The Art of Ending Things
How great entertainment sticks the landing.
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The B-movie goofiness of its premise belies a depth and thoughtfulness.
Ultimately,The Descentfunctions as a horror movie on multiple levels, a sort of Jenga tower of terror.
It should feel overstuffed and implausible, and its a testament to Marshalls vision that it doesnt.
Id never actually seenThe Descentsequel until this week.Well, you dont want to bother with that.
The first film resolves itself, whichever ending you choose.
It wraps it up in a way that was bleak, whichever way you cut it.
The second film began and it didnt pick up from either ending.
How did it end up happening if you werent onboard with it?I didnt own the rights.
That was the price of getting the first film made.
Pathe Pictures had the rights to the movie and were going to make a sequel regardless.
Did they even consult you?
[Marshall is credited as an executive producer on the sequel.
]They initially consulted me, and my advice was, Dont make a sequel.
And they were like, Were gonna do it.
I suppose maybe it was my own stubbornness.
Anif youre going to do it I dont want anything to do with itkind of thing.
The sequel takes it for granted that she does, in fact, escape.
I do think that both of yourDescentendings could potentially be read as she doesnt escape, right?
Psychologically, shes screwed.
All her family and friends are gone, in the most horrendous fashion, some killed by her hand.
I felt like a gauntlet had been thrown down.
I was set in my task to just create the scariest movie I possibly could.
And he said, I love it.
But theres no way we can afford to do it.
If you have any other ideas, come back with them.
And he was like, I love it.
Other ideas came along after my fiend and co-producer on the film suggested, What if its all women?
What does it take for somebody to go insane?
How far can you push them?
What levels will people go to to survive?
And how friendships and relationships fracture in these circumstances.
Or is it just a cut and theyre listening to different things?
People have read into that for sure.
Wow, Ive never watched the film that way.
I always just assumed the creatures were real.It was never written with that in mind.
People have since written theses on the films hidden meanings.
We interjected all of these teasers and hidden meanings along the way just to suggest that kind of thing.
For the question Are the creatures real or a figment of her imagination?
that made it way too obvious that they were [figments].
I kept asking female friends to read it and let me know if it sounded like real women.
It was really important.
What kind of feedback did they give you?
Did they ever say, A woman wouldnt say or do that?Yeah.
Not as a rule, but think of it from that point of view feeling versus just thinking.
Then theres the white guys crawling around inside this body.
The journey through the cave is a journey through the female body.
I didnt intend it that way, but I was like, Okay, you see that?!
How can we explore that?
I find that bizarre and fascinating.
I was like, If thats the movie youre making, I quit now.
Beyond that, I tried to completely desexualize the whole thing.
Even the affair none of that was onscreen.
Okay, lets dig into the endings.
So thats the happier ending, for you, to have her stay and lose her mind.I think so.
Not for us, but for her.
In that ending, do you assume shes going to die shortly therafer?Yeah.
Shes either going to starve to death or fall off a cliff or get attacked by a crawler.
But shes with her daughter.
Thats what mattered most to her.
I didnt start it knowing how I was going to finish.
It evolved as I was writing it to resolve in that way.
It wasnt going to be a triumphant escape from the cave.
I do think you rarely see, especially now, a totally bleak horror ending.Yeah.
And if any genre should be allowed to have bleak endings, it should be horror.
Did it ever cross your mind while making the film that youd have to change the ending?No.
It never crossed my mind.
At that time, it was great to have that freedom to make the movie I wanted to make.
It was like, Great, weve done it, thats the ending, boom.
She gave me just enough.
In those last 15 minutes or so, her performance is so incredible to me.
She completely changes her physicality and becomes this feral creature.
That brings something out of you, when you look in the mirror and youre this beast of blood.
Showing her the necklace meant she knew about the husband and about Beth.
It was like,Ah, okay.
And not to kill her directly, but leave her to die.
I think in a court of law they might think its direct.Probably the same thing, yeah.
We shot the film in January and February, and it was in cinemas in the U.K. in July.
That was six months later.
Which is very fast.
Theirs was the much bigger budget, bigger stars, all of that.
We thought wed get stomped on by this bigger movie.
As it turned out, [the U.S. release] was essentially a year later.
Lionsgate did some test screenings for their release.
And they tested it again, and the results were even higher, in the 90s or something.
They were ecstatic, but they didnt have the right to cut the film.
It had already been released globally.
It was only in the U.S. and Canada that they hadnt seen it yet.
And we said, Well, okay, but in return, we want a 3,000-screen release.
And they agreed to it.
So we thought, What the hell.
Lets go for the bigger release.
So I dont even know if you’ve got the option to find the cut version anywhere!
The cut version doesnt really exist now.
I think its on YouTube, but barely.Something like that.
But the most widely available version is the complete U.K. edition.
Its back to the way it should be.
Were you bothered by the initial request, from an artistic standpoint?Initially I was bothered.
I dont buy it.
Thats test audiences for you.
I was living in the U.K. at the time; my world was the U.K.
Wed had that ending, and everything was rosy.
So I didnt lose any sleep over that, really.
I wasnt going to be so precious about it like, Its my ending or no ending!
and get 20 screens in the U.S. because of it.
Its a business, and I wanted everybody happy, including the fans.
I wanted as many of them to see it as possible.
It was literally, they clipped 30 seconds off the end.
It makes a difference, but it wasnt rewriting the whole movie.
So I could live with it.
Certainly, my attitude then was that it was a cliche that Americans wanted happy endings all the time.
Look at something likeSe7en.
At the end of the day,Se7ens got an incredibly bleak ending.
And its an amazing hit movie.
I think the best way is not to treat audiences like theyre dumb, because theyre not.
They know their shit.
Cheerful films do well.
The term Hollywood ending has been around for some time.
I guess it must have originated from a concept long ago.
But I think maybe the 70s started to change that, a bit.
And the films coming out around that time invited a more cynical approach.
Audiences have adjusted with that.
Did the attention that was paid to the two endings surprise you?
People have been talking about it for years.Yeah!
It does seem to be quite a conversation point.
I think its fascinating: Which ones the bleak ending, which ones not?
And a few books have had essays about it.
Ive never had anybody write about my work in that way before.
It makes me proud that people could be bothered.
And how theyre meant to be there.
My whole theory with them was that theyre the cavemen who stayed in the cave.
Thousands and thousands of years ago.
And theyve evolved to live there instead of in houses, like the rest of us.
And you always considered the ending totally conclusive?
Shes trapped underground, nobody knows where she is, she doesnt know where she is.
She aint getting out of there.
Where do you take the story?
You have to compel her to go back to the cave.
Thats the only way its gonna happen.
They were like, Uh, what if shes lost her memory?
I was like … [Sighs.
I would get that.
Shes in shorts for no obvious reason.
Theres some oddities, for sure.
Some people have suggested I do a prequel about the miners, with a totally different bunch of characters.
You could do something along those lines.
It would be better if it was amazing, but its okay.
