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Time It flows differently in the Underland. Down here, there are no minutes or hours, only epochs and AONs. Some called this deep time, the dizzy expands of the Earth's history that stretches away from the present. But for those who descend, deep time is also another way of seeing, one in which things that seemed inert come alive. Stone flows, the earth has tides, and eyes breeze.
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with Rob Pettitt all about his new film Underland. This film recently played at the Tribeca Film Festival, and we'll be playing some other fests as we go along. Definitely keep an eye out for it. It is pretty amazing. I think you will really get a kick out of it. I know that I did. Thanks so much for listening,
and I hope you enjoyed the interview. Can you tell me a little bit of your background as far as how you got into filmmaking.
So, my dad's a filmmaker. So I always grew up with all sorts of strange cameras and bits of technology lying around the house from the age of about twelve, where I used to turn off family holidays into the sort of nightmare sort of kupbreak style shoots I give people there of gone holiday, but I him will learn lines and get up at seven in the morning, and would you'd have made a mystery. I didn't understand what editing was. I didn't know you could edit films. I
thought everything was shot in sequence. Remember I remember doing you know, we do it line by line, shot by shot, which is sort of quite a pure way of making a film, I think. But anyway, just sort of stayed in that world and have always been interested in technology as well, and how cameras have changed to So a few years ago I was given a drone actually by my uncle, my uncle Husta Linpa Well to this place in the Poconos, and remember thinking, oh, this is an
interesting sort of way of seeing the earth. No one's ever really sort of we haven't explored that strata of airspace because it's sort of too low for helicopters, and two highs of the sort of human case and made us quite an experimental film called Upstream that follows the course of a river all the way to its source in a roundabout way. That's sort of what led to Underland.
He decided to go below instead of above, well, yeah, to what to sort of follow the river from there?
Yeah, from the platter on the Cagaron platter above high up in the Keangoon Mountains all the way down. I mean it led our stream lego collaboration with Robert McFarland and the writer of Bunderland, which is which is how it sort of led, and his sort of literally career it's been one of one of sort of deep mapping, you know. He started at the summits of the mountains and he's followed following things down down, down into the into the nether. Yeah.
How did you meet mister McFarland.
Robert McFarland and I, Yeah, we started. I made a little short film about him. Actually, it's for Granted magazine. We met years and years ago and we sort of stayed in touch. And when I was given this drone and came back with this sort of strange footage from the mountains. I remember thinking, oh, yeah, this is a landscape that Rob McFarland has written a lot about me and walked in a lot and it was last game
by associated with his work. So I sort of sent him a video postcard of that expedition and he wrote something for it, wrote some beautiful narration for and that became a project called up Stream, which is also a collaboration with the composer Houster Vocal Bottleman, and he had
around that time also just written Underland. And I remember first reading Underland while I was here in the Bocalones in Pennsylvania, and I sat on the end of the Jeffy bike on Lake Proconal, and I remember being gripped by the first line, which is the way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree. And that ash tree was one. It's one that's real,
and it's one that I found. It grows from a gentle hollow in the field in England, and it does indeed had a split in the trunk, and that split leads into a thirty three thousand foot long case system and you crawled through the split in the trunk of this tree and into another world really, and that case system became a sort of portal for many of us on the team into all these other worlds and all these incredible places that that are explored by incredible people.
And the film sort of grew from that.
To see this world that we would never normally see as such an eye opening experience. I mean it reminds me a little bit of the Herzog Cave documentary, but in such a different way. How is that experience for you going inside of these caves and experiencing them and especially having to I mean, how big of a crew did you have to work with?
