June 19, 2025 • 24 mins
Mike ventures deep beneath the surface with director Rob Petit to discuss Underland (2025), a haunting, meditative documentary that charts an extraordinary subterranean journey into the hidden worlds beneath our feet. Narrated by author and co-writer Robert Macfarlane, the film adapts his bestselling book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, bringing to life an awe-inspiring descent into caves, catacombs, glacial crevasses, and underground rivers spanning continents. More than just a travelogue, Underland explores humanity’s relationship with deep time—how we bury our dead, our nuclear waste, and our myths far below the surface.
Mike and Petit explore the technical and philosophical challenges of filming underground, the role of sound and narration in shaping the film’s atmosphere, and how Underland uses darkness and silence to confront ecological crisis, mortality, and deep history. A lyrical, unsettling, and urgent cinematic experience, Underland burrows into the mind as much as the earth.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.
Mike and Petit explore the technical and philosophical challenges of filming underground, the role of sound and narration in shaping the film’s atmosphere, and how Underland uses darkness and silence to confront ecological crisis, mortality, and deep history. A lyrical, unsettling, and urgent cinematic experience, Underland burrows into the mind as much as the earth.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh ye is bot, it's show time. People say good
money to see this movie.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
When they go out to a theater, they are cold sodas,
hot popcorn, and no monsters. In the Protection Booth, everyone
pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Don it off.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Time It flows differently in the Underland. Down here, there
are no minutes or hours, only epochs and AONs. Some
called this deep time, the dizzy expands of the Earth's
(01:05):
history that stretches away from the present. But for those
who descend, deep time is also another way of seeing,
(01:31):
one in which things that seemed inert come alive. Stone flows,
the earth has tides, and eyes breeze.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I am
talking with Rob Pettitt all about his new film Underland.
This film recently played at the Tribeca Film Festival, and
we'll be playing some other fests as we go along.
Definitely keep an eye out for it. It is pretty amazing.
I think you will really get a kick out of it.
(02:20):
I know that I did. Thanks so much for listening,
and I hope you enjoyed the interview. Can you tell
me a little bit of your background as far as
how you got into filmmaking.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
So, my dad's a filmmaker. So I always grew up
with all sorts of strange cameras and bits of technology
lying around the house from the age of about twelve,
where I used to turn off family holidays into the
sort of nightmare sort of kupbreak style shoots I give
people there of gone holiday, but I him will learn
(02:49):
lines and get up at seven in the morning, and
would you'd have made a mystery. I didn't understand what
editing was. I didn't know you could edit films. I
thought everything was shot in sequence. Remember I remember doing
you know, we do it line by line, shot by shot,
which is sort of quite a pure way of making
a film, I think. But anyway, just sort of stayed
(03:10):
in that world and have always been interested in technology
as well, and how cameras have changed to So a
few years ago I was given a drone actually by
my uncle, my uncle Husta Linpa Well to this place
in the Poconos, and remember thinking, oh, this is an
(03:30):
interesting sort of way of seeing the earth. No one's
ever really sort of we haven't explored that strata of
airspace because it's sort of too low for helicopters, and
two highs of the sort of human case and made
us quite an experimental film called Upstream that follows the
course of a river all the way to its source
in a roundabout way. That's sort of what led to Underland.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
He decided to go below instead of above, well, yeah,
to what to sort of follow the river from there?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yeah, from the platter on the Cagaron platter above high
up in the Keangoon Mountains all the way down. I
mean it led our stream lego collaboration with Robert McFarland
and the writer of Bunderland, which is which is how
it sort of led, and his sort of literally career
it's been one of one of sort of deep mapping,
you know. He started at the summits of the mountains
(04:18):
and he's followed following things down down, down into the
into the nether. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
How did you meet mister McFarland.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Robert McFarland and I, Yeah, we started. I made a
little short film about him. Actually, it's for Granted magazine.
We met years and years ago and we sort of
stayed in touch. And when I was given this drone
and came back with this sort of strange footage from
the mountains. I remember thinking, oh, yeah, this is a
landscape that Rob McFarland has written a lot about me
(04:49):
and walked in a lot and it was last game
by associated with his work. So I sort of sent
him a video postcard of that expedition and he wrote
something for it, wrote some beautiful narration for and that
became a project called up Stream, which is also a
collaboration with the composer Houster Vocal Bottleman, and he had
around that time also just written Underland. And I remember
(05:14):
first reading Underland while I was here in the Bocalones
in Pennsylvania, and I sat on the end of the
Jeffy bike on Lake Proconal, and I remember being gripped
by the first line, which is the way into the
underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.
