When director Brian Duffield talks about “Whalefall,” he keeps coming back to one idea: this is “the opposite of ‘Jaws.’” Where Steven Spielberg turned a shark into a monster, Duffield wants audiences to see the whale as the hero.
In the film, a teenager named Jay dives off California’s Monastery Beach to recover his late father’s remains and gets swallowed by a sperm whale. Duffield told Reuters at the film’s London premiere Monday that whale experts welcomed the movie and hope it pushes audiences to learn more about the animals.
Austin Abrams, the “Resident Evil” star, plays Jay, and Josh Brolin plays his father. The story is based on Daniel Kraus’ 2023 novel, which Kraus co-wrote into a screenplay with Duffield.
Kraus said the idea came from a viral video of kayakers who accidentally ended up inside a whale’s mouth. “Immediately, (I) had what I felt at the time was the best idea I’ve ever had,” he said. The question that followed stuck with him: “Could someone really be swallowed by a whale?” Whale experts told him a person could, under the right circumstances.
Duffield isn’t promising it’s comfortable. “A lot of things have to go very badly for you for it to happen,” he joked, before explaining that sperm whales are built to eat giant squid. “If you’re smaller than a giant squid, you can fit down that throat. Who knows what happens next?”
Pulling that off on screen meant building the whale for real. Computer-generated imagery served only to enhance the environments; the filmmakers constructed the whale interiors and exteriors at large scale. “Everyone who worked on this movie said it was the hardest thing they’ve ever done,” Duffield said. For Abrams, he added, just sitting inside the whale set was an “incredibly dangerous stunt.”
Underneath the survival story is grief and a strained father-son bond, which Brolin said drew him in. “I sobbed at the end of the book,” he said. “Partially because of the father-son relationship, partially because it’s truly a hero story.”
That’s also why Duffield hopes the film lands differently than “Jaws.” “I hope (people) want to go home and hug their families and…realise that we have a short time here and might as well utilise it the best we can,” he said.
“Whalefall” begins its global theatrical rollout on October 14.