Well, we had an incredible team, utterly incredible. It's funny you mentioned Van because one of our EPs, Andre Singer, has produced I think it's how seventeen of Furness Films and don It's also sort of sits on the board with Sandbox as well or other production companies. So I certainly felt the sort of presence of Werner and throughout the film, and of course he's one of my sort of cinematic heroes. And I remember when I try saw FITZGERALDO and actually for us saw the making of FITZGERALDO
the documentary about it called Burton's Dreams. I remember thinking, or there is something about the idea of taking the camera into difficult places, taking the camera into environments that are very indifferent to your desires his filmmakers, that feels it feels sometimes like a sort of madness, but also sometimes you know, it's it's one that's quite hard to resist. It's a it's a pull that is quite hard to resist. And that is essentially the central question of the film.
Why do we seek the void?
You know?
Why do we get into this pool, this strange song that calls us downward? So in terms of recruiting a team, I had to find people who also have that, saying Paul or rather weren't so put off by the idea of squeezing through narrow and wet caves that that they would they wouldn't take a gig. I mean, we have the most incredible production team, As I've said, it started with Spring, which is run by Andre Singer, and with Planet Optedless as well. So we had Lauren Greenwood are
absolutely brilliant and interpret producer, and Sandbox as well. You just sort of got it right from the beginning, and did they let us very slowly build the team and find the right people and the right collaborators. And I remember when i'd first had our when I had my first conversation with Rubin woodin Deshomp, a cinematographer. I remember thinking, this is the guy, you know, I mean, his his work, his eye, his craft is I think just unsurpassed. And so we were headed to the ash tree before we
picked up a camera. We headed to the old ash tree and we explored that casystem together with our camera assistant, Rich Savage, to make sure that we were all going to be comfortable underground, to learn to move underground, to
learn to move as a team underground. And then he slowly started introducing a little bit more kit and a bit more ambition, to the point where actually, you know, we were often taking fourteen places of kit and these places because it's dark and you've got to light it somehow. So yeah, that's how it's all sort of grew.
Just the logistics of that alone, lest of ben so tough. I mean, did you have to wear special outfit, special shoes, or you're that's slipping around down there, Like what do you have to do to prepare for that.
So the film is sort of set in three principle underground environments. We've got a cave system, We've got a storm drain that actually laters sort of becomes an abandoned mine. And we also have this Fidogs laboratory which is set too kilometers beneath the surface of Ontario in Canada. So there are three very different environments that required certainly different outfits,
different logistical approaches. In the cave systems absolutely how you're wearing your sort of kitted up, and there was some sort of vertical descents as well, so you're in harness and all sorts of considerations that are incredible. Production team, at least Lauren Greenwood, had to sort of constantly think about, you know, how to keep people safe. It's one thing, relatively easy thing to get people into a cave. It's a much hard thing to get them out, to get
them out. With the footage, we did feel often that our journey as a team and the crew sort of mirrored themetic journey that we were trying to tell the story of, which is to descend into the underworld and then to surface with treasure right, and that treasure in our case was a set of images that would allow us and sounds that would allow us to make and tell a story. It was often the getting out that was the more sort of challenging stuff in those instances.
The odd sort of flip side to that is that the deepest place that we went was actually the one that had the most human presence in the most infrastructure. You go two kilometers down this vertical mind shaft through some incredibly dusty tunnels which are full of a money nickel, They're so full of all this very fine rock dust, and then you walk into what is one of technically speaking, the keenest places in the world. Then emits the equivalent of a teaspoons worth of dust to pass through these
lapdoors over the course of an entire year. So you then spend two to three hours sanitizing all your equipment, cleaning every cooling fin of every bit of the camera with swaps in order to protect the experiments that they're running down there, experiments that might, you know, one day solve the mysteries of the universe. So yeah, we had to operate in a number of different environments and they all require different approaches.
How many people are you dealing with when you go down in these environments? Is it like you cameraman, sound person DP as well yourself? So how many, five, six, ten Our.
