Jumping into The Dive With Director Maximilian Erlenwein

Remaking a movie is always a challenge. The first is finding something new to say or do, to make it fresh. When writer/director Maximilian Erlenwein was asked to remake scuba dive survival thriller Breaking Surface as The Dive, his big change was to not just set it in the ocean, but film it there too.

Adapted by Erlenwein from Joachim Hedén's 2020 drama, The Dive relocates the aquatic action from a Norwegian fjord to the warmer Mediterranean waters surrounding the island of Malta. However, the basic drama remains the same: two sisters (Louisa Kraus as May and Sophie Lowe as Drew) go for a dive to help clear the very obvious tension between them. When one gets stuck under a fallen boulder on the sea floor, it's up to the other to find a way to get her up before her air runs out.

Austin Chronicle: The original Breaking Surface is great, so I can imagine there'd be a certain reticence to take this on.

Maximilian Erlenwein: When I was approached by the production company to do a remake of a film, immediately I said no. Usually I don't like remakes, and most of the time they suck. But I read the screenplay, and the thing is that I've done a lot of scuba diving in my life, and I love diving. And for me, as a German director, to get a script offered like this, I couldn't not do it.

So first I read the screenplay, and went, 'Well, how can I do my version of this? What can I bring to the table to make it my film?' So I started writing, and I changed the characters and a few of the story elements.

The biggest difference is that the original was shot only in the studio, and I wanted to shoot as much in the ocean as possible, to capture that world I love so much. Diving is like flying on a different planet. It's just amazing and beautiful, and I thought, 'If I can just capture a little of that feeling I have when I'm diving, that's enough for me.' And to make it as terrifying as possible, of course.

AC: Shooting in open water and shooting in a tank, both are hard, so you've just got to decide what kind of tough you want to have, especially when most of the film takes place underwater. How do you handle basics like casting and location scouting?

ME: It's crazy making a film underwater in the ocean. Everyone tells you, 'Don't do it! Don't do it! It's a setup for disaster!' When there's water involved, you always run into problems.

But then again, shooting in the ocean, it's images that people are not used to, and I thought I can achieve that immersive feeling without VFX. We didn't have the budget for big VFX and big CGI, so everything has to be real. Then it's choosing the right people to work with, and we had an amazing underwater cinematographer and an amazing dive crew from Malta.

We stepped into every trap in the beginning. We did everything wrong, but after a few days, you get into it and you get more effective. The whole machinery, you have to simplify it. You can't go into the ocean with a big crew. You have to make the crew very small, very flexible, and react to the weather – and then it's actually very fun and very rewarding. When the weather is right and the sun is right, and you're 30 meters under water and you get this one amazing shot, that's an amazing feeling. It's like waiting for the mountain lion for two days in the jungle, and finally he arrives.

AC: And shooting off Malta, that's a pretty busy stretch of water. I guess it was harder to keep shots clear than just closing off a street.

ME: For real. We had tourists diving into the shots. I'm on the monitor on the boat and see people in the background. I go, 'What is this?'

It's busy waters, so you just have to be flexible and go to the other corner of the island. Every morning, you wake up, you check the wind, and the wind gives you a clue how the current will be and how choppy the waters will be on that side of the island, and you have these amazing fishing boat captains who also work for film, and they know where to go. So it's all about flexibility.

AC: So what was the toughest single shot to get?

ME: The most difficult thing, surprisingly, was not a spectacular shot. We just wanted to do an over-the-shoulder shot of one of the actors, and the other actor is 20 meters away.

The thing is, nothing in the water stays still. Everything is moving. So you're on the monitor, and something is floating away, and you're not sure what it is. Is it the camera operator? Is it the shoulder? Is it the other actor? And then you try to set it up again, and everything is just floating away. If you have one element in the water, just one diver, the cinematographer can adapt to it. But if you have more than one element – a boat and a diver, or two divers – that was the most challenging shot to get.

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The Dive is available on VOD and in theatres, Aug. 25.