THE TANK – An Interview With Writer/Director Scott Walker

Introduction

After inheriting his mother’s abandoned coastal property, Ben (Matt Whelan), his wife Jules (Luciane Buchanan), and their young daughter accidentally unleash an ancient, long-dormant creature that terrorized the entire region – including his own ancestors – for generations. The Tank, from Well Go USA Entertainment, arrives in theatres on April 21st and on Digital on April 25th.

Synopsis

Following a creepy, stormy prologue set in the 1940s, we jump ahead to the 70s and meet Ben and Jules running their popular pet shop. We learn however, they are struggling to juggle running their shop, parental duties, and veterinary school fees. However, good fortune seems to shine on the likable young family when they learn Ben’s late, institutionalized mother, held the deeds to a property. A property she had never told Ben about.

The audience learns, along with Ben and Jules, that the beautiful coastal property had been boarded-up and abandoned before Ben was born, with no reason or explanation found…yet. The family then moves in for a few days to spruce the place up (including a classic horror trope of unlocking heavily locked and boarded windows and doors) in time to receive purchase offers. They also get the underground tank up and running as the source of fresh water for the house. Then, events turn dark, creepy, and claustrophobic.

Analysis

Director, Scott Walker, explains below how he wanted to ground The Tank in reality, and even researched, then created, the bio-backstory for his creation. As such there is little humor, camp silliness or actual fun to be had, which is often associated with the genre. Rather the film is propelled by the performances (with particular praise reserved for Buchanan who is also receiving fantastic reviews in Netflix’s The Night Agent), high production values, dreamlike New Zealand scenery, and a Weta Workshop creature that deserves attention.

Cinema Scholars’ Glen Dower recently got to chat with writer/director Scott Walker about THE TANK, nightmares that inspire, Scott’s writing process, and filming in New Zealand, among other topics. 

Interview

You did for sure. We have the prologue, set in 1946 then we jumped to 1978. Why that decade and specific year? Because it is a timeless piece. It could have been anywhere, in any time, but why did you choose that specific era?

Scott Walker:

I think it was that I grew up being a huge fan of Dracula, The Wolfman by Lon Chaney, and those types of films, Christopher Lee especially. Then going into sort of the Eighties with An American Werewolf in London, then The Howling later. There’s a great era there. But I think also that we were a year into Covid, which we were certainly, as a family stranded away from where we lived up until that point and felt very unstable. It was, I think the whole world was spinning like that. And I think 1978 was the grounding of a much saner or seemed to be a lot simpler, less complicated time, with no technology. This film could have been contemporary, but I liked the aesthetic and the design of the Seventies. So, if you’re going to pick a time to lean into, it’s a cool area. So, I liked that. Then I wanted their parents’ story obviously to be prior to that, which was coming out of World War II, the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl era. And there was a real story of which I’d written the backstory of that, which gave us 1946. I wanted this intergenerational thing where both generations have failed to learn from the mistakes of destroying the environment.

And Mother Nature, the creature who’s a girl, she, it’s a ‘her’, she’s been awoken and she’s going to come and set the balance straight again. Which in a way was kind of how I think it must have been feeling about Covid. Like, is Covid some form of retribution for what we’ve done to the planet? And so yeah, there was a lot of that feeding into it. And I liked telling something on a low budget that has to be very contained. I wanted these two disparate periods where, from a costume design perspective, there are two very different looks. Old cars, Seventies cars. And just from a time perspective, there’s quite a bit that got cut out of the 1946 sequence, but just not a lot, but enough that was like, oh, every shot that I fought so hard for us to get in that back felt like, oh, I got to cut that. But that was the reason. And I like the Seventies as a simpler time. I think I’d watched The Conjuring and I was like, ‘I really like the aesthetic of that time.’ And I’d written the film knowing the creature was going to be practical, a real kind of a nod to monsters, classic monster movies. And the period helped with that, I think.

Glen Dower:

The location is also timeless and stunning. That little cove just seemed like a piece of heaven. But also, of course, it would turn into a dreamscape, which could switch into a nightmare. The film is set in Oregon, but you filmed in New Zealand, is that correct?

Scott Walker:

Yeah, we shot everything here. We actually shot on the beach I grew up on as a kid. And so it was kind of a fantastic, not just a great feeling of going home to my childhood when I used to be into all these monster movies and stuff where it all started. So, it was cool. And that was all the exteriors and the big kind of vistas.

Glen Dower:

Back to your writing process, you must have had a lot of fun with the ‘creature feature playbook’, so to speak. We have lots of ill-advised decisions, characters who are just there to die, doors that are heavily locked for a reason, and you have a family animal that may or may not survive…Did you have fun playing and stretching the rules of a horror film?

