Aka 47 Meters Up with Writer/Director Scott Mann

There's a question that I've been pondering lately that maybe you might be able to help me with. It's kind of similar to a lot of my questions. Who do you think would win in a fight? Sharks that are 47 meters down in the water or vultures that are 2,000 feet up in the air? Do they have to stay at that elevation? Yes. Well. Yes, it's part of the movie. Sorry. I'm not sure who would win. I think sharks might live longer if the birds can't land. Oh, no. It's a real battle of attrition. So if they're going to outlast them, then I guess I've got to give it to the sharks. Oh, well, I guess the sharks win. I mean, it's kind of, honestly, the sharks would win if they came in contact with each other as well. Well, that's a weird question. Well, it seems like a perfectly normal question to me. Well, who would win a fight, 47 meters down or 47 meters up? Well, if only someone would make a movie about a person trapped 47 meters up.

I mean, I know I've seen 47 meters down, the horror masterpiece. But as far as I know, we're not talking about 47 meters down. What possibly have to do with the movie we're talking about today? See, now, I was actually hoping to ask you this question. the only connection that i've been able to find between 47 meters down from 2017 and fall from 2022 the movie we'll be talking about today is that two of the producers james harris and mark lane worked on both movies is that is that the connection because they were like different studios different production companies different uh distributors different writers different directors. You've hit upon the one reason why these poor producers who have come up with an amazing formula for films could not title this movie 47 meters up, which is what they clearly wanted to do. They wouldn't have been as high up as they wanted it to be if they'd called it 47

meters up. It would have been a somewhat, you know, a dangerous height. No, it's very high. it's just not like astoundingly high you know the movie we're talking about is titled fall from 2022 yeah it is a survival horror i guess you'd call it yeah one of those survival suspense thriller horror type things yeah like yeah frozen not the disney film it was uh directed and written by scott mann also written by jonathan frank really good movie uh i'd encourage anyone to see it. If you like survival movies, it is a fantastic addition to the genre. I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really fun. You know, you just go in there to enjoy the suspense and not think too hard about it because we're going to do that for you. Yeah, we love thinking too hard about movies. Go and watch it because it's great. And we are going to go way into spoilers here. So before that, hello and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real. This is the podcast where we talk

about fan theories and do deep dives into films trying to find alternate interpretations to blow your minds and possibly ruin your childhoods though not the child nobody saw fall as a child i hope because if they did they are still a child you know sometimes we do that anyway and welcome to any new listeners we have thanks so much for tuning in today we've got an amazing guest we have the writer and director of the movie we're talking about today fall welcome to our podcast, Scott Mann. Hello, thanks for having me. The first question I wanted to ask just to start things off was, how did you end up on the project Fall? How did this project kind of begin? It was myself and Jonathan Frank, the co-writer. The kernel of the idea, I think, came about when we were shooting a film called Final Score in London. And we were doing a kind of crazy stunt with Dave Bautista riding a motorcycle off the top of a building or something.

What really scared us was where we stood with the monitor. There was kind of a sheer drop really nearby, and it was about an eight to ten-story drop straight down. I remember the feeling it gave Jono and I, who were both kind of scared of heights, just this terror of, like, please, no one go near the entrance. Like, just stay away. And we start talking about the nature of heights and fear of death. And it's kind of a universal fear that whilst we've used it in films in the past for a sequence, maybe, or, you know, different sequences and some really good memorable ones all the time but it never been the kind of core uh element of of the movie you know the theme you know to really kind of go into and look at all the different flavors of it the psychology of it and really have fun with it so i think it was really born around then the plot for fall is pretty straightforward is it though it's kind

of convoluted with like the relationship between them but these two young women are trying to get over the death of their friend slash husband slash lover and they decide to climb to the top of a very tall tower and they get stuck there and then they try to get down and that's the movie like there is obviously a story you know that's being told through this film which is you know there's especially on the character side i would say but i think the the central thing was rather than being plotty be kind of like be about the the roller coaster ride you know be about the feelings that were kind of taking the audience through and be conscious of that and kind of connect through our characters to take us on that ride and and and so it was very um it was definitely i even before finishing the film i remember because it was very minimalist the way we went about filming it because it was very like real it was definitely like my favorite filming experience i've ever done

it was very kind of raw and film grammar like in terms of like okay we want to capture this and and we want to convey this it was a really nice um even though it was really hard it was a really nice movie to make you know like the best one yeah my favorite i've ever been involved with for sure some interesting tidbits about the filming of the movie in the movie the abandoned 2000 foot tall b67 tv tower is actually inspired by the kxtv kovr radio tower in walnut grove california that's what they use for like the establishing shots of the tower and everything but for the up close shots they actually built like a hundred foot high platform on top of a 2 000 foot high cliff yeah is that right that's yeah because that's insane yeah that's pretty much yeah yeah i think i i learned this from the film's producer a guy called james harris he'd done a bunch of great genre movies right one of which uh 47 meters down um obviously dealt with a lot of water and a lot of

depth yeah great movie he really pushed hard right from the start like do it for real when you do something for real it seems to capture this energy that goes beyond even the performance itself it's like i think when you're on set the environment kind of feeds the performances and those performances feed the crew and feed the storytelling and the capturing of the grits you know great moments and i think that to do that yeah you really had to put it in in a real situation you know i did i did actually look and research into virtual environments and things like this and we did some test cases on the guys use the mandalorian stage and doing a vertical one to kind of look down but but i i think again all the other elements really were worth worth the trouble of basically like going around california it was actually covet type as well so i remember myself and james james who by the way if there's anyone on the film is most scared of heights it's james like when i was

