Exclusive: As Above/So Below’s John Erick and Drew Dowdle Talk Filming Underground Found-Footage Style
Steve Barton
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As Above/So Below opens today, and reviews (including mine and Uncle Creepy’s) are mixed. Before rendering your own verdict, hear from director/co-writers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle about their experiences making the film.
Dread Central: When I walked into the screening of As Above/So Below, I was not prepared for a modern twist on an old fashioned archeologist vs. a curse adventure. Then there’s this Satanic element and sort of a body count/slasher vibe, too. How did you manage to put everything in there and still make it very linear?
John Erick Dowdle: You know, we just trusted our intuition. It just felt right to us, more than anything else. It was funny; this movie moved so quickly, which is a rare thing. We had to stay intuitive and maybe a little less intellectual. I think that really served this movie really well. We sort of over-prepare for everything, and we really didn’t have the chance on this.
Drew Dowdle: Yeah, we liked the idea of this search for a relic. We’ve had the idea for a long time, and it’s something we always wanted to come back to. You know, something very relatable and something that people can identify with in a movie. But add to that this idea that we imprison ourselves either through guilt or regret; whatever it is that holds us back is what this self-imprisonment idea is. It’s something that was more important than the history and the legend and all that, which was obviously very important to get in there as a starting off point; but ultimately we wanted the psychological horror to take over the story.
DC: As most people who read my reviews regularly know, I am not a big fan of found footage. I feel like Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Taxi Driver or some similar classic Academy Award-winning film could never be done as found footage. We need the cinematography and composition to add gravitas. But I do have a few exceptions. I love Enter the Void. It is one of my all-time favorite movies. Chronicle, End of Watch… Those movies made found footage work. So I’m wondering: Is the found footage route something you always wanted to do with this from the beginning, or was this ever conceived as more cinematic because of the atmosphere and practical location? Your surroundings are so arresting, but one never really gets a chance to look at them with shaky cam.
JED: For this project it just innately felt like the right way to go. In part because we knew, if you are going to go down and shoot the Catacombs and shoot the real thing, [there isn’t going to be much room for lights and cameras on tripods]. If you were to shoot it in traditional coverage, and light one side of the room, and shoot that and turn all the lights around, like it would take you ten years to shoot it. [laughter]
DC: Do you remember, was Neil Marshall’s The Decent shot in caves or on a soundstage?
JED: They shot most of that on a stage. All those tight spaces and stuff, they shot that all on set. We really wanted to shoot in the real thing. And we were six stories underground and in a lot of locations. We had to lower equipment down through a manhole. So we had to stay really light, and we thought that would affect the actors’ performances, too. You know that is the most important thing: performance. In this case, we felt they would really connect with the material. So we wanted to not have people texting or buzzing during the setups. Like you know, you get them underground, and when you’re watching the movie, you feel like you’re seeing the breath in the air, you see kind of the crazed look in their eyes when they are down underground too long. So you feel like you’re underground with them.
DD: And I have to say, too, that [was a] prime location, the Catacombs. There is no faking that. So it was a matter of not going to Romania and building sets, when we could have the real thing and feel like this. It was critical to us that we were shooting in the real location. Honestly, like John said, it has such an impact on performance. That is just as important a by-product. There was no way we would make this movie and not shoot it in the real place.
DC: Well, I can see how it impacted the actors. But what about impact on director? [laughter]
JED: We are rapid directors, writers, producers… there is something to be excited about. We were down there with a wireless, walkie-talkies don’t work down there, wireless monitors don’t work down there. So anytime you see the action of actors running down a corridor, we are about ten feet behind them holding a monitor with no lights on, and we sort of put our forearms up over our face in case the ceiling got low. You know, use your forearm, sort of gash your forearm instead of gash your forehead. We all took a big hit down there.
DD: Every filmmaker’s dream is to be kind of left alone when making a movie. Nobody wanted to go down into the Catacombs. We had a French line producer that was kind of our time-keeper; he was keeping track if we were going into overtime, but… he was literally claustrophobic. So if you ever saw him actually down there, we knew we were in deep shit… we knew [laughter] the plug was about to get pulled when we saw him actually down there. But for 98 percent of shooting the movie, it was just us and the actors.
DC: I realize that the physiological aspect is indeed the most important thing because as someone who sees hundreds of horror movies a year, I rarely get emotionally invested in the characters. And you did accomplish that. But I am wondering in the course of your research, what was the most interesting thing you learned either about the Catacombs or about some ancient curses?
JED: The thing that I found really interesting is there is this whole underground Cataphile world of people who live down there. They have massive systems, and they carry their pickaxes and they’ll break down walls just to explore all these unchartered areas. Some of them had bunks down there. There is such this weird kind of subversive underground world — they have a cinema down there, or had one… the cops found it. It’s just this really cool kind of edgy underground world that I found fascinating.
DD: I thought, too, just how old the space is was really interesting. How much it’s been used over the centuries. Like one day we would be in a zone where we saw graffiti from the French Revolution. And then a few days later we would be in a space that they carved Adolf Hitler symbols into the rock. So many centuries of history that have used this space. But I would say the one detail of research that we knew we wanted was the search for the Philosopher’s Stone. We did a lot of research on that.
Read Staci Layne Wilson’s positive As Above/So Below review.
Read Uncle Creepy’s negative As Above/So Below review.
As Above/So Below director John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine, Devil) wrote the script with his brother, Drew. The film stars Ben Feldman, Perdita Weeks, and Edwin Hodge.
Synopsis
Miles of twisting catacombs lie beneath the streets of Paris, the eternal home to countless souls. When a team of explorers venture into the uncharted maze of bones, they uncover the dark secret that lies within this city of the dead. A journey into madness and terror, As Above/So Below reaches deep into the human psyche to reveal the personal demons that come back to haunt us all.
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