And that ash tree was one. It's one that's real,
and it's one that I found. It grows from a
(05:34):
gentle hollow in the field in England, and it does
indeed had a split in the trunk, and that split
leads into a thirty three thousand foot long case system
and you crawled through the split in the trunk of
this tree and into another world really, and that case
system became a sort of portal for many of us
(05:55):
on the team into all these other worlds and all
these incredible places that that are explored by incredible people.
And the film sort of grew from that.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
To see this world that we would never normally see
as such an eye opening experience. I mean it reminds
me a little bit of the Herzog Cave documentary, but
in such a different way. How is that experience for
you going inside of these caves and experiencing them and
especially having to I mean, how big of a crew
did you have to work with?
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Well, we had an incredible team, utterly incredible. It's funny
you mentioned Van because one of our EPs, Andre Singer,
has produced I think it's how seventeen of Furness Films
and don It's also sort of sits on the board
with Sandbox as well or other production companies. So I
certainly felt the sort of presence of Werner and throughout
(06:47):
the film, and of course he's one of my sort
of cinematic heroes. And I remember when I try saw
FITZGERALDO and actually for us saw the making of FITZGERALDO
the documentary about it called Burton's Dreams. I remember thinking,
or there is something about the idea of taking the
camera into difficult places, taking the camera into environments that
are very indifferent to your desires his filmmakers, that feels
(07:10):
it feels sometimes like a sort of madness, but also
sometimes you know, it's it's one that's quite hard to resist.
It's a it's a pull that is quite hard to resist.
And that is essentially the central question of the film.
Why do we seek the void?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
You know?
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Why do we get into this pool, this strange song
that calls us downward? So in terms of recruiting a team,
I had to find people who also have that, saying
Paul or rather weren't so put off by the idea
of squeezing through narrow and wet caves that that they
would they wouldn't take a gig. I mean, we have
(07:44):
the most incredible production team, As I've said, it started
with Spring, which is run by Andre Singer, and with
Planet Optedless as well. So we had Lauren Greenwood are
absolutely brilliant and interpret producer, and Sandbox as well. You
just sort of got it right from the beginning, and
did they let us very slowly build the team and
(08:06):
find the right people and the right collaborators. And I
remember when i'd first had our when I had my
first conversation with Rubin woodin Deshomp, a cinematographer. I remember thinking,
this is the guy, you know, I mean, his his work,
his eye, his craft is I think just unsurpassed. And
so we were headed to the ash tree before we
(08:26):
picked up a camera. We headed to the old ash
tree and we explored that casystem together with our camera assistant,
Rich Savage, to make sure that we were all going
to be comfortable underground, to learn to move underground, to
learn to move as a team underground. And then he
slowly started introducing a little bit more kit and a
bit more ambition, to the point where actually, you know,
(08:47):
we were often taking fourteen places of kit and these
places because it's dark and you've got to light it somehow.
So yeah, that's how it's all sort of grew.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
Just the logistics of that alone, lest of ben so tough.
I mean, did you have to wear special outfit, special shoes,
or you're that's slipping around down there, Like what do
you have to do to prepare for that.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
So the film is sort of set in three principle
underground environments. We've got a cave system, We've got a
storm drain that actually laters sort of becomes an abandoned mine.
And we also have this Fidogs laboratory which is set
too kilometers beneath the surface of Ontario in Canada. So
there are three very different environments that required certainly different outfits,
(09:32):
different logistical approaches. In the cave systems absolutely how you're
wearing your sort of kitted up, and there was some
sort of vertical descents as well, so you're in harness
and all sorts of considerations that are incredible. Production team,
at least Lauren Greenwood, had to sort of constantly think about,
you know, how to keep people safe. It's one thing,
(09:52):
relatively easy thing to get people into a cave. It's
a much hard thing to get them out, to get
them out. With the footage, we did feel often that
our journey as a team and the crew sort of
mirrored themetic journey that we were trying to tell the
story of, which is to descend into the underworld and
then to surface with treasure right, and that treasure in
(10:14):
our case was a set of images that would allow
us and sounds that would allow us to make and
tell a story. It was often the getting out that
was the more sort of challenging stuff in those instances.
The odd sort of flip side to that is that
the deepest place that we went was actually the one
that had the most human presence in the most infrastructure.
