‘Whalefall’ Director Brian Duffield Previews This Fall’s Newest Most Anticipated Spectacle

Brian Duffield’s Whalefall arrived at April’s CinemaCon with a modicum of buzz compared to heavy hitters such as Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three. But all of that changed when the Las Vegas-based convention debuted a show-stopping six-minute sequence in which Austin Abrams’ Jay Gardiner is swallowed alive by a sperm whale. The footage brought the house down, turning 20th Century’s survival thriller into the biggest surprise of the entire event, and forcing film outlets to revise their lists of 2026’s most anticipated films.

“I loved that no one knew we existed. When the movies-to-look-forward-to lists came out [ahead of 2026], we were not on them, and I just liked lurking in the shadowy depths,” Duffield tells The Hollywood Report in support of Whalefall’s first teaser trailer. “When CinemaCon came up, we had already been showing the clip to people for a while. So the studio was like, ‘We should just show the clip instead of a trailer and really spook people.’ And it seems like it did the trick.”

Based on co-writer Daniel Kraus’ book of the same name, Whalefall sends Jay (Abrams) on a diving expedition to recover his deceased father’s remains (Josh Brolin’s Mitt Gardiner). That’s when he’s consumed by the colossal 60-foot, 45-ton creature and stored in its multi-chambered stomach for eventual digestion. Jay has just one hour of oxygen left to escape, applying the knowledge and skill set his late father passed on to him, while also reconciling their strained relationship.

The highly emotional tale requires Abrams’ Jay to save himself from the inside of a whale, but it was Duffield who had to protect Abrams from himself. 

“Honest to God, the only problem with Austin is that he will throw himself too hard into things. It was never like, ‘Austin, you’ve got to do this stunt.’ It was usually like, ‘Austin, you cannot do this because you’ll die,’” Duffield shares in admiration of his lead actor. “The only arguments I ever really had with the guy were about how he’s just so committed and so determined to do everything as viscerally real as possible.”

Beyond the CinemaCon reaction, the confidence that 20th has in Duffield’s third directorial effort is already palpable. Whalefall marks the first time that the writer-director has received the full weight of a major studio, and it’s a long time coming for those of us who’ve been tracking his screenwriting work since the 2010s, as well as his critically acclaimed outings as a director, Spontaneous (2020) and No One Will Save You (2023). The former received the most limited of limited releases during the pandemic, and the latter, while always a streaming play, had to promote itself amid 2023’s labor strikes without the participation of its star-producer, Kaitlyn Dever. 

“I’m thrilled that Whalefall is coming out theatrically. I know I’ve never seen a movie like Whalefall before, not just because of the spectacle and the claustrophobia, but the emotion and audaciousness of what Daniel Kraus wrote,” Duffield says. “So I hope audiences will go on this very insane, exciting experience with us.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Duffield provides an overview of what else audiences can expect from a movie set inside the innards of a whale, something the Whalefall crew called “the hardest thing they’ve ever done.”

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Everyone has now seen at least some of the footage that received rave reviews at CinemaCon. 

It’s a very condensed version. It’s a third of it. CinemaCon had the full scene, and this is the CliffsNotes version.

Did that warm reception provide you and your team a major shot in the arm during post?

Yeah, but I loved that no one knew we existed. It was really nice. When the movies-to-look-forward-to lists came out, we were not on them, and I just liked lurking in the shadowy depths, as it were. Then, when CinemaCon came up, we had already been showing the full six- or seven-minute clip to people for a while. So the studio was like, “We should just show the clip instead of a trailer and really spook people.” And it seems like it did the trick.

In the longer version, the first minute or so is Austin’s character [Jay Gardiner] swimming around peacefully and then, from afar, he sees the whale that keeps getting closer to him. It’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen. One of our little jokes was like, “What if the Brachiosaurus from Jurassic Park just started stampeding towards you?” It begins as the most awesome, beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, and then it just changes direction very quickly. So the reaction out of Vegas was really cool, and I hope that people will feel similarly when they see the movie.

Granted, it’s just a first teaser, but I wish more movies would adopt this marketing approach of just dropping us into one bravura sequence. 

