Director of this year's deep sea thriller Underwater, William Eubank recently sat down with the folks at Bloody-Disgusting to discuss some of the lesser known facts about the film and ironically, he divulged that Underwater was not actually written to be a Cthulhu movie originally, despite the Lovecraftian monster's inclusion during the film's climactic ending. Read on for excerpts from their interview as well as some amazing concept art!
Brian Duffield wrote this terrific, scary film, but it wasn’t Cthulhu. It was just called a Behemoth. And I was in post for two years, basically. And during that time, when [we] actually started designing and creating what this Behemoth was gonna look like, I just knew at that point the movie was more mystical; in the way we shot it, in the way there were so many unanswered questions.
[IT director] Andy Muschietti had come down and seen some of my early monster stuff, which was a little more squid-like. And he was like, ‘I don’t think that’s scary enough.’ And Chernin [Entertainment] was telling me [the same thing]. And so then I was like, alright, well… I’ll make him something that’s pretty scary,” Eubank recalls, laughing. “We didn’t have much money to do big redesigns or anything like that, but fortunately since it was early in the process we were able to tweak the design that we were doing. And obviously you see the Clingers a lot more. And fortunately because we were working on the movie in order, we were able to shift the designs towards a darker, more Lovecraftian thing. When I started submitting designs for the Behemoth at the end, I was basically just telling the artists, ‘Alright, let’s make the Old One. Let’s get the boss of all bosses.’ It all worked. It’s so perfect.
During the interview, William also explains that Disney were on board with the project from day 1 which was a relief given that Disney had acquired Fox while Underwater was still in pre-production.
You can read the full interview over on Bloody-Disgusting here and you can pick up your own copy of Underwater NOW on Digital HD and Blu-Ray!