(10:37):
You go two kilometers down this vertical mind shaft through
some incredibly dusty tunnels which are full of a money nickel,
They're so full of all this very fine rock dust,
and then you walk into what is one of technically speaking,
the keenest places in the world. Then emits the equivalent
(10:57):
of a teaspoons worth of dust to pass through these
lapdoors over the course of an entire year. So you
then spend two to three hours sanitizing all your equipment,
cleaning every cooling fin of every bit of the camera
with swaps in order to protect the experiments that they're
(11:18):
running down there, experiments that might, you know, one day
solve the mysteries of the universe. So yeah, we had
to operate in a number of different environments and they
all require different approaches.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
How many people are you dealing with when you go
down in these environments? Is it like you cameraman, sound
person DP as well yourself? So how many, five, six,
ten Our.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Underground team would sort of drink and expand depending on
what sort of environment we were entering. When we were
following the incredible Ahaw speleological group in Mexico, that's Fatima
and her team of archaeologists, you know, they had a
lot of support as well, and we had a lot
of surface support to we had to come up with
(12:01):
this incredibly convigated way of getting batteries back to the
surface for charging. You know, we're in the middle of
the jungle as well, so you know the sort of
logistics like that, and we needed a team to be
able to do the run from where we were deep
in the cave to take these dresses batteries out and
bring down the charged once in that So in those cases,
you know, you sort of look around and go, wow,
(12:21):
there's a twenty people with us. But in other cases,
like when we were exploring the storm drains that run
under the beneath the casinos in Las Vegas with Bradley Garrett,
the of Anick storer and writer roughly it's a brilliant mind,
brilliant person. We chest the team to as small as possible,
so we had myself, our dpe Rubin, William Deschamp, who
(12:44):
was also operating the camera as well as Rich Savage,
was our focused product and the sound recordist. So there
was four of us to us Bradley, that was about
as small as we could get it down to.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
Obviously, I don't imagine you have any problems with claustrophobia.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
No, and that was a precondition I think for being
able to work on the film. But that you know,
that said, there were moments, and there were moments on
some reki expeditions actually that were some of the trikets.
You know, there were some really difficult ones. Brended mine
got into difficulty when we were on an expedition together.
And it seems can go from fun to not fun
(13:22):
very very quickly, you know, in a matter of seconds,
and it becomes it turns from a reki into a
sort of extraction mission and then that takes. Yeah, those
sort of things take.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
The tot just feels like, what's the most difficult documentary
I can make? This one sounds like it's pretty close
to it.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
It's true. For those who know Rob McFarland's book on
which the film is based, there's there's a brilliant which
act is brilliant, But early on he talks about why
we why there exists as sort of punctural abhorrence for depth,
Why is it we aspire to hide? You know, even
says how that's reflected in language. You know, to be
(14:02):
elevated or lifted up is preferable to being depressed. You know,
there's a sort of gravity to the language of sadness
or of Greece. We associate the underworld with all these
sort of terrible things, and I think part of it
is to do with how difficult and effortful it is
to go into the underworld. You can sink two feet
(14:24):
below the surface and already your your lines of sight
has stolen your as web says, your breath is squeezed
from long society, that stolen from eyes, and so yeah,
it was insanely difficult, and that became that sort of
slowly started to dawn on us. Rapidly actually dawned on
as it's very dark, it's very in most of these places,
(14:45):
which draws up interesting creative questions. You know, we have
to deal with the question of, well, okay, we're not
going to have a film that's disbaby minutes of a
live screen, so what is the light then like? Because
there has to be one, so we have to sort
of ask questions about, well, dramatically speaking, what is the
light source? Things like that. Other strange things sort of
(15:07):
started to happen. We'd put quite a lot of time
into rigging vertical descents, but shots that would go down
into the abyss, because we're already that feeling of being
pult down. But then we get to the surface and
realize it doesn't look like you're going down at all
because you have no special reference. You need falling water
in order to know which direction is are. So over
(15:29):
a period of time, we learned all these lessons about
things that translated to the screen and things that didn't,
and things that we hadn't thought about until we really
started going into some of these places.
Speaker 5 (15:40):
That's like, you had to learn a lot while you
were actually making this film on the go.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
That's right, it's learned a lot, but also unlearned things
that only seem to apply on the surface, and relearn
things that may not even be directly related to the image,
but are related to keeping yourselves safe, such as in
the storm train. Bradley was like, look, you've always got
to know which way the water would flow. You have
(16:06):
to know whether we're walking uphill or downhill, because if
there is a rainstorm and we do get caught in
a flood, we need to know and be pretty sure
that we're going to be flushed out, not flushed in
things like that. You know, it's like you've got to
learn all this new stuff, so quite a journey.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Once you capture all of this footage. What's your post
production process like?
Speaker 3 (16:30):
The editing process on the film was, as you can
probably imagine, it was long. It was a winding path.
It involved a lot of patients from a lot of people.
I was very fortunate that the producers Lauren and Jess
and I should mention Darren and Harry from Provozoa who
were equally patient and bring in a holding a space
(16:51):
that was really like a It was a play space,
and it was one way we were sort of safe
to run lots of experiments, to fail and to better.