driving up these mountains like in the desert james was panicking and screaming about how we were going to die um and we went to all these remote locations uh and and just tried to find uh the the right height the right kind of environmental kind of feel um to get as high as we possibly could with the greatest drop-off we possibly could um and it took it took several probably months in the end to find the right site um and in the end if i so you made james go visiting cliffs yeah he absolutely hit it it was uh it was it was absolutely torture i think if james if you ask james what is what is worst film he's ever worked on but maybe his favorite film of all it's probably this one right because it was it really put him through the paces but um they ended up finding the site that we filmed that it was the top of a place called shadow mountain in the middle of the desert they found it by going on google earth and kind of just

looking at the altitude heights to places that were high enough and skimming along and finding these like remote locations and it turns out they're all like a lot of them are kind of like you know on the edge of military sites and all you know they're all in the middle of bloody nowhere right so but yeah we found this location i remember being up there and there was just enough room there was kind of an area like a flat area where we we looked and and kind of figured right if we can get uh the the structure up here and and actually the techno crane was the biggest challenge getting the techno crane up there we had to essentially build parts of the road up to the mountain so we could get the vehicles that were able to lift it up so it became a big engineering effort and a big a big haul to get everyone up there but once we're up there we were able just to shoot and it was all real and and then you only really have to do the augmentation on the visuals

when you look down past a certain point it was kind of a one-time thing but once we got it it was uh it was great to be able to do it really cool i like the kind of the meta narrative you're telling here where you you saw dave batista doing a stunt and it terrified you and stressed you out you're like let's do that for an entire shoot basically you picked the top of a cliff in the middle of a desert so of course there's no way to get there no it's just a disaster let's bring a bunch of cranes and can i just say the other layer of complication not to make it good enough getting people out to the desert like the whole drive to the desert from the hotel was was it an hour an hour and a half and then we had to get the bottom of the mountain and then get these little kind of cars up the top and then the actors had to get prepared and and basically it amounted to pretty much a four-hour shooting day once we were up there it became this very intense thing where the actors

uh where Ginny and Grace really had to go up there and we had a window usually once they're up there they're pretty trapped up there it's like hard you know because you're getting on cherry pickers and go all the way at the top and we're getting in position we're shooting but i remember we pretty much had segments of two hours shooting which was usually limited by grace's bladder which meant breaking for lunch then it meant going back up going up for another two hours that was kind of the dictated schedule it was quite the effort i think the first time i saw the trailer for this movie i mean it looked pretty cool it's like ridiculous and epic and just like suspenseful and then it won me over when it flashed the message on the screen from the producers of 47 meters down and i was like oh it's 47 meters up that's what we called it on that's what we called it on set by the way on set we jokingly called it 47 meters oh my gosh

yeah we totally can't be back that's literally what leif and i have been calling it since we saw the first trailer we're like we gotta see 47 meters up it looks so good that is totally that totally but james and i jokingly call it yeah we could have called it 47 meters of course it might have resorted in lawsuits but it's not it's not accurate anyway it's much higher than that it's definitely not only 47 meters yeah yeah it's a good formula just trap the people 47 meters in any direction i can't wait for the next sequel 47 meters sideways yeah you know well so if you watch this movie and you thought that it was pretty straightforward you were wrong because i'm gonna blow your mind with this theory now listen because this could get a little complicated okay the main character is named becky and she has a best friend named hunter they go climbing a lot hunter did not die she actually murdered becky's husband dan oh

and then faked her own death to start a new life right wow okay this goes like way many layers deep she faked her death so it was an elaborate ruse by Hunter and she pretended then what happened to Becky in that theory did Becky get down or she did I'll tell you here's how it happened i just gotta preface this as far as the theories we covered go um this one's it may be the most out there so that would be the biggest bombshell i think is in this movie the big plot twist is hunter died even though it seems like she survived for a little while we find out that she dies i am saying hunter actually survived okay we'll get into why i believe that and the preponderance evidence that exists for that theory they did show her fall about 1900 feet to the ground no she fell onto a satellite first yeah her body just chilled there for a while supposedly yeah and then it after she was dead they knocked her down the rest of the way or becky did that's that's what the

movie would have us believe is that hunter tried to make a jump she didn't quite make it she fell onto like this random little platform that's just there and died and birds ate her and then eventually becky climbed down to the platform and shoved hunter off to cushion her phone so that she could like make a phone call from from the ground floor send a text send a text yeah it's pretty it's pretty unbelievable and i think my theory is is more believable i kind of think the opposite but okay okay so so i know what you're thinking i this is way out there why this movie was so simple but why do i believe this well so to prove this theory there are a few points i'm going to have to prove and i'm going to lay them out here first we need to prove that hunter sabotaged dan's gear to murder him that dan being becky's husband who died at the beginning who dies at the beginning of the film okay the next thing i need to prove is that hunter had motive to murder

dan okay and i need to prove that hunter faked her own death and survived those are the things that i need to prove right at the beginning of the movie we see dan and becky climbing together having a great time on this cliff side they start to make out because they're just having so much fun and immediately hunter screams from across the side of the cliff ew gross get a room which i thought is good consistency because she you know she's cheating with dan so she's like you don't don't kiss my lover right yeah yeah she's jealous right after that dan falls to his death now if my memory serves it was not his gear that malfunctioned but rather the hole in the cliff that he inserted his gear into that uh did not hold his gear up they are using what is called cams to anchor into the rock face of a very high cliff as they climb up becky already before she's even had a traumatic experience seems terrified of climbing even though they imply that she's a

highly experienced climber and she does this all the time she's already doing the thing where she like cowers against the walls like i can't do it dan well but maybe she's just trying to like fit in with the in crowd like all her friends are climbers so she wants to be like them two other people up there okay those are her only two friends people she cares about so they are climbing normally with cams and ropes and harnesses hunter is free soloing like the total badass she is i don't even think she has a chalk bag which is what usually the only thing you really bring with you if you're free soloing free solo is when you climb you do rock climbing usually up a cliff or whatever without any gear at all except for like a bag of chalk to keep your hands from you know getting sweaty and stuff if you fall you die but But free soloers, even though they seem like these like adrenaline junkie badasses, they're

