This article contains major spoilers forCaddo Lake.
Caddo Lakeis a brand-new sci-fi thriller that was produced by one of the genre’s most well-known directors, M. Night Shyamalan. Streaming now onMax, it tells two seemingly separate stories that become linked through some clever twists and turns that fans of M. Night will be familiar with. Arriving on the streaming service just in time for the Halloween season,Caddo Lakegives fans of the genre plenty of mystery and intrigue to chew on.
Game Rant sat down withCaddo Lake’s co-directors Celine Held and Logan George to discuss the movie in detail. They talked about their experience ofworking with M. Night Shyamalan, shooting on location out on the lake, and also gave a hint at what their future projects might look like.This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Caddo Lake’s Directors on Coming Up With the Movie’s Concept
Q: How did you come up with a concept forCaddo Lake?
Held: It just started from this photo that I found on Reddit of Caddo Lake. It was May 2020, and we were stuck in this really small studio apartment. We decided to drive down and see it for ourselves because of this photo, we just couldn’t get it out of our heads. It felt otherworldly, and we’d been looking for something where we could capitalize on an environment that would be inherently cinematic in a way we hadn’t seen before. We were talking a lot about our parents at the time, because of the pandemic. I mean, we couldn’t even hug them, and it got us thinking about relationships with parents in general.
George: My mom passed away in 2019, and Celine had mentioned these conversations she had with her, these sorts of long talks they had, where my mom was describing these stories from her life. Celine was telling me about them, and I realized I hadn’t even heard some of those stories myself. It almost sounded like a totally different person, and so it sort of brought up this question for us, how well do you really know your parents? They’ve lived this whole other life, so sort of swimming in that idea of how much is unknown about what is really one of the most intimate relationships that a person has. Your mom or your dad, or your chosen family, whoever raised you.
I think that, combined with this lake, we felt we had something. We would go out on the lake a bunch, we lived off the lake for like, two to three months, writing a draft of the script, and we just got lost all the time. We’re in these dinky little kayaks, and the people that lived off the lake would tell stories all the time about how everyone gets lost.
Some people have to stay out overnight on some of the islands as they can’t find their way back until morning. There was this sort of common ground over this lake that we couldn’t really master. There was so much that was unknown about it, the twists and turns. It’s somaze-like, and we drew parallels with the unknown elements of our parents’ lives that we touched on earlier.
Q: What’s it like working as co-directors? Are you each responsible for different things, or is everything a joint responsibility?
Held: I think what it allows us to do is be totally prepared. There’s not really a question of, for example, “Why are we putting the camera over there?” or “Why are they saying this line?” We’ve had to have all of those discussions, sometimes, and of course, sometimes there are disagreements. It really forces you to both get on the same page.
As a solitary director, you would do that on your own, so for us to have to be able to talk it out, really helps. Hopefully, when we call cut in production, I can run to our director of photography, and Logan can run to the actors, and we’re saying the same thing. This results in a clear vision because we are totally aligned. That’s not to say we’re so into the magic of production and being able to be flexible and capture those little things that makemaking a movieso exciting.
George: Sometimes we see different things or are passionate about different aspects of a shot or a scene, and we have to prioritize that a lot of the time. When we call cut, it’s like, we don’t even need to talk, we both know what happened. It’s the same with writing, too. By the time we’re through a script, there’s no confusion around who wrote which scene because it’s just been traded and sort of thrown back and forth so many times.
Shooting On Location in Caddo Lake
Q: Did the movie’s plot deviate much from the original script as you were filming?
Held: Of course, some bits changed. Most of the things that I can think of right now are things that changed in post-production, and we were able to alter them with a reshoot. For example, in the scene when Ellie runs out to the dock finding that the boat is missing, and she and Daniel kind of go at it, it was raining.
We realized it couldn’t rain. We had to film in between it raining. Something else that changed after we started shooting was the strength of the relationship between Daniel and Ellie. It became so profound in production that we needed a scene to wrap up their relationship. That scene was a reshoot added later because we felt that he actually changed the course of Ellie’s trajectory.
George: We were totally beholden to the weather—obviously the bulk of the film is outside on the lake. Then we, ourselves as a crew, would sort of change these locations as we worked on them, because your crew is tracking through this swampland, and the actors are moving through one particular area, churning up a lot of mud, and pretty quickly what started as a little bit of water, turned into two, three feet of thick mud. You almost physically couldn’t move the same way you were moving during take one by take six.
There was a lot of improvisation around building out some of those scenes where we would come in with a plan to shoot right there, and then by day four, it’s like a total mud bath. You had to completely change your idea of how you were going to film the scene. We also give our actors a lot of flexibility with the script. We’re not very precious about our lines. As long as the essence of a scene is communicated, and it feels believable, moment to moment, scene to scene, we’re open to dialogue changing, depending on the texture of the scene. If it doesn’t sound authentic, we change it.