Scott Walker:

Yeah, totally! I saw it first as a haunted house film for the first half where there’s this sort of mystery and then it’s more of a practical creature feature. The challenge is how to reveal the creature partially, but not fully. As soon as you see it, you’ve seen it. And so you are always about flashes, glimpses, parts of it. I really wanted this evolution of the creature so that the first time you see it…

Glen Dower:

…the creepy larva…

Scott Walker: 

Yes! The larva and it looks like that. And you’re like, I don’t know why it’s like that at the front. But then it opens that way and then later we reveal, it opens that way as part of it ability to take down larger prey. And so there’s these two types of film and then the second half being a sort of an out-and-out relentless-will-they-survive. There were a lot of things I really wanted to reference in there and things that were close to me growing up. Whether the tank design itself is a big nod to Dracula’s Castle Crypt, Christopher Lee and tonally not going out-and-out blood fests gore, but trying to keep it more real if you were attacked by a real live, powerful predator, less about the blood, more about the visceral reality of the attack. And also, I think in the back of my mind, also thinking it would be nice if this was a sort of family horror. I know it’s Rated R, but something you can take the kids to, so it doesn’t have limbs flying everywhere.

Glen Dower:

It’s not overly gory. Like you say, it’s real animal attacks, there’s mauling involved as opposed to splatter.

Scott Walker:

That’s sort of Jurassic Park if Jurassic Park was more violent, I guess. But parts of Jurassic Park, Gremlins, those are practical, and that’s what I want to do. I want to create something that’s a fun rollercoaster, and a nod to classic monster movies.

Glen Dower:

Let’s talk about the cast, specifically Lucian Buchanan as Jules. What a wonderful time for her. She’s also now on the new Netflix show, The Night Agent. Here, she definitely joins the line of cinematic Kick-Ass Moms. She starts off very academic, is a great vet, and has great knowledge, but then she takes care of business. Was that something you and her talked about in crafting her character?

Scott Walker:

Absolutely! And she’s never been in a horror before. She was Tripitaka in The New Legends Monkey for Netflix, and that was kind of physical, but this was the next level of physical. She’s fantastic. And I wanted someone who had that has softness but strength and someone who could play a great contrast to Holly (Shervey), who plays Linda, who’s the mother in 1946. And they are obviously related, but they’re very much opposites in how they react in this type of situation. It really becomes what a mother will do to save her child and what real motherly strength is compared to fatherly strength. So, I wanted to give her character those moments and ultimately she has the coolest moments. I’m so excited for her with the stuff that she’s doing now and what she’s got coming up. But The Night Agent has just exploded and she’s great.

Glen Dower:

I just want to quickly talk about how you got the Weta Workshop to put together the Creature for you. It must have been such a thrill for you, of course behind King Kong and of course the Lord of the Rings. You obviously made the decision to have a fully practical monster, not CG.

Scott Walker:

Yes indeed, I wanted it to be a fully practical creature, and I’ve known Richard (Taylor, Weta Workshop’s Special Effects Supervisor) for quite a long time and I’ve had this nightmare about the tank experience. And I phoned him and said, ‘I’ve written this script…’ And his immediate reaction was ‘When I was a child, I had the same experience! So I’ve had all of your nightmares and I love that you want to do it practically.’ And I think a lot of people think that Weta really only does these huge, big-budget films, but he’s very passionate. They’re all very passionate about the traditional practical creature stuff and what you can do and using all the old tricks. And so it was really exciting.

We are low budget, but he had an amazing team come together on this and so many incredible technicians and there’s such a great, generous, great group of people to work with. It was a real dream. And he and I are working on this werewolf comedy that I’ve written, and that’s one of the next things coming up. But this was something in the middle of Covid. I could write something that is more physically contained but feels like it’s in a bigger world. And with certain sets of a tank and a cave sequence and a forest and this amazing coast, we can create a feeling of a film that looks much, much bigger than it actually is. And it’s just fantastic to have those guys on board. I mean, it’s the dream. If you are going to do a monster movie, they’re the guys that you want working with work with you, I guess, to me.

Glen Dower:

We’ve had the Death Angels in A Quiet Place, we’ve had the Xenomorph in Alien, and we’ve had the Crawlers from The Descent…have you christened your creature yet?

Scott Walker:

It was funny because Richard said to me in the very beginning, ‘What is this thing?’ And I knew it was from Earth, so it had to have been old. So over a weekend I kind of geeked out and thought if I was a Ph.D. student, what would be its phenotype attributes? It’s got a reproductive cycle. How did it evolve? So I wrote him a summary of a Ph.D. thesis basically, with all of this reference work, and he went with that. And I think on that, I called it a nato-Terragen, meaning Night Earth. And from the beginning of time or from the beginning of species. Plus, I think because it was in Oregon, I called it its number, which was ORNT-6, or something like that. I don’t know. But, I don’t know any of this stuff, but I like to research and I like being able to try and ground things in a sense of reality. And certainly for this to be able to bring it back so all the parts of the creature’s design were in some way based on some species that emerges. And the theory was there are hundreds of thousands of new species being discovered every year, at the bottom of the ocean, some deep in the mountains and this is kind of one of those things. So, don’t go wandering in the forest, or into strange houses. But yeah, some days we’d be shooting and someone would just say ‘Have you heard of a hagfish?’ And we’d be like, ‘Yeah, something with jaws that came out like this’, and that was the process.

Glen Dower:

Mr. Walker, thank you so much for your time, and the very best of luck with the release of The Tank!

Scott Walker: