that before. In however many years I was working on other people’s films, I’ve never once worked with a female director.
Something In The Water is in cinemas now.