It took a long time. The process of editing really
was one of mapping. I would say, you know, I
was very clear from the beginning of the process that
after the title in the film, I wanted the camera
(17:13):
to stay underground, and I wanted us to go deeper
with all the protagonists. Yeah, so I wanted to break
these journeys and I wanted us to feel like we
were constantly moving down with them. I drew this sketch
right at the beginning, which was a bit like a vortex.
I wanted to seem to feel like a vortex to
the point where we sort of come to this understanding, right.
(17:35):
You know, each braid might start in its own reflective
irrespective field archaeology, theoretical physics, urban exploration, but really they
sort of all reached the same conclusion. So the question was,
it's not like we have another film that we can
sort of point out and go call that to our model.
So you know, it did take over a year of
putting things together as something spelled by the wayside, sadly,
(17:58):
as they do in the courvering room. We worked with
the most incredible editor, David Hill, who really understood not
just each journey, but understood the mythic arp, the vortex
structure within which we wanted them all to sit. So
the short answer is lots of experimentation, lots of patients
(18:18):
for which I'm very grateful for.
Speaker 5 (18:21):
Yeah, they have that space to explore the space of
the film as well as the space of the underground.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
It has to be crucial for you exactly there. Yeah,
it was.
Speaker 5 (18:31):
The sound mix and the music just really add to everything,
especially just that the isolation. But yet you know, the
music is kind of our companion at times. I appreciated
that as well.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Thank you saying yeah right from the you know, when
we wrote the treatment for this film, I had said,
this is as much a journey into sound as it
is into image, because especially in that sort of first
third where you're plumb into this strange world and actually
(19:03):
what happens physically, I was very interested in the biophysical
sort of response, what the body, what the body does,
what happens to the senses when you go underground. We
wanted this to be a sensory film. Well, your ears compensate,
your hearing is heightened, and that was something that Supervising
sounded at a Yarkam sort of strong, really understood and
(19:23):
dived into. But to work with Hannah Peal on the
score was such a joyous thing. Hannah is unparalleled, unmatched
talent really and so generative. You know, she's so good
at just coming up with ideas, at getting a scene,
coming up with ideas the scene changes, because you can imagine,
things changed a lot. Hannah stayed with this process for
(19:46):
the four years that it took to make the film,
which is which is quite unusual for a directed composer collaboration.
You would usually sort of partner with the composer a
little later when once the pictures settled you've hit picture
a lot. But Hannah was invested in this right from
the beginning. Should make stems. Sh'd come up with ideas,
Joachima and I would work on those together, and David
(20:07):
and I would work on them together, would go back
to Hannah Rick. That's just a constant game of things evolving.
And Hannah also brought together the most incredible group of
musicians and we recorded the score live and that was
one of my favorite days during the whole process where
we were able to you know, there a song sheets
(20:27):
that said Underland score and come in just this some
of the world's most incredible musicians would then just bring
it to life and yeah, I haven't heard a day
like that for a while. It's incredible.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
What was it like findly singer with an audience.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Yeah, it was quite a thing of an audience because
you before we permitted at Tebecca, not many people had
seen the film. You know, you do a few screening
to sort of press in industry and people within like
within the team and so the extended team to sort
of get notes from people, but it really is it
was its first outing, and people was sort of I remember,
(21:04):
you know, there's a constriction point in the film about
halfway through whether strands tightened the physical sort of space
around the people in the film Titans, And I'd always
wandered that I'd wanted an audience to sort of feel that,
and I was sitting in the room that people seem
to be making me recognises. So it was a great
joy for us all to sit there and feel like, yeah,
you know, it's a it's a film and one that
(21:27):
we emerged with from the Jaws of the underworld sort
of thing.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
Is there a good place for people to keep up
on the film and with you so they know where
it's playing.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I would say Sandbox website, Sandbox on Instagram. They are
Sandbox films are excellent at posting all the news. It's
going to be at DC Docs on Friday thirteenth, before
it's last two screenings at Tribecca this coming weekend, and
then who knows where next, but hopefully we'll get a
(21:57):
European premere and then I would like to be used
about where it might be durable, where people can see
it more widely.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
I can't imagine seeing this on the big screen. It's
got to be such a treat.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Oh, I hope you get too goods. Yeah, bigger the
better at it. Yeah, I mean we shot it. We
shot it so cinema, Rubens dies so cinematic. You know,
we've mixed in in five to one and may who
noticed one day to be able to release an autos
as well. I sorry, we mixed the atmos. We've delivered
in five to one. But you know, we've designed this
and made this to be seen and experienced in the
(22:30):
most igmssive way that it can be, and I hope
people do get to see it in the cinema in
the first instance.