Yeah, Disney was excited by the idea. That scene happens within the first 15 minutes of our movie. All but one or two shots in the trailer are from the first 15 minutes. When a guy gets eaten by an animal, that’s usually the end of the movie, but we’re saying that there’s at least an hour more to go. And that’s not the only set piece by any means. So hopefully people register that this is really the opening of our story in a lot of ways. There’s quite a lot of movie to come after Jay goes down the chute. [Writer’s Note: Duffield indicated on social media that the film has a 98-minute runtime.]

I can draw a line between Whalefall and an older script of yours, so you clearly have an interest in underwater terror. But coming out of No One Will Save You, how did you land on this adaptation as your next film?

I was in post on No One Will Save You when I found out about the book, and then I just became ravenous. I kept bothering [author] Daniel Kraus to let me read it once he finished it. We didn’t know each other at the time either. I literally just slid into his DMs. Then, once I read it — beyond the logline and the technical challenge being really appealing to me — the emotion and the characters just really spoke to me. It wasn’t what I was looking to do next, but as soon as I read it, I was like, I might as well quit the business if this isn’t what’s next because nothing else will matter. So I’m so lucky that Daniel and I got to collaborate on this movie.

If you’re going to make a movie involving whales and water, 20th Century is the place to do it. Did anyone try to connect you with James Cameron?

No, we have not spoken yet. I’d be scared shitless. (Laughs.) He was dealing with the best whale of them all, Payakan, and the studio knows I’m a big Payakan fan boy. So I think he was busy jamming on Avatar: Fire and Ash as we were doing this. But I hope he sees Whalefall and likes it.

You probably split the shoot between a water tank and an actual body of water. Whenever filmmakers approach Steven Spielberg for advice about shooting on real bodies of water, his advice is “don’t.” Do you now understand why?

What’s funny is that shooting on boats, on water, was by far the easiest part of our shoot. (Laughs.) We partially shot in L.A., so we had the best crews in the world. None of our boat stuff is really that elaborate, but it’s all on the water. We didn’t shoot anything dry for wet. But then everything inside the whale is insane. Every crew member said that it was the hardest thing they’ve ever done. I’m not saying this was harder than Jaws by any means, but shooting inside of a whale is its own set of very unique and unusual challenges. I won’t do it again, but I’m glad I did it once.

Josh Brolin went from throwing Austin Abrams around like a ragdoll in Zach Cregger’s Weapons to embracing him as his son in Whalefall. You cast them before you knew their dynamic in Weapons?

Yes, I cast them before there was a trailer or anything. Knowing Weapons was an ensemble piece, there were a lot of questions: Do they have scenes together? Are they father and son? So I called Zach Cregger about it, and while he didn’t want to spoil anything, he did tell me, “There’s a scene or two of Austin and Josh together, but not as father and son.” So that was enough for us. 

Weapons was so huge that when we tested Whalefall a bunch of times, I kept waiting for people to bring up Weapons, but it never came up. It’s a testament to how talented Austin and Josh are. Once you’re in the movie, you really don’t think about them as other people. You just think about them as the characters that you’re seeing. Everything about their characters in this movie is so different from Weapons. It has less to do with anything cool that I did and more to do with how talented those guys are.

And now a sperm whale is throwing Austin around like a ragdoll. It looks like he went through a lot to shoot this movie. 

(Laughs.) Yeah, he did. 

Was he a good sport throughout it all?

Oh my God, yeah. Honest to God, the only problem with Austin is that he will throw himself too hard into things. It was never like, “Austin, you’ve got to do this stunt.” It was usually like, “Austin, you cannot do this because you’ll die.” So the only arguments I ever really had with the guy were about how he’s just so committed and so determined to do everything as viscerally real as possible. 

Every shot in the trailer is Austin. When people see the full six-minute set piece in the movie, every shot is Austin. Inside the whale, every shot is Austin. There’s also some great stitching with stunt performers and CG to give those people their due, but 95 percent-plus of the movie’s stunts are Austin.

As you can see in the trailer, the inside of the whale is a very tight space, and there’s not a lot of room to hide Austin. Even when he is sitting completely still inside the whale’s stomach, it’s a stunt. It’s actually pretty dangerous because he’s on a gimbal, and the stomach has pistons and manipulators. So everything in the full movie was dangerous, but Austin never got hurt. It’s a real testament to Shauna Duggins, our stunt coordinator. 

