Neil Marshall on The Descent
Neil Marshall, writer and director of The Descent, says that comparisons to his 2002 hit are inevitable: "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.
"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."

Making The Descent
Christian Colson, producer, The Descent
Christian Colson is the producer of The Descent, and the joint managing director of Celador Films, the producer and financier of the film. He says: "Raising the money was pretty easy in as much we didn't have to go and persuade a third party. It was really just a question of persuading ourselves that we wanted to go with it, so that was a very straightforward process.
"Development was also relatively straightforward. Neil came in and pitched the idea to me about two and a half years ago. I really wanted to work with him and I really liked the basic story idea. And we've worked through draft by draft over the last two and a half years. We went through 10, maybe 15 drafts, getting it to the point where we decided it was good enough to make, but every draft got better and better. The interesting thing about this project is that some things haven't changed at all since the first draft.
"Neil is an incredibly visual writer so some of the basic physical action and fight scenes have been as drafted since day one. The script is relentlessly linear in so far as we never revisit anything; it just keeps moving straight forward, and the environment through which the characters move has stayed pretty much the same since the first draft. They moved through exactly the same physical spaces then as they do now in the film, and certainly some of the set pieces with the crawlers are as drafted originally. But we did some work on characters and the back-story. So the whole notion that Juno had betrayed Sarah with Paul was a fairly late development, probably draft nine or ten."
On working with Marshall, Colson says: "Working with Neil has been a real pleasure. I was an admirer of Dog Soldiers so he's somebody I wanted to work with. He's incredibly passionate about what he does and it's been great to work with somebody who you basically trust, who knows what they're doing, and who is as committed to the process as he is. He's very stubborn sometimes, and we've had a few clashes, but that is as it should be I think, and he's won most of them, which is also as it should be.
"He's incredibly laid back on set. There's a very calm atmosphere, and he's very collaborative. He knows what he wants but is confident enough in his abilities to take the best of everybody's contributions. He works very closely with Sam McCurdy, his DoP, and that's a very dynamic relationship that has yielded some great results, and the same applies to Simon Bowles, the production designer. Neil is also wonderful with the actresses in as much as he allows them the space to have input into their characters, and appropriate them to a degree. So he's fully in control without being a control freak."

Simon Bowles, production designer
Production designer Simon Bowles, who also worked on Marshall's Dog Soldiers, was responsible for creating the look and feel of The Descent. He says: "My job is to create a sense of character and location in the scenery. This was a great one to do, because designing caves, there's so much texture and so much you can do to dress them and give them character, using stalactites, or slime, or dust, for example.
"The inspiration for the design really came from the script. Neil produced a beautiful script that was laid out so wonderfully it gave a character for each of the locations on the way through the film. Neil and I batted scripts back and forward, emailing each other reference photographs to develop the look even before we went into pre-production. Neil's got a great eye and he's very visually creative. It was very easy to see the flow of the spaces with the caves, from large, huge spaces, going down to tiny little ones.
"To research this film we went caving to various locations in the UK, to try and get stuck in the tiny small spaces and be in awe of the huge spaces, as well as lots of research on the Internet, and through books and talking to people."
Comparing his experiences on The Descent to his earlier work with Marshall, Bowles says: "On Dog Soldiers it was a completely different situation. We had a lot of interiors and exteriors of houses. Nice flat walls. It was nice and easy. On this movie we've got the complete opposite because we're designing caves - big, small, twisted, flat, wet, dry, dusty, lots of different situations, and we wanted to get a huge scale, and give it a multi-million pound feel, which hopefully we've achieved."
The caves were constructed using an innovative new resin. Bowles says, "We built the caves from a kind of spray resin foam that a company based in the UK had recently developed. It forms a foam structures that is carve-able and shape-able, and is waterproof and fire resistant which is also really important. As a material, it's produced an amazing range of textures.
"We had a few different ways of creating the caves. Some of them were moulded, where we took moulds from real existing cliff faces. Other caves were more uneven with stalactites and calcium deposits. For that we used the same material, the same foam, we just used it in different ways. In the end, each set has got its own character."
Bowles and his team have had to think resourcefully to create the depth and breadth of different spaces required by the script: "Because we're restricted to space here at Pinewood Studios, and also in terms of budget, we've created a system where by we're revamping the sets to create new ones. So while we're only basically building six caves, we're changing their look through colour and texture, by adding stalactites maybe or making one of them wet, or very dry and dusty, to hopefully fool the audience into thinking that the cave system is much bigger than the sets we've actually built.
"We're also extending some of the sets using visual effects, such as matte paintings and miniatures, to make them feel larger than they really are.
"My favourite cave is the one where the girls first see a crawler. They climb up a big waterfall and come up into a chamber, covered in a carpet of bones. It's the largest set we've built here, and it just works really well. To create it we only had four days to revamp another set. I wanted it to be very wet, so it involved laying down a 50ft square tank and then applying these big stalactite structures and big columns that looked as if they're made of some sort of calcium deposit. Then we had 500 bones made, which we dressed in around the floor, as if they'd been washed up against the structures. It's got lots of different elements in it and they work together really well, it's really wonderful."