pretty smart and they practice their routes. They don't do it all at once. If they're not feeling it on a certain day, it seems like it's just not going right. They don't know the route. They'll just climb back down and they'll try again the next day. Well, right. All the ones who are alive climb like that because if they didn't, they wouldn't be alive anymore, right? You know, it's a dangerous activity where one mistake will get you killed. So you have to be incredibly careful if you're alive. or what's it called? Survivorships bias, right? Like the ones who are alive are the careful ones. Yes. Dan cams into the rock. Now, these cams are spring-loaded metal dealies. I'm not a climber. Hey, where do you get those metal dealies for his feet? Or shoes. What's the attitude? I just want some dealies. i can't remember the word shoes some horse dealies for his feet they're spring-loaded things that come out and hold on to crevices and things like that they're

well tested um if they're new they should be enough to hold your weight and they should not break or come loose if you have cammed it correctly an experienced climber which dan is should cam it into the rock and then make sure that it's secure by pulling on it and checking it before they just assume that that is a secure anchor. So he would have checked this cam to make sure it was properly anchored. Or he wouldn't have and would have died. Wait, that's what happened. I was on one of the subreddits about climbing and they were like, those cams would never fail like that. So the thought was that maybe Hunter sabotaged Dan's equipment because he didn't choose her he chose Becky now of course Hunter would never get back at Becky because she loves Becky but she doesn't feel the same way about Dan you know she should take that guy out you know if the Reddit authorities take issue with this then by golly it must

be you must be right now a side note in the normal interpretation of the movie I love that Hunter is just so badass here she's like I'm coming down to presumably rescue Dan but she's like a free solo with no equipment what's she even gonna do she's gonna climb down and just grab him and climb up with him on her back anyway she seems to assume and as far as i can tell is right that she can do anything that she wants to do i'm i'm getting mixed messages you're you're trying to convince me that hunter is a murderer but you seem to be talking about her as if you admire her Oh, I love Hunter. Hunter is my favorite character in this movie. She seems like a horrible person so far. She had an affair with Dan, her best friend's husband, and then murdered him. Right, right. She may be a horrible person. I'm not going to argue that. I just still kind of think that she's a cool badass. You know, like we might think about other cool badasses.

I don't know, like Walter White. He's kind of a cool badass, but he's not a good person. So Hunter is the Walter White of fall. She's the one people are afraid of when they're on the rock cliff. Little side note, in a movie like this, where you're like trapped in one location on top of a tower or say in a ski lift, you don't want your name to be Dan, apparently, because Dan dies here and Dan died in the movie Frozen, Adam Green's Frozen. No, he didn't. What are you talking about? Have you seen Frozen? Nobody died in that movie. Sorry, we proved no one died in Frozen. It was all a prank. Just ask Adam Green, he knows. Watching Frozen normally, Dan gets eaten by wolves. Don't you mean he played with his trained wolves? Yes. Sorry, Dan played with his trained wolves. Clearly what happened. Go listen to our Frozen episode if you're curious. I gotta listen to that episode. What we're rambling on about.

It was really good. We even had a great guest. Yeah, legendary Adam Green. Director of Frozen, director of the Hatchet series, star of his own podcast, the Movie Crypt podcast. It's about 12 months later, the next time we see Becky and she's getting drunk. She's getting messages from her dad, but she doesn't answer him. He leaves a message saying, I've tried to console you in every way I know how. As we see later from his personality, this implies he does not know how to console people. Yeah, fair enough. Because his methods for trying to console her are not good at all. So far, I don't disagree. He told her, must have been just a few months ago, less than 12 months after her husband died, that she shouldn't be so broken up about it because her husband was an asshole. Right. It's not a very nice thing to say. He claims he didn't say that, but that's what Becky says that he said. And I would be more inclined to believe Becky in this instance because the dad is being defensive.

Throughout this movie, she doesn't ever hallucinate. She's a trustworthy. Imagine things that didn't happen. So here's one of the things we know with abusive parents that they're always like, the rules apply to me, but not the other way around. The rules apply to you, but not to me.

He's like authoritatively permissive.

No, don't you understand? You forget to do everything and I am subjugated. The other way around. Subjugate me more.

he's such a masochist he's so into it he's like i need more rules no no the other way around rules apply to you but not to me when becky swears at him and i have to point out that she is an adult woman he says you don't get to talk to me like that we raised you better than that the next thing he says to her is he insults dan again and then he says i don't care about your grief sorrow whatever the hell this is and then he swears at her and says you know damn well god damn it becky i need you to try he did teach her to use that language i learned it from you dad so again the rules apply to her but not for me but not for me wait backwards so interesting to note when she swears at him it was in the original cut of the movie it was probably a lot more vile like the things that she said to him um and that's why it seems like he's overreacting it's almost like a few years ago i was on a plane so the movie spy had just came out so it must have

been about 2015 uh spy of course being uh you know starring jude law um jason statham melissa mccarthy uh she has to pretend she's a spy anyway um of course i was on an airplane so the cut of the movie this being a rated r movie with a lot of you know swearing and bad language in it i ended up watching the airline cut of the movie which removed all the swearing and bad language which made it a truly amazing masterpiece of a movie because in this movie she has to convince everyone that first she is a rough around the edges hardcore bodyguard and and then that she is like a master assassin psychopath with no feelings or anything right and she does this by constantly just mouthing off and swearing at everybody and i've never seen the theatrical cut of this movie but in the cut of the movie that i saw she uh flipped her lid and suddenly started calling everybody why you doo-doo head you sack a doo-doo and just really went off on those doo-doo heads