Caddo Lake’s Payoff Should Feel Satisfying for Audiences
Q: When creating a movie like this, how do you decide how much of the story to give to the audience and how much to leave them to piece together themselves?
George: It’s ultimately a very subjective thing, and I do think you want to leave your filmmaking open enough so that people can have those realization moments for themselves. As far as the fundamental twist of the story of what you’re watching and how these two characters connect, it was a delicate balance.Once the audience understands the twist, we didn’t want them to feel cheated, or that narratively we were hiding things.
I think our approach was to leave everything we possibly could in plain sight, but be very conscious of how much we were showing in each character’s timeline, to make it feel like it was a satisfying realization. You shouldn’t ever feel like, “Oh, there was no way for me to ever figure this out.” It should be like, “I saw all those breadcrumbs, and now I’m piecing it together.”
Held: Logan and I met at NYU a long time ago. He had taken a class on game design, and that had a big influence on writing this script. For example, Celeste’s red hair. Both actresses who played her in different times, Diana Hopper and Lauren Amber, have red hair. We talked about this a lot because Logan was a little nervous that we were just telegraphing it from the very beginning.
George: It’s the same principle as in a video game. You want to feel like you as the player can make that jump because the game has told you everything you need to do to make that jump. It’s your fault as the player if you don’t make the jump. I think you’re able to feel the same way abouthow a narrative plays out within a movie.
Working With M. Night Shyamalan
Q: What was it like working with M. Night Shyamalan, who produced the movie?
Held: Night’s been incredible from the very beginning. He read the script multiple times. We come from anindie film background. I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of that, it’s who we are, but he read it, and he said that his producer, Ashwin, had also read it, and Ashwin just didn’t get it. Night really helped us make sure that the audience was one with our characters, and that they understood the big twists. The way that he described it was that we were doing a quadruple black flip of twists. If the audience only saw a small portion of that, they would only see one flip.
George: He explained that you want to get credit for doing the quadruple flip, not just a single one! So you have to give the audience the space and the time to acknowledge all these revelations and twists. He is so articulate, especially in post-production. He’s able to sort of diagnose a problem really quickly, and fix it. He just cares so much about the audience’s experience of the film. Some other filmmakers are like, this is the film I’m going to make, and if you don’t like it, tough. Night is the opposite of that. It’s like he wants every single person that’s sitting down to watch it to have the most cathartic, enjoyable experience possible.
Held: There was one thing, though, that we fought for because we felt like it was important in this story. When you look back atM. Night Shyamalan’s filmography, there’s no one usually pulling the strings when the twist is revealed. We wantedCaddo Laketo be the same. It’s something that this specific family got caught up in, and we’re not going to explain how it works, because that’s not important to the story. That felt like something we went back and forth with Night a lot regarding, “Do we have someone, or do we have something controlling these events?”
George: We ultimately decided that it was sort of pulling the story so far away from the emotional element, and we felt that at the script level. It just always felt like it was almost beside the point. We really wanted to kind of lean into the idea that these characters just sort of get swept up into another world.
Q: What is your biggest takeaway from working with M. Night Shyamalan?
Held: I think there are several little gems he says that we’ll always stick in our heads. One is his ‘cards up, cards down’ analogy. In other words,usingThe Sixth Senseas an example, cards up, “I see dead people,” cards down, Bruce Willis’ character is actually dead. We didn’t quite totally grasp that in this film, but we’re taking it into our next work in a big way. Night cares immensely about the viewer—that was something that we learned from him in doing a few test screenings of this movie, and it will certainly stay with us.
George: For me, it’s his willingness to kind of iterate as needed. Not being afraid of the process of actually changing things that need to change. This is a healthy thing. This household name filmmaker, who is sort of like a mastermind, for all intents and purposes, to recognize and see him making the same mistakes, realizing things don’t work… seeing those machinations on a moment-to-moment level was really fun.
Q: What’s next for you both? Are there any details of upcoming projects you can share?
Held: We’re working on a couple of different projects right now. We are already working on the next feature film. We’ve essentially realized that we love locations.
Our first film,Topside, takes place in the tunnels beneath New York City.Caddo Laketakes place on this incredible lake that we fell in love with. For our third film, we found that we’re a little bit obsessed with mines. Specifically, we found this particular mine. We are writing a story that takes place within it, and we’re really excited about it. It almost feels like we are trying to make it more and more difficult for our cast and crew to film. We will probably end up doing a project on Mars someday!
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Caddo Lakeis streaming now on Max.
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