Speaker 5 (22:35):
Yeah, mister Pettittt, thank you so much for your time.
It was great talking with.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
You, absolutely pleasure you two. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Back not run down.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
There's a thing dot down the place for those over
caving on unknockground, the ro life, the awake.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
To the rest of the world's.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Asleep, belong the nine shafts people, Bill lost one for
the carving on Bundock Down all the roots think.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Swing from tone to tone on the taner Ron, down.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
On your boots, all the trucks, and you be on
the con fis.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Those so felt talking done under con
Oh ye is bot, it's show time. People say good
money to see this movie.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
When they go out to a theater, they are cold sodas,
hot popcorn, and no monsters. In the Protection Booth, everyone
pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Don it off.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Time It flows differently in the Underland. Down here, there
are no minutes or hours, only epochs and AONs. Some
called this deep time, the dizzy expands of the Earth's
(01:05):
history that stretches away from the present. But for those
who descend, deep time is also another way of seeing,
(01:31):
one in which things that seemed inert come alive. Stone flows,
the earth has tides, and eyes breeze.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I am
talking with Rob Pettitt all about his new film Underland.
This film recently played at the Tribeca Film Festival, and
we'll be playing some other fests as we go along.
Definitely keep an eye out for it. It is pretty amazing.
I think you will really get a kick out of it.
(02:20):
I know that I did. Thanks so much for listening,
and I hope you enjoyed the interview. Can you tell
me a little bit of your background as far as
how you got into filmmaking.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
So, my dad's a filmmaker. So I always grew up
with all sorts of strange cameras and bits of technology
lying around the house from the age of about twelve,
where I used to turn off family holidays into the
sort of nightmare sort of kupbreak style shoots I give
people there of gone holiday, but I him will learn
(02:49):
lines and get up at seven in the morning, and
would you'd have made a mystery. I didn't understand what
editing was. I didn't know you could edit films. I
thought everything was shot in sequence. Remember I remember doing
you know, we do it line by line, shot by shot,
which is sort of quite a pure way of making
a film, I think. But anyway, just sort of stayed
(03:10):
in that world and have always been interested in technology
as well, and how cameras have changed to So a
few years ago I was given a drone actually by
my uncle, my uncle Husta Linpa Well to this place
in the Poconos, and remember thinking, oh, this is an
(03:30):
interesting sort of way of seeing the earth. No one's
ever really sort of we haven't explored that strata of
airspace because it's sort of too low for helicopters, and
two highs of the sort of human case and made
us quite an experimental film called Upstream that follows the
course of a river all the way to its source
in a roundabout way. That's sort of what led to Underland.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
He decided to go below instead of above, well, yeah,
to what to sort of follow the river from there?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yeah, from the platter on the Cagaron platter above high
up in the Keangoon Mountains all the way down. I
mean it led our stream lego collaboration with Robert McFarland
and the writer of Bunderland, which is which is how
it sort of led, and his sort of literally career
it's been one of one of sort of deep mapping,
you know. He started at the summits of the mountains
(04:18):
and he's followed following things down down, down into the
into the nether. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
How did you meet mister McFarland.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Robert McFarland and I, Yeah, we started. I made a
little short film about him. Actually, it's for Granted magazine.
We met years and years ago and we sort of
stayed in touch. And when I was given this drone
and came back with this sort of strange footage from
the mountains. I remember thinking, oh, yeah, this is a
landscape that Rob McFarland has written a lot about me
(04:49):
and walked in a lot and it was last game
by associated with his work. So I sort of sent
him a video postcard of that expedition and he wrote
something for it, wrote some beautiful narration for and that
became a project called up Stream, which is also a
collaboration with the composer Houster Vocal Bottleman, and he had
around that time also just written Underland. And I remember
(05:14):
first reading Underland while I was here in the Bocalones
in Pennsylvania, and I sat on the end of the
Jeffy bike on Lake Proconal, and I remember being gripped
by the first line, which is the way into the
underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.
And that ash tree was one. It's one that's real,
and it's one that I found. It grows from a
(05:34):
gentle hollow in the field in England, and it does
indeed had a split in the trunk, and that split
leads into a thirty three thousand foot long case system
and you crawled through the split in the trunk of
this tree and into another world really, and that case
system became a sort of portal for many of us
(05:55):
on the team into all these other worlds and all
these incredible places that that are explored by incredible people.
And the film sort of grew from that.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
To see this world that we would never normally see
as such an eye opening experience. I mean it reminds
me a little bit of the Herzog Cave documentary, but
in such a different way. How is that experience for
you going inside of these caves and experiencing them and
especially having to I mean, how big of a crew
did you have to work with?
