00:00For me, I was convinced that the Jaws was rising beneath my feet to bring me down.
00:17Is it true that you made this movie because Steven Spielberg ruined pools for you?
00:24It's the gift that keeps on giving.
00:27He ruined the ocean for me.
00:29And then I brought that fear into the swimming pool and an irrational childlike imagination.
00:35And then, yeah, wanted to capture, try and capture that same feeling and tap into that kind of childhood fear
00:42of a space that should be safe.
00:44You can see the bottom. It's a small contained space.
00:46And yet to a child's mind when the lights go out and you can't see the bottom anymore.
00:51At least for me, I was convinced that the Jaws was rising beneath my feet to bring me down.
00:56How do you build tension in a small space as is a pool?
01:02That's a good question. We definitely talked a lot about that.
01:04I mean, a couple of things we're doing is we always talk about how we make the pool feel like
01:08an ocean.
01:08And so some things we're doing is we're shooting on very wide lenses.
01:10So sometimes you start above the water and when you go underwater, there's actually a hidden cut to a wider
01:17lens where it feels like the space is bigger than it should be.
01:20And that's just trying to put us inside the perception of like a child specifically.
01:24I think just playing it from like, okay, Marco Polo for instance, right?
01:29If you take away some of the visuals, it makes the pool feel bigger and more mysterious because you can't
01:37see the edges.
01:38You can't see it. You're just squinting through your eyes and you're kind of drifting out there.
01:41And I think that allowed what you don't see to fill up our minds and for us to kind of
01:47imagine where the corners fall off and what might be there waiting.
01:51And when the lights go off too, like you could only see the, you could see your legs kicking, but
01:55you can't see what's beneath that.
01:57So I think it was just getting inside of the subjective experience of like a kid and how that pool
02:03feels to them because everything feels bigger when you're, when you're younger, right?
02:06We all, we all remember going back to our childhood home and be like, that was my house.
02:10It looks so small, but not when you're a kid, everything seems bigger.
02:13So just trying to get into that headspace.
02:15How much Stephen King is there in this movie?
02:20Because I felt that this pool could easily talk with the very sewer.
02:26So how much it inspired also your story?
02:30Huge. Yeah.
02:31I mean, Stephen King, I grew up reading Stephen King, you know, even like Christine taking a car or Cujo
02:37taking the family dog.
02:38Um, it, um, I definitely, it feels like it could have been a long lost novel of Stephen King.
02:45And I think that taking a place that's familiar and supposed to be fun and positive and then ruining that
02:52and subverting that.
02:53That was, um, I know, I know Stephen King is in the DNA of, of Night Swim big time.
02:58Since you are a director, you, you know all the tricks.
03:03What scares you now when you watch an horror movie?
03:06You know what it is actually?
03:07Here's the honest answer to that.
03:09If I am invested on like the story level, then it kind of like shuts my brain off from analyzing
03:18all of the filmmaking tricks.
03:20If I just get like, I just get swept up in the story, then I will, I'll get swept up
03:25in the scares too.
03:26If it's this movie I don't care about or characters I don't care about, then I'll only be looking on
03:31the kind of like diagnostic level of like, how are they doing this?
03:35And what angles are they using in the filmmaking?
03:36But, um, you know, I'll say an example like Hereditary scared the absolute shit out of me because there's something
03:45that happens in that movie without any spoiler that surprised me so much that I was like, oh, I don't
03:50know what's going to happen now.
03:52I don't like I'm not in control.
03:55I'm like a little baby in the palm of your hand now and like I, you know, that's a scary
04:00feeling not to know what's going to happen next because normally I can guess what's going to happen next.
04:04But I think that's it getting swept up in the story.
04:07James Wan is producer and his nickname on Instagram is Creepy Puppet.
04:11Did he add something to say about the creatures that we may see in your movie?
04:17Yeah, big, big time. Yeah, he was, he was really heavily involved as a creative collaborator with me like going
04:23through, I would come to his house and do storyboards and I kind of pitch him through the scene.
04:27And we look at creature designs and he, I mean, I worked with, um, Fractured FX who did all the
04:33ghost and creatures for the conjuring and for Annabelle and for the nun.
04:37And so that's his, that's his people.
04:40And so we got the, you know, the best of the best to help create these, um, these, these entities
04:44in a night swim.
04:45Thank you so much.
04:46Thank you.
04:47Bye.
04:47Ciao.
04:48Ciao.
