- 2 days ago
Filmmaker Jesse V. Johnson returns to EoM Presents to discuss his latest directorial effort, the ocean survival thriller “Above & Below.” Johnson speaks about the technical and logistical challenges of underwater filmmaking, the performances of frequent collaborators Louis Mandylor and Jess Liaudin, and why humans are always more frightening antagonists than sharks. Also starring Laura Marano, Antonio Banderas, and Christina Ochoa, “Above & Below” arrives in theaters on July 29.
Official Synopsis:
30 feet below. 10 minutes of oxygen. 1 apex predator.
Official Trailer: youtu.be/18wdUGRPUY4?si=Ho-FfLYL6Vi1ohs2
Directed By: Jesse V. Johnson
Written By: Anthony Steven Giordano,
Cast: Laura Marano, Christina Ochoa, Mario Tardón, Antonio Banderas
Official Synopsis:
30 feet below. 10 minutes of oxygen. 1 apex predator.
Official Trailer: youtu.be/18wdUGRPUY4?si=Ho-FfLYL6Vi1ohs2
Directed By: Jesse V. Johnson
Written By: Anthony Steven Giordano,
Cast: Laura Marano, Christina Ochoa, Mario Tardón, Antonio Banderas
Category
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FunTranscript
00:00We're alive, we're alive!
00:02Hey, and welcome into EOM Presents. This is Thomas Manning, and there's a filmmaker we've covered here on Elements of
00:08Madness multiple times over the years, Jesse B. Johnson.
00:11Our founder, Douglas Davidson, has reviewed a handful of his films, and I've actually interviewed Jesse myself four times now.
00:18And this latest interview is on behalf of his new film, Above and Below.
00:22And as we get into, within our discussion, this is indeed a shark movie, but it's a movie about how
00:30oftentimes sharks aren't even the problem.
00:33It's bad human beings that are really worse than anything.
00:37Above and Below stars Laura Marano and Antonio Banderas, among others, and this is going to be in theaters on
00:44July 29th.
00:45I thank you all for watching and listening, and I hope you enjoy my interview with director Jesse B. Johnson
00:51about Above and Below.
00:52So, what I appreciate about this film is that the humans are just as much of a threat as the
00:57sharks, and I was really interested in that dynamic.
01:01And, you know, obviously the sharks can be exceedingly dangerous, but our protagonists are really only in the position they're
01:07in with the sharks because of what other humans have done.
01:10So, can you talk about exploring that dynamic as a filmmaker and, you know, what that opened up for you
01:16as a director?
01:17Well, I watched a lot of these movies.
01:19I went on a shark movie binge before doing this one, and there's a lot of really bad ones, and
01:25there's a number of extraordinarily well-made ones.
01:27The number of well-made ones is a lot smaller than the number of badly made ones, and unsuccessful shark
01:34movies.
01:34But the one fact that kept all of the unsuccessful ones linked together was trying to – the filmmakers tried
01:42to imbue their shark with a malevolent, evil sort of, you know, serial killer vibe.
01:50And it's like a shark is not a serial killer.
01:52A shark eats because it's hungry, you know.
01:55You know, you watch divers swimming, white sharks, and they ignore them.
01:58They were swimming around them.
01:59You know, if it thinks you're edible, it'll take a bite and taste you a little bit, or it nudges
02:05you first, gives you a knock, and then, you know, it's not a predator.
02:10It's not John Wick with fins.
02:12And I wanted that to be very, very clear.
02:16And, you know, I wanted – as you mentioned, I wanted the humans to be the evil ones because humans
02:22do have a capacity for evil that most animals don't.
02:26We had one of the actresses on it is Christina Ochoa, who is a – she's a shark specialist, and
02:32she said when we were first casting this and putting it together, she just – she said,
02:35please give me a word that you don't create some kind of beast out of these things that creates more
02:40bad PR and bad press for sharks than they already have because, you know, they are just a natural animal
02:47that acts upon its very basis of instincts.
02:50It's not a mean or vicious or, you know, cruel thought.
02:57That's not how it works.
02:58It's a machine that eats when it's hungry and ignores you when it's not, you know.
03:03So I tried to talk with her a lot about it.
03:05There's always some elements where there's a slightly more filmic element in there, but for the most part, I wanted
03:10the humans to be the antagonists, the, you know, the problem.
03:14I also, after watching all of the shark movies and, again, analyzing what worked and didn't work, when you had
03:22human characters that you believed in, empathized with, had sympathy for, understood, that worked in a rational manner that were,
03:33you know,
03:35sympathetic, you believed, you know, the shark suddenly became that much more scary.