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Well, we had an incredible team, utterly incredible. It's funny
you mentioned Van because one of our EPs, Andre Singer,
has produced I think it's how seventeen of Furness Films
and don It's also sort of sits on the board
with Sandbox as well or other production companies. So I
certainly felt the sort of presence of Werner and throughout
(06:47):
the film, and of course he's one of my sort
of cinematic heroes. And I remember when I try saw
FITZGERALDO and actually for us saw the making of FITZGERALDO
the documentary about it called Burton's Dreams. I remember thinking,
or there is something about the idea of taking the
camera into difficult places, taking the camera into environments that
are very indifferent to your desires his filmmakers, that feels
(07:10):
it feels sometimes like a sort of madness, but also
sometimes you know, it's it's one that's quite hard to resist.
It's a it's a pull that is quite hard to resist.
And that is essentially the central question of the film.
Why do we seek the void?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
You know?
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Why do we get into this pool, this strange song
that calls us downward? So in terms of recruiting a team,
I had to find people who also have that, saying
Paul or rather weren't so put off by the idea
of squeezing through narrow and wet caves that that they
would they wouldn't take a gig. I mean, we have
(07:44):
the most incredible production team, As I've said, it started
with Spring, which is run by Andre Singer, and with
Planet Optedless as well. So we had Lauren Greenwood are
absolutely brilliant and interpret producer, and Sandbox as well. You
just sort of got it right from the beginning, and
did they let us very slowly build the team and
(08:06):
find the right people and the right collaborators. And I
remember when i'd first had our when I had my
first conversation with Rubin woodin Deshomp, a cinematographer. I remember thinking,
this is the guy, you know, I mean, his his work,
his eye, his craft is I think just unsurpassed. And
so we were headed to the ash tree before we
(08:26):
picked up a camera. We headed to the old ash
tree and we explored that casystem together with our camera assistant,
Rich Savage, to make sure that we were all going
to be comfortable underground, to learn to move underground, to
learn to move as a team underground. And then he
slowly started introducing a little bit more kit and a
bit more ambition, to the point where actually, you know,
(08:47):
we were often taking fourteen places of kit and these
places because it's dark and you've got to light it somehow.
So yeah, that's how it's all sort of grew.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
Just the logistics of that alone, lest of ben so tough.
I mean, did you have to wear special outfit, special shoes,
or you're that's slipping around down there, Like what do
you have to do to prepare for that.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
So the film is sort of set in three principle
underground environments. We've got a cave system, We've got a
storm drain that actually laters sort of becomes an abandoned mine.
And we also have this Fidogs laboratory which is set
too kilometers beneath the surface of Ontario in Canada. So
there are three very different environments that required certainly different outfits,
(09:32):
different logistical approaches. In the cave systems absolutely how you're
wearing your sort of kitted up, and there was some
sort of vertical descents as well, so you're in harness
and all sorts of considerations that are incredible. Production team,
at least Lauren Greenwood, had to sort of constantly think about,
you know, how to keep people safe. It's one thing,
(09:52):
relatively easy thing to get people into a cave. It's
a much hard thing to get them out, to get
them out. With the footage, we did feel often that
our journey as a team and the crew sort of
mirrored themetic journey that we were trying to tell the
story of, which is to descend into the underworld and
then to surface with treasure right, and that treasure in
(10:14):
our case was a set of images that would allow
us and sounds that would allow us to make and
tell a story. It was often the getting out that
was the more sort of challenging stuff in those instances.
The odd sort of flip side to that is that
the deepest place that we went was actually the one
that had the most human presence in the most infrastructure.