Underground team would sort of drink and expand depending on what sort of environment we were entering. When we were following the incredible Ahaw speleological group in Mexico, that's Fatima and her team of archaeologists, you know, they had a lot of support as well, and we had a lot of surface support to we had to come up with this incredibly convigated way of getting batteries back to the
surface for charging. You know, we're in the middle of the jungle as well, so you know the sort of logistics like that, and we needed a team to be able to do the run from where we were deep in the cave to take these dresses batteries out and bring down the charged once in that So in those cases, you know, you sort of look around and go, wow,
there's a twenty people with us. But in other cases, like when we were exploring the storm drains that run under the beneath the casinos in Las Vegas with Bradley Garrett, the of Anick storer and writer roughly it's a brilliant mind, brilliant person. We chest the team to as small as possible, so we had myself, our dpe Rubin, William Deschamp, who was also operating the camera as well as Rich Savage,
was our focused product and the sound recordist. So there was four of us to us Bradley, that was about as small as we could get it down to.
Obviously, I don't imagine you have any problems with claustrophobia.
No, and that was a precondition I think for being able to work on the film. But that you know, that said, there were moments, and there were moments on some reki expeditions actually that were some of the trikets. You know, there were some really difficult ones. Brended mine got into difficulty when we were on an expedition together. And it seems can go from fun to not fun very very quickly, you know, in a matter of seconds, and it becomes it turns from a reki into a
sort of extraction mission and then that takes. Yeah, those sort of things take.
The tot just feels like, what's the most difficult documentary I can make? This one sounds like it's pretty close to it.
It's true. For those who know Rob McFarland's book on which the film is based, there's there's a brilliant which act is brilliant, But early on he talks about why we why there exists as sort of punctural abhorrence for depth, Why is it we aspire to hide? You know, even says how that's reflected in language. You know, to be elevated or lifted up is preferable to being depressed. You know, there's a sort of gravity to the language of sadness
or of Greece. We associate the underworld with all these sort of terrible things, and I think part of it is to do with how difficult and effortful it is to go into the underworld. You can sink two feet below the surface and already your your lines of sight has stolen your as web says, your breath is squeezed from long society, that stolen from eyes, and so yeah, it was insanely difficult, and that became that sort of
slowly started to dawn on us. Rapidly actually dawned on as it's very dark, it's very in most of these places, which draws up interesting creative questions. You know, we have to deal with the question of, well, okay, we're not going to have a film that's disbaby minutes of a live screen, so what is the light then like? Because there has to be one, so we have to sort of ask questions about, well, dramatically speaking, what is the light source? Things like that. Other strange things sort of
started to happen. We'd put quite a lot of time into rigging vertical descents, but shots that would go down into the abyss, because we're already that feeling of being pult down. But then we get to the surface and realize it doesn't look like you're going down at all because you have no special reference. You need falling water
in order to know which direction is are. So over a period of time, we learned all these lessons about things that translated to the screen and things that didn't, and things that we hadn't thought about until we really started going into some of these places.
That's like, you had to learn a lot while you were actually making this film on the go.
That's right, it's learned a lot, but also unlearned things that only seem to apply on the surface, and relearn things that may not even be directly related to the image, but are related to keeping yourselves safe, such as in the storm train. Bradley was like, look, you've always got
to know which way the water would flow. You have to know whether we're walking uphill or downhill, because if there is a rainstorm and we do get caught in a flood, we need to know and be pretty sure that we're going to be flushed out, not flushed in things like that. You know, it's like you've got to learn all this new stuff, so quite a journey.
Once you capture all of this footage. What's your post production process like?
The editing process on the film was, as you can probably imagine, it was long. It was a winding path. It involved a lot of patients from a lot of people. I was very fortunate that the producers Lauren and Jess and I should mention Darren and Harry from Provozoa who were equally patient and bring in a holding a space that was really like a It was a play space, and it was one way we were sort of safe to run lots of experiments, to fail and to better.
It took a long time. The process of editing really was one of mapping. I would say, you know, I was very clear from the beginning of the process that after the title in the film, I wanted the camera to stay underground, and I wanted us to go deeper with all the protagonists. Yeah, so I wanted to break these journeys and I wanted us to feel like we were constantly moving down with them. I drew this sketch right at the beginning, which was a bit like a vortex.