03:39If you have pencil-thin characters that are just – this is the, you know, the skinny blonde girl, this
03:46is the, you know, the jock, and these very, very sort of, you know, thinly drawn characters, you have no
03:54sympathy.
03:54It doesn't matter, you know, they don't care if they get even, you know, they don't care if they –
03:57it doesn't matter because you're not investing as an audience member.
04:01And that was a big factor in the films that I invested in or didn't invest in and enjoyed or
04:06didn't enjoy.
04:07So, you know, we took a look at the script and said, let's create more for these guys to do.
04:11Let's create more backstory.
04:12Let's try and distract the audience from the fact that this is a shark movie at all so that when
04:16they do appear, it's, you know, it becomes just one more added threat in an already dangerous situation.
04:23And so that was my aim with it.
04:25And it was based on watching a lot of other shark movies and hoping that we came up with something
04:29that was fresh, you know.
04:31Right.
04:31It's a lot of them.
04:31Right.
04:32And in terms of the challenges of underwater filmmaking, I know you've worked on a variety of productions over the
04:38past few decades, but what was your background experience in working with underwater film?
04:44Had you ever done anything quite to this extent before?
04:46No, I've done a little bit.
04:47I've done a lot on the water, you know, as a stuntman and as a director.
04:52I hadn't been a part of any underwater, specialized underwater unit before.
04:56And we were two weeks in Sofia in a 25-meter tank, which had extraordinary safety protocol.
05:03Communication is one-sided.
05:05You can talk into the water as a director and they can hear you, but they have to use hand
05:09signals back to you.
05:10And you're watching through various monitors and you require a really cohesive plan that works.
05:18And so you'll rehearse the scene outside of the water, you know, on the concrete as if they're underwater.
05:24And we'll film that and record what they're saying.
05:27And then they jump in the water and they basically replicate what they did.
05:31And they match their mouths to the audio that I then play back underwater.
05:36So they are miming to that.
05:38So you do the scenes in big takes.
05:40You don't want to be doing short takes because, you know, you have to get them out.
05:45And taking them out of the water to rest is over an hour, you know, and you have to put
05:49them back in again.
05:51Tanks have to be checked.
05:52Everything has to be checked.
05:53Protocols have to be followed.
05:54So you're trying to shoot as much as possible at any given time.
05:57So we do the whole scene in one single take from multiple angles and then get them out of the
06:05water and then, you know, review everything.
06:07And it was it's it's complex.
06:10There's it's I have done a lot of complex movies and sandstorms and effects in the air and on water.
06:18So I kind of got it.
06:19But I'd never done anything quite this complex in terms of doing it.
06:23And I realized by the end of it, by two weeks in, there were a lot of things we could
06:28have done at the beginning to make it go a lot more smoothly.
06:30But, you know, part of that is also exciting because you're doing things that perhaps haven't been done before and
06:37are not necessarily following the rules.
06:39And sometimes you get things that are really exciting that way.
06:42Other times you end up with 25 minutes of footage, which is unusable.
06:45And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you move on.
06:48But it was really fun.
06:50And the Sophia crew that we had in New Boiana were amazing.
06:54They were so safety conscious, so helpful.
06:58Zoli, the first AD and associate producer was was amazing.
07:02So the help that they gave me can't be understated.
07:05You have a dive team, you have a safety diver for each actor that's in the water for the, you
07:09know, and then the camera team have their own safety diver.
07:13Luckily, Maxime Alexander, who was my cinematographer on this one, is a very, very advanced diver and did all of
07:19this.
07:20You know, he operated a camera underwater every day.
07:23So he was in for whatever it was, 10 hours a day for two weeks.
07:27And then the above the water stuff was a lot more straightforward, but still complex because we're on a boat
07:32in the African Ocean.
07:34So, you know, we had a tail boat with us.
07:37But then we realized that because the water is rough, just having another boat come in and, you know, give
07:43you what you need was impractical.
07:45So we ended up keeping everything on the boat that we're on, which, you know, you have to have minimum
07:50numbers of people.
07:51So this entire above the water stuff was was done with sort of like a crew of nine or 10
07:56technicians, which is unheard of.
07:59But, you know, because we all knew what we had to do and we all chipped in and everyone did
08:02multiple jobs and myself and the other producers are carrying cases and you sort of jumping from one boat to
08:08another, which is absurd as well.
08:10Well, you ended up with a sort of efficiency that was was good.
08:16But, yes, it was it was interesting.
08:18It was you have to rethink the way films are made and come up with a new method of doing
08:22it.
08:22You do anyway for every movie you want, because there's different crew in different locations, especially when you're outdoors.