(10:37):
You go two kilometers down this vertical mind shaft through
some incredibly dusty tunnels which are full of a money nickel,
They're so full of all this very fine rock dust,
and then you walk into what is one of technically speaking,
the keenest places in the world. Then emits the equivalent
(10:57):
of a teaspoons worth of dust to pass through these
lapdoors over the course of an entire year. So you
then spend two to three hours sanitizing all your equipment,
cleaning every cooling fin of every bit of the camera
with swaps in order to protect the experiments that they're
(11:18):
running down there, experiments that might, you know, one day
solve the mysteries of the universe. So yeah, we had
to operate in a number of different environments and they
all require different approaches.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
How many people are you dealing with when you go
down in these environments? Is it like you cameraman, sound
person DP as well yourself? So how many, five, six,
ten Our.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Underground team would sort of drink and expand depending on
what sort of environment we were entering. When we were
following the incredible Ahaw speleological group in Mexico, that's Fatima
and her team of archaeologists, you know, they had a
lot of support as well, and we had a lot
of surface support to we had to come up with
(12:01):
this incredibly convigated way of getting batteries back to the
surface for charging. You know, we're in the middle of
the jungle as well, so you know the sort of
logistics like that, and we needed a team to be
able to do the run from where we were deep
in the cave to take these dresses batteries out and
bring down the charged once in that So in those cases,
you know, you sort of look around and go, wow,
(12:21):
there's a twenty people with us. But in other cases,
like when we were exploring the storm drains that run
under the beneath the casinos in Las Vegas with Bradley Garrett,
the of Anick storer and writer roughly it's a brilliant mind,
brilliant person. We chest the team to as small as possible,
so we had myself, our dpe Rubin, William Deschamp, who
(12:44):
was also operating the camera as well as Rich Savage,
was our focused product and the sound recordist. So there
was four of us to us Bradley, that was about
as small as we could get it down to.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
Obviously, I don't imagine you have any problems with claustrophobia.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
No, and that was a precondition I think for being
able to work on the film. But that you know,
that said, there were moments, and there were moments on
some reki expeditions actually that were some of the trikets.
You know, there were some really difficult ones. Brended mine
got into difficulty when we were on an expedition together.
And it seems can go from fun to not fun
(13:22):
very very quickly, you know, in a matter of seconds,
and it becomes it turns from a reki into a
sort of extraction mission and then that takes. Yeah, those
sort of things take.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
The tot just feels like, what's the most difficult documentary
I can make? This one sounds like it's pretty close
to it.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
It's true. For those who know Rob McFarland's book on
which the film is based, there's there's a brilliant which
act is brilliant, But early on he talks about why
we why there exists as sort of punctural abhorrence for depth,
Why is it we aspire to hide? You know, even
says how that's reflected in language. You know, to be
(14:02):
elevated or lifted up is preferable to being depressed. You know,
there's a sort of gravity to the language of sadness
or of Greece. We associate the underworld with all these
sort of terrible things, and I think part of it
is to do with how difficult and effortful it is
to go into the underworld. You can sink two feet
(14:24):
below the surface and already your your lines of sight
has stolen your as web says, your breath is squeezed
from long society, that stolen from eyes, and so yeah,
it was insanely difficult, and that became that sort of
slowly started to dawn on us. Rapidly actually dawned on
as it's very dark, it's very in most of these places,
(14:45):
which draws up interesting creative questions. You know, we have
to deal with the question of, well, okay, we're not
going to have a film that's disbaby minutes of a
live screen, so what is the light then like? Because
there has to be one, so we have to sort
of ask questions about, well, dramatically speaking, what is the
light source? Things like that. Other strange things sort of
(15:07):
started to happen. We'd put quite a lot of time
into rigging vertical descents, but shots that would go down
into the abyss, because we're already that feeling of being
pult down. But then we get to the surface and
realize it doesn't look like you're going down at all
because you have no special reference. You need falling water
in order to know which direction is are. So over
(15:29):
a period of time, we learned all these lessons about
things that translated to the screen and things that didn't,
and things that we hadn't thought about until we really
started going into some of these places.
Speaker 5 (15:40):
That's like, you had to learn a lot while you
were actually making this film on the go.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
That's right, it's learned a lot, but also unlearned things
that only seem to apply on the surface, and relearn
things that may not even be directly related to the image,
but are related to keeping yourselves safe, such as in
the storm train. Bradley was like, look, you've always got
to know which way the water would flow. You have
(16:06):
to know whether we're walking uphill or downhill, because if
there is a rainstorm and we do get caught in
a flood, we need to know and be pretty sure
that we're going to be flushed out, not flushed in
things like that. You know, it's like you've got to
learn all this new stuff, so quite a journey.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Once you capture all of this footage. What's your post
production process like?
Speaker 3 (16:30):
The editing process on the film was, as you can
probably imagine, it was long. It was a winding path.
It involved a lot of patients from a lot of people.
I was very fortunate that the producers Lauren and Jess
and I should mention Darren and Harry from Provozoa who
were equally patient and bring in a holding a space
(16:51):
that was really like a It was a play space,
and it was one way we were sort of safe
to run lots of experiments, to fail and to better.
It took a long time. The process of editing really
was one of mapping. I would say, you know, I
was very clear from the beginning of the process that
after the title in the film, I wanted the camera
(17:13):
to stay underground, and I wanted us to go deeper
with all the protagonists. Yeah, so I wanted to break
these journeys and I wanted us to feel like we
were constantly moving down with them. I drew this sketch
right at the beginning, which was a bit like a vortex.
I wanted to seem to feel like a vortex to
the point where we sort of come to this understanding, right.