which caused all these hardcore criminals to just you know recoil in disgust and say whoa whoa calm down hey you don't need to go that hard that kind of language it was an amazing movie but yeah i think something like that happened here because apparently the original cut of fall included over 30 uh f-bombs that they had to cut out so what they ended up doing was i guess they used artificial intelligence dubbing technology to not only alter the language that was used but also the on-screen mouth flaps now i've heard that it was at lion's gate request that the movie fall be censored that it had too many f-bombs it had just too much swearing in general and then that you brought flawless ai in to do this censoring is that right more or less was it your own choice it was yeah i would say it's it's that it was a bit more it wasn't kind of that black and white in a sense it was actually the point where we made this movie um without a domestic distributor so so

we made it for very little money and and then when we finished the movie it was a case of playing it to the Lionsgate who I'd done movies with in the past and we all had relationships there and we kind of previewed it early with them they really liked it they were very supportive of it and they said that look we have a window we'd like to put this out in and we'd like to put it out wide but we can't put it out wide if it's if it's got the they didn't npa pass we were surprised how many swear words there were because we never planned it to be uh an r-rated movie but it turns yeah it's all acting at the top of the towers there's all this like fucking and and uh there's about 36 or 35 f-bombs uh mainly from ginny by the way who's the one with a real potty mouth she will and um and and so they uh yeah so basically they said look but we need it pg-13 can you guys do that and so we looked first about reshooting which is like the typical way you would do this

stuff right well we looked first actually at editing them out right like very often like edit behind the head and do these kind of things and we went through that process but there's no way to cut to because it's two people sat in the middle of nowhere on a tower so that quickly kind of finished so we're like okay well what do we need to shoot to make this work and what do we need to reshoot and we're going through that process and costing it out and it was costing absolute fortune because obviously you have to kind of get to the top of the ding and there's all these um and we really didn't want to do it any kind of blue screen green screen stuff because knew how that would have kind of fucked the movie on on all the efforts we've done to do it genuinely um yeah and um and really it was a kind of it was these two worlds that i've had a foot in each for a little while now in terms of like we've been building up a um the the ai company

and really the focus on the build out of all that technology has been has been a platform that serves uh uh translation mainly right so to take kind of translation dialogue um and and we were it was prior to us actually launching product it was when things were still in the dev cycle um or kind of starting to kind of move into kind of a production cycle and um uh but but we'd we'd recently kind of got it to a point where we're able to deliver cinematic uh level like as is called a space like full like imax resolution um deliverables which was a big kind of turning point of the company and um and it i don't even think it was my suggestion someone else had said like why don't we just use that for this and like do new dialogue um and it and it's so obvious now now someone says it but it's like it became this you say yeah why don't we try that and then so we uh you know so we tried it and then it worked and so we went for it and and we did it and it was kind of a quite

fitting thing that a journey on one side uh of everything i was doing kind of bit neatly into this other one um and uh and we're able to pull it off there's a slight compromise there may be on a couple of those lines but generally it is the movie that that i i envisaged and it's what i wanted and it tells the story and same with ginny and grace do you know i mean they were very involved in this process and and they you know we were all proud of what came out came out of it and and i think we we got a chance to it was weird that i got busy to show my kids who are 12 and 10 um and they were able to watch one of dad's movies and even though it is a bit much actually when i was watching with them i think i'm scaring these kids for life but uh um they um yeah they got to watch it because they were in it they have a little cameo in it actually in the movie so um they got to kind of watch this movie go at the premiere and hang out with everyone

do all this stuff and i think um and it was nice to be at share it and i'm glad like for me i'm so glad it was able to play wide like it's it's a much wider audience it's had to reach and we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it hadn't had that opportunity so i think it's you know as a as a example of of kind of uh something that benefits kind of filmmaking as a whole i think it's a great a great example that's just unbelievable it's so incredibly serendipitous i know exact product you need to solve the exact problem it's like it's like a great plan kind of four years in the making without realizing i mean to me it's just it is my probably my all-time favorite like legend of filmmaking like the little myth of filmmaking there because to me it's like you've got like tony stark and his his suit his iron man suit just got crushed he doesn't have any iron man suit and the bad guy's coming and then he's like

wait in my closet i've got a prototype suit that i've never tested before but it's just what i need at just the right time and then he puts it on and it's even more powerful than what he thought that's basically what you did with this ai you're like wait i've got it in my closet and it will do everything we need and better it's like that's funny what a great analogy thank you so yeah i think uh i love the analogy i think yeah but i think like this is i'll say what it is well like the start of this thing i'll shoot a film differently now i know what we can do on the eye side and it's going to change how we all make movies how we all distribute movies it's got a huge impact absolutely and i think it's that's what's kind of exciting about it is like you find these new use cases and you find these things in it and it's like it's these it's these power tools for the film creatives really that that gets you know that's why i'm i'm so excited about the

flawless piece is it just i i think we'll we'll have a world where we can make movies that are more kind of a better movie and and have it reach further and those things are kind of central to us all having more opportunity and making original stories so i think there's a there's a huge piece this way it's very exciting it terrifies some people of course the ai piece but even just the ability to tweak one word in the perfect take is insane when it comes to directing like it's an incredible product it's really cool it's like it's yeah then it's and what's coming down the pipe on it where it's going is is even more kind of crazy so i think you know and i think as filmmakers we're gonna enjoy it i mean 100 now hunter gives us a few hints as to what her plan is when she first talks to becky about climbing the tower she says i'll rest when i'm dead she's already foreshadowing she needs to fake her own death so that she can rest. Why else would she say that? She doesn't