08:28But in this case, we were really we all had to sit down and think, how are we going to
08:31do this and make it work?
08:33I think there was a lot of people betting against it working on the first day in the water.
08:38So we had the shark cage and they hadn't quite attached it properly.
08:41So I had the whole cast and crew all watching as the shark cage was loaded into the water.
08:46And the moment it touched the water, the cable snapped and it dropped 100 metres to the bottom of the
08:51sea.
08:52And it was total silence on set.
08:55There were two art department guys that had been in the back of the cage and they luckily had had
09:00scuba gear on and they came floating to the surface.
09:03But we never saw that cage again.
09:04It was gone.
09:05You know, so that, you know, the cast said, we're not going in the water.
09:11And I said, no, you're not going in the water in the cage.
09:14You know, we'll wait till we get to the tank to do that.
09:17But there were incidents like that that happened throughout, which really make your hair stand on end.
09:22But there's no other way of getting around it.
09:24You try and make things as safe as you possibly can with, you know, using worst case scenario in your
09:30mind.
09:30And inevitably, once in a while, something will happen that's even worse than you could have imagined.
09:34And thankfully, no one was hurt.
09:36No one was drowned.
09:37And, you know, we were very conscious of that going through the movie and watching, making sure that they were
09:43safe.
09:43But, man, it was an interesting one.
09:45The first day that Lewis Mandalore had to go in the water and he'd given me a speech up to
09:50this point saying how little he liked going in the ocean.
09:52It was the irony being that he's from Australia, but he hates surfing.
09:57He gave me this long speech at the hotel.
09:59And I used a lot of the dialogue from Lewis's speech to me in the movie.
10:02And you'll hear it scattered throughout the film where he's swearing and angry at the water.
10:06That's that's actually Lewis.
10:09He he he hates sharks.
10:11And he made me give my word that there were no sharks.
10:14And I went to the Spanish crew and I said, there's there's no sharks here.
10:17Right. They said, no, they have the Valencia, you know, little shark about that big, but it's tiny.
10:22OK. And so the day that Lewis is going in, I looked out, I saw a fin clearly circling, you
10:27know, the boat.
10:28I said, there's a fin. And then the Spanish crew said, is that a shark?
10:31And they said, no, it's not a shark. It's a hammerhead.
10:35I said, I think a hammerhead is a shark.
10:37It's still a shark. Yeah.
10:39Communication there and a lot of talking.
10:41And then finally, yeah, well, it is a hammerhead, but it's a long way away.
10:45And I said, it moved pretty quick, I think.
10:47Anyway, Lewis went in the water while the hammerhead was circling the boat.
10:50And it didn't pay any attention to us.
10:52And it all worked out OK.
10:53We did try and film the fin.
10:55But the thing about real sharks is the fin doesn't look like it looks in a movie.
10:59It's very slow and it's kind of curled over the top.
11:02And it looks a little looks a little like the Timu version of a predator shark.
11:08So we got we did get footage of real hammerhead sharks circling the boat while we're filming.
11:13But we ended up not using it because it's not not terribly, terribly frightening looking.
11:18Right.
11:19And I'm glad you mentioned Lewis, because I want to ask about both Lewis and Jess Lealden, who you've worked
11:25with a pair of them before.
11:26And I really loved how you use them together.
11:29It's not their typical action movie roles and they don't do any of their martial arts here.
11:33But, you know, more than anything, this is just a great showcase for them as actors.
11:37So what impressed you the most about their performances here?
11:43I love the innocence that they brought to it.
11:45My biggest problem with bad guys, villains, is that you have an actor who spends his whole life trying to
11:53get jobs and impressing people and being nice.
11:55And now he's asked to play a bad guy and he bases it maybe on some bad guys he's seen
12:00in other movies or, you know, might have run into someone in real life.
12:04But the truth of the matter is most truly malevolent, unpleasant human beings think that they're actually good.
12:13They think they're doing good for themselves, for their family, for the world.
12:18They don't wake up in the morning and say, what evil thing can I do today?
12:22They wake up in the morning and figure, like the rest of us, how can I make money to pay
12:26the bills?
12:26What can I do today that makes me feel, you know, happy, you know, when I'm feeling, you know, grumpy?
12:32You know, they have the same, you know, mindset.
12:37And Jess and Lewis understand that.
12:40They understand it.
12:41And I've had Lewis play a bad guy for me before.
12:43I've had Jess play a bad guy for me before.
12:45And what they do is they bring a lot of that to the table, which just makes them interesting characters
12:52for me.
12:52You know, they're two guys that really like each other, that have been doing this for some time.
