Neil Marshall talks 'The Decent'
June 10th, 2005
Source: Pathe / The Hollywood News
Posted by: Paul Heath

One of my favourite flicks from a couple of years back was Neil Marshall's DOG SOLDIERS. The film delighted audiences across the globe, giving British film and horror movies in general, a massive shot in the arm and a huge kick up the arse.

Three years on and Marshall is about to release his follow-up, the highly anticipate THE DECENT, again, another horror this time set undergroud. We have a first look at the trailer here. Here's what director/writer Marshall had to say about his latest big screen adventure.

Afraid of the dark? You will be.

So what can we expect from Marshall's chicks with pics movie?

"In many ways, it is the sister film to Dog Soldiers. There are six women, rather than six men, trapped and facing a common foe, but rather than bond together in the face of adversity, they turn against each other and their relationships disintegrate."

He adds: "Ever since we conceived of this script idea, there's been a running joke that this film is about six chicks with picks, but that's simplifying it. It is about six contemporary, adventurous women's physical descent into the depths of the earth on a caving holiday that goes horribly wrong, but it is also about a descent into madness."

Marshall has always wanted to do a horror film set in a cave.

"I thought it was a fantastic environment that had barely been touched upon in horror films. It's the classic environment. Horror films are best set in the dark and you can't get any darker than that. I also wanted to do something with an all female ensemble cast which, in an action horror film, is quite unique.

"The script was in development for about two years. It's been through quite a few drafts but it's honed down to something we're all very happy with. The first draft of the script was a lot more caricatured; the women were a bit more stylised and slightly unrealistic. The action hasn't really changed at all, the actual story progression, and the physical action that happens within it hasn't changed at all, but the characters have gone from strength to strength, and become much more real and human. It's just been a question of adding layers to them. I call it the flaky pastry principal."

On working with an all female ensemble cast, Marshall says:

"It has been an absolute dream. I confess that I went into it cautiously, having worked with a pretty much all male ensemble cast on Dog Soldiers. That was a blast, in the bar every night, and I knew it was going to be very different working with six women. But in the end we've managed to achieve that same atmosphere of collaboration, and a good sense of fun, and a good sense of professionalism, with everyone just mucking in. These girls are game for anything, and on screen they're just mind-blowing, a really, really solid bunch and it's been a dream to work with them."

Marshall says that his experiences making The Descent have been very similar to Dog Soldiers:

"There aren't that many differences. We've got a fantastic crew, a fantastic cast, everyone's having a really good time making it, we're splashing blood around left, right and centre, we're smashing things up, killing monsters, it's just as much as a blast really.

"The only down side, I suppose, is that working at Pinewood, we don't have the social life that continues after the shoot every night. When we were in Luxembourg on Dog Soldiers we were in the bars every night together and we don't have that here - everybody goes home at night. And that's kind of weird. We try to make the most of it by having a few drinks every once in a while because the social life is as much a part of it as the actual working life, so I miss that hugely, but other than that, it's just as much fun."

In the film's script, Marshall named the savage, hungry predators that the women encounter in the cave as 'crawlers'.

"The crawlers are cave men that didn't leave the cave. They've evolved in this environment, over thousands of years and there's a community of them that live down there in families. They've adapted perfectly to thrive in the cave. They've lost their eyesight, they have acute hearing and smell, and they function perfectly in the pitch black. They're expert climbers, so they can go up any rock face and that is their world. These girls infringe upon their world, and the crawlers are simply defending their territory.

"The inspiration for the crawlers came from the idea that if there were these creatures living under ground, what would they be, where would they have come from? Elements came into the story of finding a cave painting, a prehistoric cave painting, so I thought, "OK cave men. Well if they were cave men, what if they were actually more human than not?", because to me, making them more human, makes them more scary. They have human attributes, and that's far more terrifying than any fantastical creature."

On how the crawlers have been realised on screen, Marshall says:

"I'm absolutely over the moon with the way they've turned out. They're incredibly physical, and virile and fierce looking. Their colouring and attributes are all to do with being in the pitch dark, and what your worse nightmare underground would be, and meeting these guys is pretty much it - slimy, hideous, writhing, biting, monsters."

Craig Conway and Les Simpson who both appear in Dog Soldiers are two of the actors beneath the crawler make up. Marshall says:

"Craig and Les are my actors of choice in that they have been in every film I've ever made in one way or another. It was pretty difficult to get them in to this one - I thought, I'm making an all female ensemble film, where am I going to get them in? And then it occurred to me, what if they played the crawlers? I wasn't sure they'd be up for it, but they were well up for it.

"I also wanted to use them because I wanted actors rather than dancers to play the crawlers. The make up that they have allows them to express themselves fully, both physically and with facial expressions, and putting actors in the make up and costume is just the best of both worlds."

During the shoot, Marshall kept the crawlers hidden from the actresses right up until the moment in the script when they each first meet one:

"I made a deliberate point of keeping the crawlers away from the girls until they encountered one in the script. I wanted to see what the effect would be, and it really helped build up the tension and anticipation. They were getting really, really nervous about it. They didn't know what to expect, they hadn't seen any pictures, they had no idea what they were going to look like, and it was a lot of fun playing around with that. They got really on edge about it, so when we did the take and introduced the crawlers, they just snapped and went running off into the dark screaming. For weeks we'd been building up this image of these really hard-assed, tough as nails girls, and as soon as a crawler turns up, it's hands in the air and running away like a big bunch of sissies!"

Setting a film in the dark depths of the earth has not been without its challenges for Marshall and the crew:

"From its original conception I envisaged this film as being very, very dark, both in tone and in visual style. I didn't want there to be any gratuitous light sources in this cave. It's proving a problem as we're filming to suddenly think, 'well, how are we actually going to light this scene because they've only got a box of matches on them? Well, right, we'll use a box of matches, I don't know how we're going to do it, but we'll use a box of matches'. Towards the end of the film though, the girls start setting things on fire, so it gets a bit easier for us. But at the moment, we're in this mid section, where they've lost all their torches, and snap lights, and their flares, so it's getting pretty dark and intense."

Making the budget stretch across the spectrum of The Descent's underground world has also been a challenge:

"One of the biggest challenges of making this film has been putting every penny of the budget on screen to make the sets work. Simon (Bowles, production designer) has done a fantastic job of the production design but we do have the problem of not having enough money to make the sets stretch throughout the whole story so we have had to reuse sets. As the story progresses, we're ripping sets apart and putting them back together again in a different order to make a new set. That's becoming a slight challenge now, but because they're so good at what they do, it's not really that much of a problem."

Despite the challenges, Marshall says:

"Every day of the shoot has just been a blast, something has happened, something funny, or something spectacular, there's been a great stunt, or some great dramatic sequence, things just falling into place along the way. Every single minute of the shoot has been good".

So why horror movies then Marshall?

"Horror films are a lot of fun to make and a lot of fun to watch audiences watching. Sitting among an audience watching a good horror film and gauging their reaction, you can hear the fear, you can hear the gasps and the jolts and the screams and the laughs. It's a very audible reaction that you get, and that's very satisfying from a filmmaker's point of view. I just love scaring the pants of people."

The film hits theaters in the UK on July 8th.

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