Austin goes a million percent at all times, even during the ADR sessions we did a couple of weeks ago. He ran around the room, screaming and doing everything he could to make it as good as possible. He’d often want to go again because he thinks he can do everything better. He’s just such a beast. It’s amazing what he can do.

The science behind the premise is relatively accurate. I heard Brolin say that Kraus researched it all a great deal. Apparently, sperm whales don’t chew their food. They swallow their prey before it’s stored in their multi-chambered stomach for eventual digestion.

Yeah, you can get swallowed by a sperm whale. It’s funny, I think the things that will get dinged for not being accurate are actually accurate. Of course, there are liberties that we had to take for movie-making purposes, but we really tried to be as accurate as possible by working with a lot of whale experts. No one’s ever done an endoscopy of a sperm whale for obvious [size and logistical] reasons, but based on everything we’ve learned, there’s a lot of science in the movie. A lot of it is unspoken science, too. Jay is not narrating like he does in the novel. So hopefully the audience infers certain things, and every now and again, Austin, as Jay, will chime in with a little bit of dialogue. But we did our best to make it as scientifically accurate as possible, and I’m so sorry for people that are going to be scared about that.

Is Whalefall largely a dual narrative that flashes between the innards of a whale and the father-son relationship? 

Yeah, it evolves throughout the movie. It starts off on a dual track and merges into a singular track. It’s as real a life-or-death situation as you could possibly be in. There’s also a Green Mile element to it in terms of Jay knowing how much time he has to get out of the whale in a very literal, physical way. Austin and I talked a lot about how there’s no one to impress or to hide your feelings from when you’re inside the stomach of a whale. You can feel whatever you’re feeling. No one can hear you, and no one can see you. 

Jay is in this very physical moment of, How do I live? But there’s also this huge emotional wound with his deceased father. He’s kind of living on his own deathbed once he gets swallowed by the whale. And like any deathbed, you’re thinking about your life — what you wish you could have done differently and how you wish you could have resolved certain things. So those two are interlaced until they very literally become one element in the back half of the movie. I’m really excited for audiences to see their emotional journey.

But the bulk of Josh’s work in the movie are these memories that Jay has of his dad and their very difficult relationship. The movie is about how to make peace with people that you’ve lost, and they do a really beautiful job of that.

Whalefall is your first proper theatrical release as a director. 

Yeah, it’s the first meaty one.

It’s long overdue for anyone who knows your prior directorial work, Spontaneous and No One Will Save You. The former dealt with a regime change and the pandemic, while the latter faced strike-related challenges. Even some of the produced films you’ve written have endured a lot of highly unusual circumstances. Thus, how would you describe the feeling of not having to worry about any of those factors again? 

On the first movie I wrote that got made [Jane Got a Gun], the director didn’t show up on set the first day of shooting, so that really prepared me that this career is like a whale. (Laughs.) It’s a living, breathing organism that has a mind of its own, and you really can’t control it. I can’t control COVID or any of these other things that have happened to my career. Spontaneous was received very warmly because COVID inadvertently turned that movie into a movie about COVID. Nothing could have prepared me for that, but these are the things that happen. 

No One Will Save You was always for streaming, and I never once tried to make it theatrical. I never saw it as a punishment either. I was like, They’re letting me make a silent weirdo alien movie with a really strange ending. Hell yeah, great.  At the end of the day, it’s about the stories we tell, and I’m just very lucky that I get to tell stories. So I’m thrilled that Whalefall is coming out theatrically.

[20th Century president of production] Steve Asbell and I are close pals now after No Will Save You and Whalefall, and we always talk about what we want to see in a movie theater experience. And you’re seeing movies pop off this year because of that similar mindset. I know I’ve never seen a movie like Whalefall before, not just because of the spectacle and the claustrophobia, but the emotion and audaciousness of what Daniel Kraus wrote. So I hope audiences will go on this very insane, exciting experience with us, and I’m just happy they let me make movies, man.

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Whalefall opens this October in movie theaters nationwide.