A few months ago, Jason Rekulak asked me if I’d be interested in making a video trailer for a top-secret Quirk project—a project so cloaked in mystery that, should I have accidentally leaked its title, I’m quite certain a squad of ninja assassins would’ve paid me a deadly visit in the night. It was, as you all surely know now, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and once it dawned on me that I was being asked to make a movie featuring both period costumes and severed limbs, I could only say yes. Now that it’s all out in the open and happily making its viral way across the intertubes, Quirk asked me if I wouldn’t mind sharing a few behind-the-scenes tales about the making of the Sea Monsters trailer.
The first challenge was finding a body of water that looked suitably English. Since I live in Los Angeles and it’s currently the height of summer, the landscapes I had access to were golden-brown, the skies perpetually blue and sunny and the bodies of water generally filled with tanned people frolicking with the aid of high-powered watercraft. None of which seemed very Regency-era English. After much searching, my producer Seth and I found Zaca Lake, a secluded little spot up in the Santa Barbara wine country (think Sideways), miles from anywhere and cute as a button. The lake was small, beautiful and surrounded by sort-of-green mountains—good enough for government work. And when we found out that both Creature from the Black Lagoon and Friday the 13th Part III had been shot there (this wasn’t just a lake; it was Crystal Lake!), we were sold.
The cast consisted of Michelle Page, who’s from Texas but can fake a British accent, and who I’d worked with before, and my friend Martin, one of the only Brits I know in LA, who also just happens to be dashingly handsome. He’s a filmmaker too, but I’m always using him as an actor for his English accent. (He voiced Welshman Dylan Thomas in this short.) Our very talented costumer, Sarah Register, just happened to work at a costume house specializing in period clothes, so we were set in that regard, and my pal Jon Gutman, a very talented 3D animator, had a week to spare between his old job at an FX house and his new job working at Dreamworks Animation—just enough time to create some menacing-looking tentacles. So we were, as they say, ready to roll.
Did I mention that Zaca Lake is remote? It’s not just two and a half hours from my house in LA, it’s a half-hour from the nearest gas station, and twenty minutes over rutted dirt roads from the nearest cell phone signal. (It’s also about twenty minutes as the crow flies from Neverland Ranch, for all you Michael Jackson fans out there.) When you’re getting away from it all, which most people who go to Zaca Lake and stay in its cabins and swim in its spring-fed mineral waters are there to do, remoteness is the whole point. But when you’re making a film and you need to constantly be on the phone and sending emails and receiving text messages, it’s kind of a problem. Because we wanted to get an early start on our single shoot day, the cast and crew came down the night before, and we stayed in a big, barn-like cabin, and all slept in one room. (We like it cozy.) But thanks to the combination-locked cow gate, six-mile winding pitch black road, and three shallow ravines you have to go through to get to the lake from the main road, plus the lack of cell service, a number of our crew never made it to the location. So we spent the night worrying that they had been eaten by bears, and started our shoot the next morning with what was truly a skeleton crew. (They didn’t get eaten by bears; they just went home, dejected.)
I wish we had taken some behind-the-scenes photos during the shoot, but we were too busy taking in-front-of-the-scenes photos (24 per second, to be exact, har-de-har). We shot from sunup to sundown, battling intense wind, screamingly loud birds and bugs that kept flying into the actors’ mouths. (We actually had to digitally remove a fly from one of the shots—it goes right into Willoughby’s mouth while he’s talking, and he keeps on acting! What a trooper.) We put the actors (and their costumes) through the paces, dragging them through the dirt and tossing them into the lake several times—and it wasn’t until the actors, the cinematographer, a PA, and myself had been in the lake for a half-hour or so that we realized there was something else in the water with us—leeches. Not Stand by Me-sized leeches, as big as your thumb, but little teeny guys that look like specks of dirt, until you try and flick them off and they start wriggling around in protest. I only got leeches on my feet and ankles; I was lucky. Somebody (not Michelle—I won’t say who) got leeches all the way up, if you know what I mean, and reportedly had to burn their underwear after the shoot. (On second thought, they might’ve just thrown the underwear away, but I prefer the dramatic image of flaming underwear.)
And yes, as many an eagle-eyed YouTuber has pointed out, the chick’s dress is wet before she goes in the water in that last shot, ROFL!
—Ransom Riggs
August 20th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Ahhh! More in depth details of what you actually get up to….