know she's going to die in the normal interpretation. Well, it's just foreshadowing by the writers that exists. She wants to climb the B67 TV tower over 2000 feet straight up. Now this is a little suspect. Why? And this was something mentioned on the Reddit climbing boards as well. Why would a free solower want to climb a tv tower that's not hard or exciting it's a ladder it's just climbing a ladder yes it's a big ladder my interpretation of this was that she wanted to get uh becky back into climbing and she wanted to do it with something that made her feel like super triumphant and like a you know real champion but in a way that was as safe as possible so she's like let's climb a really tall ladder you know uh road trip so hunter live streams while driving and almost gets them killed it's true yeah i love the way she's just constantly trying to be that person who dies in a horror movie by just being a reckless jerk all the time yeah i know

but i believe that this is calculated she is a live streamer she wants everyone to know exactly how reckless and stupid she's being and it's a calculated move because it makes her death more believable the death that she is going to fake she now has thousands and thousands of witnesses that can attest oh yeah hunter was totally reckless it makes sense we were thinking she might die eventually right she almost got hit by that truck if you've even seen her in one scene in this movie you know that she's reckless she she does something reckless in literally every scene she's in she's she's a reckless girl yeah yeah so she pulled out in front of the truck on purpose that's her alibi and then and but she wasn't going to hit the truck right like she she she wasn't no no that would just be crazy i love hunter i mean she's an amazing character yeah and i think what's so good about her is that she's surprising um because when you first start watching the movie she seems like that reckless

character who you're supposed to almost hate a little bit and you can't like oh she's gonna die first she's definitely gonna die and then but then as it goes along she really steals the show and she becomes her own character and she does end up dying first but you know you don't find that out till the end and and she just she really like surprises you morphing from what you feel it's almost a flat character to a really uh really surprising oh thanks yeah i i think there's two there's two um evolutions i would say in her character like one one was that the very first draft we ever did of this was was um was with where dan was going up with becky and it was actually uh uh a different dynamic like weirdly hunter did exist in the first act of the movie and it was dan had had an affair with hunter her best friend and then they were facing this thing at the top and really it was a lot more interesting having the two friends exploring living and what's

life and kind of thing right like why do we do this and we kind of look at these kind of thrills seats and our fear of death and everything and it all relates to kind of life and death and what is life and living life and I think the the central idea of you have one character who after a great loss retreats and goes and goes down right and then you have another character that has the capacity to well that hides from it another way by going out and kind of living on the edge and pushing herself to to near death and i think and the both those journeys can then have a kind of arc journey where you where one of them you're peeling away the truth of who's really underneath and peeling away the facade which is which is hunter right well she's hiding behind the thing she has to get past is like stop pretending stop hiding behind that facade um and be honest about about what what's going on and and with becky you have kind of the opposite where she needs to kind

of really um climb out of that hole and kind of embrace you know find the will to live you know and really and take her character from a place of wanting to die to fighting to live you know to gobbling a vulture and fighting away to survival um you had mentioned the vultures um and i just wanted to ask when did that come about the decision to use vultures as like the threat can i can i redeem these the fucking vultures so yeah i'll tell you what you know when they say don't work with animals um uh yeah it's a it's a for all the chances on the movie that was one that was the hardest to kind of surpass i think um no it was it was you know the guys to be fair the guys and the vultures themselves were great but but it's but it's hard to direct vultures it turns out they really don't do anything you to do um um but who would have thought you would have thunk it right um uh but no i i um yeah it

was i think it was a case of i tried to kind of theme it in as well and that if you actually look closely like dan at the start of the movie it's really a bird that kills him right that shoots out of a gap and kills him and i thought the ultimate is is becky kills the bird at the end and that'll that'll that'll that'll do the arc um but she saved him she avenged him yeah avenged yeah in some strange way um uh but i remember it was you know i i again i think it's about survival i remember there being some controversy about the bird and about killing the bird and i remember you know a few people involved in the movie were just like you can't kill an animal do you know i mean people are going to go nuts and which kind of in my mind i think it's crazy right we kill animals we eat animals all day long and just because it's behind a wall doesn't mean we don't do it so let's like not pretend that we're not actually at our nature uh these primitive beasts

So I think Becky at the start of the movie is the last person on earth you would expect to kill that bird. But I will say, actually, I will say another credit that is deserved here. The inspiration of that bird and what happened, my 96-year-old grandmother, my grandmother by marriage, I guess, but she used to fly fighter jets and things in the Second World War. So very kind of, you know, amazing history, this lady. but she's like by if you would meet her you'd think oh she's kind of like she's old she's a little frail and she's dotting around her house and she was telling sarah and i once this story of um we went to visit her and and there was something out in the yard we're like what's what is that in the yard oh oh and she said these these crows they keep eating all the putty in my windows and she described the story how this big black crow kept going to her windows pecking out the putty you know the sealant between the glass and because she lived out in wales she would be

freezing and and it was this cycle and she said so what i did sarah as i went i snuck behind it when it was eating the putty and i grabbed it by the neck and she described how this massive crow was fluttering around and she had to beat it to death and she really did this and then she said and then i put it on a spike and that's what's on the lawn and no crows have come anywhere near it was like wow so she made an example out of it she totally did and she went medieval holy crap she's a sweet old lady sweet old lady and that's why that's why i always kind of justified becky would definitely be able to kill that vulture and if needs be so uh it was inspired yeah it was it was inspired by mary hunter um and if you see the footage of the the the kind of doll we use to do the kind of physical stuff it is like we all laughed on set out loud when we were watching uh watching chris do this thing and she's just like beating up this large like feathered