12:57They've been making money doing it, but they keep getting in trouble because Lewis, his character in the movie, just
13:03always goes too far with what he's supposed to.
13:05He's not terribly bright.
13:07He's got great street smarts, but he keeps getting both in trouble.
13:10And Jess has to step in and bail him out.
13:12And you figure they've had to do this quite a few times, you know.
13:16And why do they keep hanging out together?
13:18Probably because the next bad guy to hang out with is even worse than Lewis.
13:22And Jess is like, well, you know, if I have to hang out with him, at least he's okay.
13:26But they bring the realism to it.
13:28They brought a workmanlike authenticity to those two characters that I really bought and I enjoy.
13:35And they feel real.
13:36They feel, you know, interesting.
13:37You want to know what they're doing and why they're there.
13:40And, you know, I, you know, I hate poorly drawn characters in movies.
13:46It's, you know, and as I have mentioned before, the one thing that unifies all of the bad shark movies
13:52is the human characters are not drawn very well.
13:56So you don't have any empathy for the guys that are supposed to be the victims.
13:59I was, I watched most of those.
14:01I watched such a lot of shark movies and research for this.
14:05By the end of a lot of them, I was more sympathetic to the sharks than I was the human
14:08characters.
14:09Because I just wanted them to eat all of them because they're so boring and so badly drawn.
14:13Most of them were sequels to shark movies.
14:16And I watched those too because I wanted to know what didn't work.
14:18It's an important study when you're about to enter into a genre that perhaps you're not terribly, terribly familiar with.
14:26And, you know, for me, this was a genre that I wasn't terribly familiar with.
14:30So I made sure that I watched somewhere in the region of 60 of these movies, you know, back to
14:36back.
14:36Some I watched more than once.
14:38Some I, you know, showed to crew members.
14:40I brought the DP and I watched, you know, third or fourth time with him.
14:43There are only three movies that I really enjoyed out of the bunch, by the way.
14:46I'm not going to mention them here because I'm talking about Above and Below, which I'm very proud of.
14:51But the ones that didn't work didn't work because you didn't have any interest in the humans.
14:56You know, the other ones, the other factor that made a shark film not work was the filmmakers tried to
15:04make their shark some kind of monster predator with a, you know, a desire to kill humans, which is just
15:10not what they are.
15:11You know, they're a machine that doesn't really see any difference between us or anything else.
15:15There's a very interesting thing that I discovered on this, which I gave to Tim Murphy, the line, which is
15:21if you turn around, you know, a shark will creep up on you from behind.
15:24But if you turn around and make eye contact with it, it's like, oh, shit, this one's got brains.
15:28I'm not bothered by that.
15:29And they'll normally swim away because they don't like they don't like being engaged.
15:33You're no longer a victim.
15:35You're no longer a lump of meat floating in the water.
15:38You're now may offer resistance because they see that there's a connection in the eyes.
15:42I thought that was an amazing thing.
15:44And it's it's in the shark manuals, you know, and so I threw that in.
15:48But they're, you know, they're interesting animals.
15:50But that that's that that was my research for this.
15:53And that's what I felt.
15:54So hopefully makes this film a little different.
15:57Yeah.
15:58Yeah.
15:58And so much of the human drama in this film is between our protagonist, Laura, played by Laura Morano and
16:05Christina Ochoa and then Antonio Banderas.
16:08And they're essentially having a conversation over the radio airwaves.
16:12But these characters hardly interact face to face for most of the movie.
16:17So I'm sure that was a challenge to kind of develop that drama in a unique way just through radio
16:25conversations.
16:26Can you talk about kind of what that required of you to develop that?
16:31I always try and make sure the actors as nearby as possible.
16:35So when Antonio was playing it, he had the luxury of having Laura sitting just behind the camera, giving the
16:40dialogue.
16:40So he had something to figuratively play across.
16:43As you know, acting is sort of 80 percent reacting.
16:48You know, if the person they're playing to forces them into somewhere, it's much easier for the actor than doing
16:54it on their own and trying to play to the script supervisor.
16:57You know, simply reading the lines and getting the words mixed up.
17:00You know, they want someone to play, too.
17:02That's how you get a good performance.
17:03You don't, you know, actors aren't automatons.
17:06You know, most, as I say, most of their job is reacting rather than acting.
17:12With Laura, it was more complex underwater because of the way we had to shoot that, which was we would
17:19put the actors on the concrete by the by the water and they play the scene how they were going
17:25to play it.
17:25We'd record it and videotape it.
17:27And then they jump in the water and basically mimic what they had done outside of the water and mime
17:32to the dialogue that I played through loudspeakers.
17:34Because obviously you can't actually pick up water, you know, a dialogue underwater.
