“Whalefall” director Brian Duffield is well aware that, in most cases, the main character getting swallowed by an animal would be a bit of a buzzkill.
“It would typically feel like the end of a movie,” Duffield tells Variety, cracking a wide grin. “Like, ‘RIP Austin!'”
But the team at Disney’s 20th Century Studios felt “bullish” on using the intense first 15 minutes of the adventure thriller — about a scuba diver (Austin Abrams) who, while looking for his father’s (Josh Brolin) remains, is swallowed whole by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale — to tease what’s to come.
“Disney felt it’s such a crazy scene, and it happens so early in the movie, that they felt a little bullish on, ‘Yeah, let’s show them how our movie kicks off and let them wonder where we could go from there,'” Duffield says about the film’s official trailer, released on Tuesday.
“Even though we are going to be a very claustrophobic movie, we’re pretty big too!” Duffield says of the film, which debuts in theaters on Oct. 16. “We have a lot of spectacle, sometimes in surprising ways, and it just felt like we’ve never seen a movie that is set in a place where most of this movie is set.”