like polystyrene thing which looks funny but but you know it's it's uh through the magical movies when you combine it with the right sounds and the right visuals you get away with the yeah with making it look like something it wasn't so yeah it looks great in the movie so right they they get it to the the tower so on the way up there they come across the carcass of a mangled dying i don't know it looks like uh what do you think it's like a jackal is that a mangled dying animal that's being picked at by vultures hunter's joke post and i i put joke in air quotes there i know you can't see me but her joke post where she takes a picture of this mangled bloody body and then writes feeling peckish and posts it would make no sense at all to her followers i i understand how to her it was a joke about the birds that were pecking the body but there were no birds in her picture and nobody would be able to tell that that bloody mess in the picture had been ripped apart

by vultures now hunter knows a lot about this tower as she explains to her followers she knows the exact length of the ladder and when she's going to get to the ledge and then how long of a climb after to get to the platform on top. Even Googling statistics about these towers, it's kind of hard to find information except for just the overall height. I believe she has climbed this tower before. She climbed it before. With like a measuring tape. Yes. She's surveyed this tower. Like I said, she climbed the route that she knew Dan was going to climb. Because she needed to loosen all those screws, right? exactly she had to loosen the screws so she's already come up and sabotaged the tower itself just as she did with dan where she climbed his route first to know which cams she needed to sabotage boy she's insatiable i do i like legitimately i love i think it's an amazing touch how as they climb and you know becky's basically having a nervous breakdown because

this is horrible um hunter's like just sing a nursery rhyme it'll keep your mind off of it and then she picks ring around the rosie which is the greatest song you could ever sing while climbing no i i think i love that that is good writing that is a plus i love it when i was watching that with christine i leaned over to her and i said i would have gone with humpty dumpty but then later on when hunter is trying to make that jump the jump where she quote-unquote falls she sings humpty dumpty sound on a wall anyway it's pretty pretty good hunter's trying to look as reckless as possible and when she gets up on the next ladder she shakes it and the bolts come loose now i believe this was intentional she had came up come up here previously she had loosened the bolts and she shakes it now and that's how she knows it will fall later and that's part of her plan all right so they make it to the top when the the day before the shoot i want to say it was

when everything was finally set and we had the safety sign off and all this the stuff that you need um we went up there and it was the first time seeing it kind of uh built and i'll be honest it did look really scary it's just kind of like bobbing around in the wind like a pin and it's light and um and myself uh grace and ginny i went first grace went second we all went up together the first time ever and i do remember kind of climbing up the thing and it was like peripherally you just feel like you're looking high up even even looking down it still looks high but but it's peripheral vision your mind says what the fuck are you doing and so climbing up this thing it was terrifying and i remember i got to the top and getting over that the bit at the top is actually what was hard because you have to kind of come away from the ladder and it is awful and um and we did it and then uh i remember grace came up after me and when she saw the

saw the view she she started crying and and it was relief and kind of a beautiful moment and all these things uh which she then i asked her to kind of hold on to that that feeling and replay it when you do it on screen but it was a really and then jenny came up and we all kind of appreciated the moment that kind of plays in the movie which is like wow look at look at this this is incredible and it kind of got me excited because it was like it was this is this is going to be beautiful as well as terrifying and uh i felt it was it was yeah it was really good for it yeah well i honestly watching the movie i can i can't tell how much of their performance is acting and how much is like actually i think there's a lot of magic going on there yeah yeah so good i mean i gotta ask did grace who played becky and virginia who played hunter of course um were were they okay with the whole process like did either of them have a problem with heights coming into yes no they

were they okay i absolutely love them they they when i i guess i should kind of reverse back a little bit when auditioning on this film a lot of actresses uh and actors say they'll they can do anything right like just you know like wanting of the job right very determined and so i've noticed over the time that uh obviously yes yeah i can ride i can ride a zebra it's like it's fine um and whatever and um i remember when i first met with them individually i remember showing them the plan because we had the engineering kind of schematics of the the you know of the of the uh the tower and and the cliff kind of uh drafted out and everything and i remember showing them kind of a printout i said oh this is how we're going to do it because they were like oh we're going to do in the studio and like thinking all these things it's actually we'll do it for real and this is how we're going to do it and i showed them the kind of the sketch and and it was basically

just been this big kind of tower on the edge of a cliff and two people kind of huddled there and um it's you'll be up here it'll be really high but that story that's stuntress in the center it shouldn't come down and um uh and and and i could tell by the white people's eyes who was like really serious to go for it and who was kind of pretending and it wiped out a lot of early uh contenders who would who otherwise you would have thought would have been perfect but but they needed the right kind of uh the right attitude going in honestly and and ginny and grace both had that in spades and they said they were honest they said look I cannot say how I'm going to feel I'm nervous looking at that picture and I'm nervous thinking about doing this but I have done like I think at the time Ginny had done a bunch of wire work on something she'd done previously um Grace is is very athletic dancer she you know she's got a lot of kind of physical discipline um and they're both

they saw kind of embody the characters that we were writing it was just felt there was an honesty there which we could tap into and and and really you know would kind of pull through the lens so hunter does a one-handed hang which is cool for us to see in like the wide shots but it doesn't look that great in the like selfie photo they take you can basically only see their faces and then she forces Becky to do it she's a great friend she makes Becky do an even more dangerous version because she's only holding on to Hunter yep better to hold on to someone's sweaty hand than you know a metal bar so Becky scatters Dan's ashes Hunter cries I think because she feels some remorse for killing Dan you know it just kind of gets to her she's kind of surprised that it gets to her hunter does not go down the ladder when it collapses she's been trying to seem stupid this whole time so it's believable when she quote-unquote dies and she's live-streamed

everything so there's evidence but on the most dangerous part of her plan where the ladder collapses she puts becky on the ladder she's smart she's not risking her own life with this risky stunt now i believe she does ultimately want becky to survive but if someone's gonna die it might as well be becky not her but she does save becky here you know she pulls her up uh there's an emergency box she is really strong like yeah not only catch becky you know like i am presumably like what a hundred 110 115 pound weight just dropping and it's just oh okay i'll just catch that weight and pull it up like your dead weight up she's not even using her feet yeah um well i i kind of believe that hunter's actor she looks a little more like she's got some muscle but man becky doesn't look like she could do any of this stuff and she doesn't even though she thinks she does yeah that's very true so um well like that was my favorite part of the movie

