Comic-Con Interview: The Dowdle Brothers Tease As Above, So Below

Below, they talk about the film’s origins, talk about how they balanced the making of the film while taking on the long-gestating thriller The Coup and reveal how Indiana Jones inspired its story.

 Ryan Turek: You finished this before you went on to The Coup, correct?

John Dowdle: Yes, we did a director’s cut of this and then we went to shoot The Coup. Then we came back and did both post at the same times.

Turek: Give me a bit of backstory about this. Did you bring this to Legendary? Did they come to you?

John: It was a combination of a few things. We thought, wouldn’t it be fun to do an adventure/Indiana Jones things with a female lead that is told in a personal way. We had this loose idea and character. The Coup had fallen apart for a third time…

Drew: We were just about to go and make The Coup and we had a meeting with Legendary and Thomas Tull.

John: He called and said that he would love to do something in the Paris catacombs. We thought that would be the perfect setting for what we had, so we had brought his own idea back to him. We pitched this super weirdo version of this thing and he was like, “Done, go do that!” Legendary just got right behind.

Drew: We came with this character we already had developed – this woman who is an urban explorer, but has a history in alchemy and her father was one of these preeminent alchemists. There was all of this connective tissue involving Paris and the catacombs. We pitched this robust backstory and Tull loved it. It wasn’t this big creature thing, it was much more supernatural and psychological. I don’t know what they were expecting, but they just loved it right off the bat.

John: It was always so fun to see in the Indiana Jones films that element of searching for a relic – something you may have heard of, but you learn about it in the course of the film.

Drew: And solving clues. Things you need to decipher. That Dan Brown element. That’s what we liked.

Turek: Something akin to the first part of The Last Crusade perhaps?

Drew: Yeah, exactly….

Turek: You shot in Paris, on location, right?

John: Yeah, we shot the whole thing in Paris. We brought like no crew with us. We said, let’s shoot something like the French would shoot it. [laughs] And we did. We shot five weeks underground in the catacombs. We were the first production to shoot in the off-limits areas and in the public areas.

Drew: We shot in three different systems of catacombs. We shot in the quarry system as well which allowed us to bring a car down there and burn it. [laughs] Basically we could do things there that we couldn’t do in the catacombs, but make it look like we were in there.Turek: Sounds like it was beneficial to not have a large crew since you were working in such tight confines.Drew: Absolutely.

John: Yeah, there’s no electricity down there. No bathrooms. We were – most of the time – six stories underground. You can only get so many people down there. We all had headlamps.

Drew: The walls were so thick that you sometimes couldn’t get the monitor signals.

John: We had to run behind the actors with our headlights off. We were a little busted up from hitting the walls and ceilings. It was a nasty place to shoot, but it was cool because it was like shooting in a nightmare-scape. You’ll see. It’s like being in a nightmare.

Turek: Before we wrap up here and reunite in Paris, I just want to clarify, The Coup is not a horror movie.

Drew: It’s a thriller.

John: A crisis movie. What this family goes through is horrifying, but it’s very much a thriller.

Turek: Was it difficult to juggle both films in post-production from a creative standpoint since they’re so different?

John: We were worried about that. But you’re right, they were different. One is more fantastical and the other is more realistic. We were mostly worried that the studio would hate our director’s cut and then we’d be like, “We’re going to Thailand for The Coup! See ya!” We screened it and Thomas Tull and the guys just loved it. We were able to leave and shoot The Coup and they waited for us to come back and finish it up.