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