because later on when she spoilers thinks that she pulls hunter back up when really hunter died It turns out she didn't. She just pulled a backpack up. Yeah, and it was so hard for her to pull that backpack up. She's straining and grunting and wrapping it around. I was like, that scene makes so much more sense when you know that she was just pulling up a backpack. Becky asks why Hunter does all these reckless things. Hunter says, I would like to be remembered for my life, not my death. And she admits why she's up here with this stupid plan And on camera, she says, I do this because of him. She's doing this because she murdered Dan. That's why she's doing it. Right. So when she says, I do this because of him, she means I do this because of him. The RV people steal Hunter's truck. I believe that this is so it won't be impounded later and she'll have it. I think those RV people were working with Hunter.

I think she drops her shoe down with a message in it. And he looks at it and walks away because he knows, oh, it's not time to pick up Hunter. Like she doesn't just walk out of here after she gets down through the desert. The RV guys pick her up down the road. He only picks up her shoe and looks inside. So I believe she had previously written a note on her shoe that survives the fall. And the plan was always to throw that shoe off. She probably had different messages on each shoe. Right, right. Okay. So it's like, yeah, it's like a Paul Revere situation. Yeah. One if I land, two if I see. Left if things are going great, right if I need help. Right. She throws down the correct shoe. Right. She didn't know exactly how long this would take. So this guy was supposed to come and check on her. She throws down one of the shoes. She should have done it backwards because the shoe that she did throw down turns out to reveal her relationship.

I think that she wanted to reveal that secret to Becky before she died. Then why go through with the whole thing? I don't know. She's not going to reveal that she murdered Dan. oh okay okay just she's she's not shame shameful about the murder no he deserved it she is she just wants to reveal that she cheated with him because that will make everyone feel better i get you now she's not really proud of it because she says it was a huge mistake it got out of hand i tried so hard not to but i fell for him this is her ironically kind of saying it because actually She made him fall for her when he fell down. She's so clever and evil. Not exactly the kind of thing you should joke about, even if you can turn a phrase. She says a true statement. She says, I loved him, but I love you more. So I ended him. Oh, wait. She says, so I ended it. Oh, no. I was going to say, I'm not sure if that's the exact line there.

But I think she probably wanted to say, I ended him. Oh, boy. There's a big epic scene that was in all the trailers where she has to swing from the rope and jump to the satellite dish, right? Yeah, yeah. I think that this is the reason that she was always playing the song Cherry Pie. I think that she was alluding to what she was going to do later. Have you heard the song Cherry Pie? Several times in this movie. Do you know what most of the song is about? No, I don't know the song very well. Basically, 90% of the lines in the song are all about swinging. so the whole song basically is swinging on the front porch swinging on the lawn swinging where we want because there ain't nobody home swinging to the left and swinging to the right so that's the whole song swinging in the living room swinging in the kitchen it's swinging in there because you want to meet a feeder swinging the whole song it's all about swinging is every like

every single verse of this song is just swinging swinging swinging swinging hunter does a lot of swinging swinging on that rope this is true i'm swinging in other senses i imagine right with other people's husbands it's uh yeah no that's uh that's a good theory but that is not that's not the reason it was also a thing like it was kind of deeply ironic that she was singing about food when she was starving that was i remember that being something at some point it like god of all the songs you want to sing um but yeah right but um i don't know why we picked that i can't remember the exact origins of picking it i just remember it felt it did feel very hunter and i remember even in early drafts everyone was like there's no way we can afford cherry pie there's no way we can do for cherry pie all these kind of different you know i was surprised to see it you know to be honest though i i've always felt um with with films very often

um i've had this right with movies where you pick what what feels like the perfect song and you kind of make the scene with it in mind you play it on set even and you'll have the feeling all captured and then you have to change it in the end and it kills you right um so i remember really early on there being a lot of discussion of like having to carve out money which we didn't really have right we had a very tight budget so to carve out a chunk of money for cherry pie was a hard thing to do but but it was always like i think james producer always dangled it as okay you finished shooting this on time and we do this on budget then you've got you can keep cherry pie but if you go over you know you lose it it's going to be some sound alike from god knows where uh yeah that was the origins unfortunately don't go as deep as maybe you hope or maybe they do you know subconscious everything i hope for i will always love this song because uh one time when i

i was going on a short road trip with some of my buddies in uh in high school and this song came on the radio and we were all listening to it in the car and then one of my friends suddenly perks up and like he's he's looking around the car to all of us he's like hey guys you know you guys know that i i just realized this but i don't think this song's actually about cherry pie and we were all like dude you think we just i thought it was a very very innocent moment for this guy who thought he was so clever figuring out you know the the raunchy undertones of this song that's the point of the song and it's not we weren't like young we were all like 17 it's like dude you just figured this out it's like that song about peaches just about peaches did you know i don't i don't know what song you're talking about oh you know it's so there's a song about if i could have my little way i'd have peaches every day

and then it's like millions of peaches he just wants peaches for me millions of peaches peaches for free and it talks about him climbing up into a tree as a kid and finding a peach and like sticking his finger into the peach oh he just loves peaches he's like and everyone of course assumes it's a very sexual song but the the artist the person who wrote it is like no it's just about peaches when i was a kid i really i found an orchard full of peaches that's what it's about oh my gosh that's amazing at this point hunter has said all that she needs to say she's apologized it's time to fake her death she ends with i'm sorry bex i love you this is the part where she's going to fake her death so let's let's look at this part she needs becky as her her alibi she needs someone who's scared out of her wits who's willing to believe anything who will tell the authorities oh yeah hunter fell she died dropped to her death so when she climbs down