I wanted to seem to feel like a vortex to the point where we sort of come to this understanding, right. You know, each braid might start in its own reflective irrespective field archaeology, theoretical physics, urban exploration, but really they sort of all reached the same conclusion. So the question was, it's not like we have another film that we can sort of point out and go call that to our model.
So you know, it did take over a year of putting things together as something spelled by the wayside, sadly, as they do in the courvering room. We worked with the most incredible editor, David Hill, who really understood not just each journey, but understood the mythic arp, the vortex structure within which we wanted them all to sit. So the short answer is lots of experimentation, lots of patients for which I'm very grateful for.
Yeah, they have that space to explore the space of the film as well as the space of the underground.
It has to be crucial for you exactly there. Yeah, it was.
The sound mix and the music just really add to everything, especially just that the isolation. But yet you know, the music is kind of our companion at times. I appreciated that as well.
Thank you saying yeah right from the you know, when we wrote the treatment for this film, I had said, this is as much a journey into sound as it is into image, because especially in that sort of first third where you're plumb into this strange world and actually what happens physically, I was very interested in the biophysical sort of response, what the body, what the body does, what happens to the senses when you go underground. We
wanted this to be a sensory film. Well, your ears compensate, your hearing is heightened, and that was something that Supervising sounded at a Yarkam sort of strong, really understood and dived into. But to work with Hannah Peal on the score was such a joyous thing. Hannah is unparalleled, unmatched talent really and so generative. You know, she's so good at just coming up with ideas, at getting a scene, coming up with ideas the scene changes, because you can imagine,
things changed a lot. Hannah stayed with this process for the four years that it took to make the film, which is which is quite unusual for a directed composer collaboration. You would usually sort of partner with the composer a little later when once the pictures settled you've hit picture a lot. But Hannah was invested in this right from
the beginning. Should make stems. Sh'd come up with ideas, Joachima and I would work on those together, and David and I would work on them together, would go back to Hannah Rick. That's just a constant game of things evolving.
And Hannah also brought together the most incredible group of musicians and we recorded the score live and that was one of my favorite days during the whole process where we were able to you know, there a song sheets that said Underland score and come in just this some of the world's most incredible musicians would then just bring it to life and yeah, I haven't heard a day like that for a while. It's incredible.
What was it like findly singer with an audience.
Yeah, it was quite a thing of an audience because you before we permitted at Tebecca, not many people had
seen the film. You know, you do a few screening to sort of press in industry and people within like within the team and so the extended team to sort of get notes from people, but it really is it was its first outing, and people was sort of I remember, you know, there's a constriction point in the film about halfway through whether strands tightened the physical sort of space around the people in the film Titans, And I'd always wandered that I'd wanted an audience to sort of feel that,
and I was sitting in the room that people seem to be making me recognises. So it was a great joy for us all to sit there and feel like, yeah, you know, it's a it's a film and one that we emerged with from the Jaws of the underworld sort of thing.
Is there a good place for people to keep up on the film and with you so they know where it's playing.
I would say Sandbox website, Sandbox on Instagram. They are Sandbox films are excellent at posting all the news. It's going to be at DC Docs on Friday thirteenth, before it's last two screenings at Tribecca this coming weekend, and then who knows where next, but hopefully we'll get a European premere and then I would like to be used about where it might be durable, where people can see it more widely.
I can't imagine seeing this on the big screen. It's got to be such a treat.
Oh, I hope you get too goods. Yeah, bigger the better at it. Yeah, I mean we shot it. We shot it so cinema, Rubens dies so cinematic. You know, we've mixed in in five to one and may who noticed one day to be able to release an autos as well. I sorry, we mixed the atmos. We've delivered in five to one. But you know, we've designed this and made this to be seen and experienced in the most igmssive way that it can be, and I hope people do get to see it in the cinema in the first instance.
Yeah, mister Pettittt, thank you so much for your time. It was great talking with.
You, absolutely pleasure you two. Thank you so much.
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