Attack of the Drive-In: Scott Derrickson Opens Up About The Gorge

If Scott Derrickson was booking a drive-in double bill of one rom-com and one classic creature feature, what would it be? Easy, he replies. “Palm Springs and Cloverfield.”

It’s not just that it would be a chance to see the pandemic-era time travel comedy on the big screen, Derrickson said (although that doesn’t hurt). “Palm Springs is the best rom-com of the last decade, and I’ve seen it probably 12 times. We put it on all the time. We fall asleep to it. And Cloverfield, I was just thinking about it yesterday, and I was thinking about creature features, and it’s in my top five. I think that movie is a much greater film than even people who like it realize.”

Rather than finding a drive-in and hunting down prints of those movies, it might be easier to just watch his new Apple TV+ film, The Gorge, about an American sniper, Levi (Miles Teller), and his Russian counterpart, Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who are stationed on opposite sides of a mysterious, mist-shrouded canyon with one instruction: Don't let whatever's in there out.

It’s a film that stands out in Derrickson’s filmography because, after years of adding a certain panache and intellect to stories of devils (Sinister), serial killers (The Black Phone), and superheroes (Doctor Strange), now he’s made his first real, unabashed B-movie. A chimera of romance, action, and horror, Derrickson describes The Gorge as “a super-expensive drive-in movie. There’s deeper levels to it, but this is a movie that you can just turn on and be surprised at the wild, nutty ride that it is.”

After all, if making a good old-fashioned crowd-pleaser was good enough for Akira Kurosawa, Derrickson reasoned that it was good enough for him. Speaking of the Japanese master, he said, “He’d make these incredibly entertaining but deeply artful, deeply meaningful movies, and I think he got to the point with The Hidden Fortress where he just goes, ‘I’m just going to make a movie that’s fun to watch,’ and he would go in with the writers every day and create a situation and go, ‘OK, so this happens – get them out of that.’”

Another reason The Gorge stands out within Derrickson’s back catalog is because it’s his first film working from someone else’s script since his 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. He noted that he usually preferred to film his own scripts, especially the ones he writes with his Austin-based creative partner and The Gorge producer C. Robert Cargill, and took some convincing to change his mind here.

The script for The Gorge by Zach Dean (Fast X, The Tomorrow War) had made the infamous Black List of great unproduced films. However, when it was initially brought to him by production studio Skydance, Derrickson said no because he didn’t feel the structure worked. There were just too many genres – action, thriller, romance, horror – all crammed in. He credited Cargill with convincing him to give it a second look. “He was the one who said, ‘You should do it,” Derrickson said, and he began to rework the script to amplify some elements, most especially the mystery of the gorge itself. “I started to feel like, ‘I want to do it because it’s so unusual, and because it’s not just trying to tackle two genres, not just three genres, but five or six.”

However, the biggest surprise within The Gorge and for fans of Derrickson’s movies is that no one expected him to make a romance – Derrickson included. “I never thought I would,” he admitted.

It wasn’t the action, or the intrigue, or the hidden evil in the chasm that ultimately captured his interest in the script. It was love. He explained that in the three years prior to being offered the project, “I had fallen in love and gotten married [and] I couldn’t have made a love story before that.” It wasn’t simply that he was in the mood for love when it came to filmmaking, he added: “It was specially the idea these two people have this attraction and are drawn to each other, but there’s this chasm and they have to work at getting to know each other, and work on getting together. That metaphor really spoke to me.”

Yet genre mashups like this can be a struggle. Steven Spielberg famously said that his screwball comedy, 1941, tried to stuff in too many elements and ended up as raisin soup (people like raisins and people like soup, but not in the same bowl). “It’s outlandish, what we’re trying to do,” Derrickson, and the love story helped him avoid imbalance. “It’s like a bunch of rainbows [but] the overarching rainbow is romance, and under that there’s this smaller sci-fi, action, horror, political thriller.” The connection between Drasa and Levi illuminates every other aspect of the story, even in the action sequences. “How they look at each other, how they work as a unit, how they put themselves in harm’s way for each other, how they touch each other as they move … I find all that so romantic.”

It all comes down to the chemistry between the two leads. But before he could think about whether the audience would buy them as love interests, Derrickson needed to be sure that they were convincing as world-class killers. “For the movie to work, you have to go, ‘OK, I believe she’s a sniper, I believe he’s a sniper.’” Yet that extra emotional click can only happen on set, “and luckily not only did they have great chemistry, they became really close friends making the movie, and that adds something to it.”

However, chemistry requires contact and the opening act – the very setup of the film – posed what can be called the Sleepless in Seattle problem. In memorable cinematic romances like When Harry Met Sally or Roman Holiday, the meet in meet-cute is everything and often the real start of the film. Yet in the 1993 classic, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are kept separate for much of the movie. However, that wasn’t a problem for Derrickson when it came to the physical divide between his lovers. After all, these aren’t regular rom-com characters. “I think that’s what interesting and easy to miss is that, given the isolation of their personalities and the requirements of their job, if they had access to each other, it would never happen. They would keep their guard up, they would not come together. It’s the safety of the distance that allows them to open the door and ease their way in, and they find out how much they like each other.” If anything, he added, “I think the most romantic part of the movie is when they’re communicating across 600 meters with binoculars and signs.”

It’s a plot point that may remind some audience members of the video for Taylor Swift’s 2009 single "You Belong With Me," where two young lovers communicate across the great divide between their bedrooms by scrawling marker pen messages on cardboard signs. “I had never seen that video until somebody brought it up online after the trailer came up,” Derrickson confessed. However, he’s OK with having the film connected with the ruling queen of pop: When he checked out Letterboxd reviews for The Gorge after an early screening, he found his favorite viewer description of the film: “‘Annihilation for Swifties.’ Nobody’s going to write a better review that that.”

The Gorge arrives on Apple TV+ on Feb. 14.