after they get up she climbs down to the satellite dish now becky cannot see anything below the satellite dish and hunter is the one who says the ladder is broken off below it but hunter is lying the hunter is lying okay the ladder is there during that part where hunter makes the jump and becky for a long time becky sees nothing she's just sitting up on top of the tower it takes her a long time she's like pull me up during that time before uh you know uh before becky looks down that's when hunter just climbs down the ladder that's there below the satellite dish and she just pulled up the back she just leaves and that's what's happening but how do you explain exactly how do you explain her looking down uh and and seeing hunter's body though well see i was in her mind you explained it in your movie yeah you already answered that for us is that becky is an unreliable narrator she looks down and she sees nothing because hunter's not

there she's actually seeing the truth right there eventually she comes to believe the lie that hunter has been telling and that's when she starts to hallucinate that there is a body there right when there actually isn't it's a twist within a twist wow this is incredible this is uh this is great when do we reveal this this is start the sequel when both of them are alive no this is yeah this is something that you really really just it's it's below the surface only the smartest viewers it's true i'm glad they cottoned on to it because it was hard to write and like weed that in without you know right i'm thrilled that they figured that out i mean just think about it what are the odds that hunter's body would have landed on that satellite dish and that it wouldn't break like that's where the ladder broke well and it starts to break when uh when becky gets on it like and becky's a twig like if it didn't break from you know hunter who's actually like kind of buff

from hunter landing on it then it definitely wouldn't break from becky standing on it after she drops hunter off i guess if there's two bodies on it right but it doesn't start to break when they're both on it only after she drops becky and then settles in then it's like no i'm gonna break yeah one thing on this on this podcast if there are any possible continuity errors or bloopers in a movie we take those to be fact those were intended yeah there are no mistakes okay that's that's definitely not true uh i want to see which ones you call because i you know there is a lot i always i always kind of reassure myself a little bit with films is that it's hard to make people follow plot point like you know to really follow plot points they say like say it say it and see it two or three times right to really kind of follow it um and then very often i feel like you can maybe get away with things with when you don't look too hard but there is a lot in there if you

look hard or not even hard just lightly i'm looking forward to these i'm like yeah so right after becky looks down and quote unquote realizes hunter is dead and sees her body yeah we get a wide shot of the whole tower and you can see the satellite dish and there is no body on it so i think what that's telling us is it showed us the lie and then it cuts back to show us outside of becky's perspective here's the truth and that's where the really smart viewers hone in and they're like aha yeah the wide shot is the truth you know let's say that's that's that's what we did intentionally and then let's not mention it got past qc on a v effect and no one noticed it's like can you even tell yeah it's probably what happened uh but yeah that i don't i didn't even realize that i you know i'm discovering these things myself so uh you know good point though now this theory unfortunately may ruin becky's arc a little bit because um

unfortunately um after this point she's dehydrated she's hungry she's hallucinating this theory doesn't believe she does any of the things that she did she doesn't climb to the top of the tower and recharge anything she never flies the drone because she couldn't have because the app was on hunter's phone not hers and so she had no ability to fly that drone so that didn't happen either that was her imagining what really happened is that hunter goes away to start her new life she needs becky to believe that she's dead so becky can tell everyone and then uh hunter just sends in an anonymous tip to the to the the 911 and that's why the ambulance comes we don't see exactly how becky gets down that's it's just 9-1-1 comes and they help her down that was entirely intentional it wasn't that that scene was too expensive to shoot so that's basically the whole theory and then someone must have called becky's dad and that's

why he shows up then yep um and then there's a tarp on the ground um i don't believe that's covering hunter's body uh we saw that there were like dead animals dead coyotes around they just covered that up because yeah it's maybe parker the dog you know that that came back and tried and then yeah it died yeah um that's that's what that is yeah absolutely that's great yeah that's um that's a wild theory to say that's um yeah it's born from people like me who just love hunter and we're like hunter's so awesome she's such a badass she could not have died yeah yeah no i i also like i share some love with hunter and i i think she um uh and i think there's yeah there's all kinds of possibilities never said never because there's all kinds of like ways that we go but what do you think of my crazy theory there's pretty good evidence that hunter is capable of pretty stupid and unkind things based on based on her actions

throughout the movie um you know her having an affair with her best friend's husband and uh doing all these crazy, stupid things that she does as part of her day-to-day life. You have raised enough evidence to cast concern and doubt on the circumstances surrounding Dan's death. It's possible that there was a ladder right under the radar dish? Well, we can't trust anything after that point in the movie. She's hallucinating Hunter. And the fact that she thinks she flew the drone, which she clearly did not, none of that could have happened. she couldn't have charged it she couldn't have used it yeah everything that she observes is in doubt everything that you have posited i can't deny reliably so i can't say that this didn't happen uh no it's it's fun this though isn't it it's like coming the thing is when you have it like the unreliable narrator you can kind of insert you know whatever whatever is believed

like it's it's up to up to the audience to derive what they what they believe and there's things in there that we you know there are things kind of we leave sometimes just and just either try and get away with or think oh that might throw people into thinking this and that and and it's kind of fun uh but yeah but that's a pretty wild theory it's a bit of a stretch but i can't disprove it which is my favorite kind of theory so there you go confirmed 100 so if you're fans of hunter as i was i think this is the theory for you music for this episode was provided by christine yeah just want to say i really liked fall if you haven't seen it go see it if you haven't seen it find it watch it it's a really fun movie i mean if you enjoy like survival horror type of movies i really liked it yeah give it some love uh thanks everybody for listening and remember the popcorn isn't real.