17:38It doesn't work like that.
17:39So they would mime to their own dialogue underwater.
17:43So there wasn't really much room for improv.
17:45And, you know, you know, I'd say go bigger, bigger with your reaction, wider eyes.
17:51They could hear me saying that.
17:52And we do that.
17:54And it was it was tough.
17:56It was toughest for the editor, poor Matthew, who had then had reels and reams and reams of footage of
18:02them under underwater that he had to basically sort of pin together.
18:05And he could barely hear Antonio's dialogue.
18:08And I mean, the off camera dialogue, which was not Antonio because he was not in Sofia at that point.
18:13I think it was either me or I brought in one of the other actors to do Antonio's dialogue.
18:17But, yes, it was a bit trickier underwater to create an environment for them to act freely to.
18:25So ultimately it was just lip syncing for them underwater, almost like a music video where they got to try
18:30different different ways of physically manifesting it.
18:33But they couldn't play much with the with the actual dialogue itself because it's set.
18:39And then, of course, once we had edited the film, the actors came in, they read it, their dialogue with
18:44ADR.
18:44And at that point, we had more food to sort of swap it.
18:47Yeah.
18:47But, yeah, it was complex.
18:49But Antonio got it easy on deck because he managed to play actually to Laura being there behind camera.
18:55OK, awesome.
18:56Yeah.
18:56And before we wrap it up here, there's something else I want to ask you about.
19:00We've spoken a few times over the years, but I don't think we've spoken since it was announced that the
19:05Academy Awards are finally going to recognize the stunt community.
19:07And I know that for you, as someone who's been in the industry for many years and been putting in
19:13the work and which has oftentimes been underappreciated and underrecognized.
19:17What does it mean to you that the Academy is finally showing that recognition and that appreciation for stunt workers
19:23and for people that like you that have been doing what you've been doing for so long?
19:26It's a two it's a twofold answer.
19:28The first is that's wonderful.
19:29You know, it's a great, great thing and well overdue.
19:33I think there's certain action units where a action director like Big Armstrong, my uncle, you know, Wade Eastwood or,
19:42you know, when Chad Stahowski and David Leach were doing these second units where it's absolutely deserved.
19:48These guys were working at a level which was amazing and they were doing bona fide action units where they
19:54were creating with the director or without the director with the studio.
19:58You know, they were creating those sequences and going off and doing them.
20:00And the stunt guys are doing amazing, amazing work that needs to have recognition.
20:05That's great.
20:05On the other other side of the coin, I came in at a point in the industry where you were
20:09the quiet professional that kept quiet and you were about making the actor look great and the director look great.
20:14And that was your job and you were paid a lot of money to keep your mouth shut.
20:18And if the actor that you doubled went on Leno and said, oh, I do all my own stunts and
20:26got a round of applause.
20:27That's fine.
20:28That's OK, because you are paid quite a lot of money to make him feel OK at doing that.
20:33You know, and I did.
20:33I was that stunt double a couple of times where the actor took absolutely all the credit for the stunts.
20:39And I'm thinking, you know, I got stitches that says that you didn't do anything.
20:43But that's all right.
20:44And that's totally fine.
20:45And that's that's just the way it is.
20:48And it's OK.
20:48Now, an action unit that has been created by someone specifically and it's made that film, you know, Cliff Hanger,
20:56things like that, where, you know, some of the bonds that Vic did where, you know, he was getting a
21:01bigger budget on his second unit than they were getting on the first unit because of the volume of action
21:06and car chases.
21:08That makes complete sense.
21:09I think it's a great thing to do.
21:10And I think it's long overdue, you know, but there's another part of me that likes the idea of it
21:15being a fantasy.
21:16And it is it is it can stay a fantasy.
21:20You know, I grew up thinking Steve McQueen did all his own stunts.
21:23Clint did all his own stunts.
21:24And it was it wasn't until I was actually sort of starting to work in the movie industry when I
21:28ran into Clint's stuntman and Steve McQueen's stuntman and got to talk to him like, damn, I grew up completely
21:34thinking the opposite.
21:37Be in the trailer and I'd be doing all of it.
21:39Yeah.
21:40Yeah.
21:41Well, Jesse, like I said, it's always a pleasure to chat with you and congratulations on above and below and
21:46looking forward to connecting again in the future.
21:48Also, I'm looking forward to seeing what you and Scott Adkins do with Irish Dog, I believe, is your next
21:53collaboration.
21:54So I'll be tuned in for that one.
21:56But thanks, Jesse.
21:57Always a privilege.
21:58Thank you, Thomas.
21:59Thank you very much for the great question.
22:00See you.
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