(17:35):
You know, each braid might start in its own reflective
irrespective field archaeology, theoretical physics, urban exploration, but really they
sort of all reached the same conclusion. So the question was,
it's not like we have another film that we can
sort of point out and go call that to our model.
So you know, it did take over a year of
putting things together as something spelled by the wayside, sadly,
(17:58):
as they do in the courvering room. We worked with
the most incredible editor, David Hill, who really understood not
just each journey, but understood the mythic arp, the vortex
structure within which we wanted them all to sit. So
the short answer is lots of experimentation, lots of patients
(18:18):
for which I'm very grateful for.
Speaker 5 (18:21):
Yeah, they have that space to explore the space of
the film as well as the space of the underground.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
It has to be crucial for you exactly there. Yeah,
it was.
Speaker 5 (18:31):
The sound mix and the music just really add to everything,
especially just that the isolation. But yet you know, the
music is kind of our companion at times. I appreciated
that as well.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Thank you saying yeah right from the you know, when
we wrote the treatment for this film, I had said,
this is as much a journey into sound as it
is into image, because especially in that sort of first
third where you're plumb into this strange world and actually
(19:03):
what happens physically, I was very interested in the biophysical
sort of response, what the body, what the body does,
what happens to the senses when you go underground. We
wanted this to be a sensory film. Well, your ears compensate,
your hearing is heightened, and that was something that Supervising
sounded at a Yarkam sort of strong, really understood and
(19:23):
dived into. But to work with Hannah Peal on the
score was such a joyous thing. Hannah is unparalleled, unmatched
talent really and so generative. You know, she's so good
at just coming up with ideas, at getting a scene,
coming up with ideas the scene changes, because you can imagine,
things changed a lot. Hannah stayed with this process for
(19:46):
the four years that it took to make the film,
which is which is quite unusual for a directed composer collaboration.
You would usually sort of partner with the composer a
little later when once the pictures settled you've hit picture
a lot. But Hannah was invested in this right from
the beginning. Should make stems. Sh'd come up with ideas,
Joachima and I would work on those together, and David
(20:07):
and I would work on them together, would go back
to Hannah Rick. That's just a constant game of things evolving.
And Hannah also brought together the most incredible group of
musicians and we recorded the score live and that was
one of my favorite days during the whole process where
we were able to you know, there a song sheets
(20:27):
that said Underland score and come in just this some
of the world's most incredible musicians would then just bring
it to life and yeah, I haven't heard a day
like that for a while. It's incredible.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
What was it like findly singer with an audience.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
Yeah, it was quite a thing of an audience because
you before we permitted at Tebecca, not many people had
seen the film. You know, you do a few screening
to sort of press in industry and people within like
within the team and so the extended team to sort
of get notes from people, but it really is it
was its first outing, and people was sort of I remember,
(21:04):
you know, there's a constriction point in the film about
halfway through whether strands tightened the physical sort of space
around the people in the film Titans, And I'd always
wandered that I'd wanted an audience to sort of feel that,
and I was sitting in the room that people seem
to be making me recognises. So it was a great
joy for us all to sit there and feel like, yeah,
you know, it's a it's a film and one that
(21:27):
we emerged with from the Jaws of the underworld sort
of thing.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
Is there a good place for people to keep up
on the film and with you so they know where
it's playing.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I would say Sandbox website, Sandbox on Instagram. They are
Sandbox films are excellent at posting all the news. It's
going to be at DC Docs on Friday thirteenth, before
it's last two screenings at Tribecca this coming weekend, and
then who knows where next, but hopefully we'll get a
(21:57):
European premere and then I would like to be used
about where it might be durable, where people can see
it more widely.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
I can't imagine seeing this on the big screen. It's
got to be such a treat.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Oh, I hope you get too goods. Yeah, bigger the
better at it. Yeah, I mean we shot it. We
shot it so cinema, Rubens dies so cinematic. You know,
we've mixed in in five to one and may who
noticed one day to be able to release an autos
as well. I sorry, we mixed the atmos. We've delivered
in five to one. But you know, we've designed this
and made this to be seen and experienced in the
(22:30):
most igmssive way that it can be, and I hope
people do get to see it in the cinema in
the first instance.
Speaker 5 (22:35):
Yeah, mister Pettittt, thank you so much for your time.
It was great talking with.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
You, absolutely pleasure you two. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Back not run down.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
There's a thing dot down the place for those over
caving on unknockground, the ro life, the awake.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
To the rest of the world's.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Asleep, belong the nine shafts people, Bill lost one for
the carving on Bundock Down all the roots think.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Swing from tone to tone on the taner Ron, down.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
On your boots, all the trucks, and you be on
the con fis.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Those so felt talking done under con
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