Leigh Took, visual effects supervisor
The biggest cave depicted in The Descent, in real terms, would be four times larger than the James Bond stage at Pinewood, so physically building all of the film's sets was never an option. Visual effects supervisor, Leigh Took, used a combination of techniques, both old and new school, to create the film's vast underground spaces.
Took says: "In the film we use matte painting and miniatures to create the bigger caves. Simon and Neil came up with some designs for the environment, and we took their initial drawings, made our own sketches and enlarged them. The main miniature is the cavernous entrance that the girls abseil down to enter the cave. It's about 12 ft and its main structure was sculpted from polystyrene, and then covered in various powders and paints to produce this impression of porous rock. We also painted parts of it with natural yoghurt to get cultures growing on it to look like mosses.
"The matte paintings form the background of the shots. They're essentially two-dimensional images created on a computer, which can be manipulated to create various effects, such as a flare flickering behind a rock.
"The actresses are shot against a green screen and we key out the green to composite them digitally against the background plate. Each one of the green screen shots is matched to a plate by taking measurements of all the angles of the camera. So, for example, for anything shot looking up, we take the appropriate angles and match them to the model and background. We use the storyboard to decide the number of shots we need.
"Creating a cave, we're dealing with an organic, natural thing, so there's nothing to give us a sense of scale apart from the things that occur naturally such as cracks in the rock or mosses.
"On the miniature of the cavernous entrance we created a waterfall by using a traditional technique of combining salt with talcum powder, and shooting it at 77 frames per second. The salt flows like water and the talc puffs up like water spray, so it gives a sense of the scale of the water, which is usually very hard to achieve."
Took adds: "We've also used the darkness of the setting to our advantage when creating the illusion of scale in this film, by letting shots go off into black, for example. "The end result is hopefully that the audience believe the illusion."

Paul Hyett, prosthetics supervisor
Prosthetics supervisor Paul Hyett was responsible for designing the special make up and creature effects on The Descent. Hyett says: "I wanted to work on this film because it was Neil and because of the script. It had loads of stuff in it that was up my street - the creatures, the gore, the heads being caved in.
"We're doing all the creatures, all the prosthetic violence to humans - all the girls get compound fractures, a head gets split open, a throat gets ripped out - all the dead animals - a giant elk, two goats, two sheep, two cows - and all the stunt weapons."
Marshall devised the original design for the crawlers, which Hyett then refined to work as a prosthetic. He says, "Neil gave me a Photoshop design and through a process of testing we came up with a slightly altered design that worked better. Neil's original design was amazing as an image but it didn't quite work as a prosthetic so we scaled it down. Originally it had huge eyes and we tested it but it wasn't really what we all wanted, so we kept working on sculptures, and making it smaller, and more human. It took about four weeks to lock down the final design."
Once the design for the creatures had been finalised, Hyett refined it to make each one unique: "We tried to give all the crawlers a distinct personality. There's one called Scar who's a really vicious piece of work, so we gave him these lip pieces that pulled down the corner of his mouth, almost like a dog snarling, so he's always got this sour face. When we first did test make up on him he looked really nasty and the actor, Craig, who plays him so well, is such a nice guy with a really happy face, it was great to turn him horrible.
"We gave the females a slightly witch-like look. We didn't want any good-looking girl crawlers - they're all ugly. We also did a child crawler and gave him a bulbous head, almost like a newborn baby. And the rest of them just have little quirks, like different shaped ears, some looked angrier, we did one that looked a bit dopey, so they all have distinct personalities through the sculptures and paint jobs."
It takes three and a half hours to make up a crawler. Hyett explains: "The crawlers are made by using a silicone prosthetic and it's literally just stuck on to the face and blended into the skin. They have separate chin pieces, and contact lenses and their teeth are custom made dentures. After that's all on, we do a full body paint design, which is air brushed completely. It's a completely white paint job, with loads of marbling and veins, and loads of slime and dirt patterns. Originally we did the make up far too white, and we realised that living in caves they'd be really dirty, so now we've got different designs for dirt patterns for each of the crawlers."
"There's a Nosferatu influence to the crawlers. We wanted them to have a slightly vampiric design without looking like a vampire, and keeping it human, always. It's almost like they've evolved one stage into a bat, but on a small scale, the first things, the ears and the spine, the bone structure of the face."  Read more… continued

The cast of The Descent talk about their characters
Neil Marshall, writer and director

READ MORE ABOUT THE DESCENT PART 2

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