Jordan Hoffman: Regarding the 3D aspect, there’s not a lot of moments where things are flying at the camera. Are you part of the philosophy where 3D is more for the psychological, sub-conscious effect?
Alister Grierson: I think so. Yes, our philosophy was not to have things flying at peoples’ faces. That’s the whole structure of the Fusion camera system – to make the 3D experience as comfortable as possible for the audience. So that they really could forget that they’re in a 3D movie, but their perception in stereo is heightening the experience of watching the film. If that’s true or not, I’m not sure. There are emerging studies about how the brain is responding to this 3D stimuli and so on.
But for us, the feeling was an underwater cave and 3D built like a perfect marriage in terms of representing something. Our 3D is quite conservative. It’s like Avatar, we’re not trying to stretch peoples’ eyeballs around. At the end of the day, we just want them into the story. This is a big thing we got from Jim, not only a working methodology but a philosophy we could take and experiment with ourselves. The big difference between Avatar and us, of course, is that we’re all live-action, so our problems were very different than Jim’s problems. His problems were CGI and motion-capture...
Jordan Hoffman: You had actual humans to deal with.
Alister Grierson That’s right. To keep alive!
Jordan Hoffman: So what are your some of your favorite disaster movies or scenes?
Alister Grierson: When I was a kid, I was a big John Carpenter fan. Escape from New York had a really big effect on me. It’s funny, you watch it now and it’s sort of campy, but at the time I really loved it. I think that started a spark with my film ideas. As we were making this picture, we talked about some of the things like The Poseidon Adventure, Gene Hackman back in the day. The other thing we talked about was Deliverance, and tried to find a marriage of the two, aesthetically. Deliverance really feels like grounded, real people. It’s just them fighting their own fears, at the end of the day. It’s man vs. nature, and man confronted by his own fears, and there’s subtextual stuff going on as well.
Jordan Hoffman: Have you seen Sanctum with an audience yet?
Alister Grierson: Only the test screening, like a pure audience that had nothing to do with the film, about two months ago. We got a really great response, it was really exciting.
Jordan Hoffman: So they were squirming at the moments you wanted them to squirm?
Alister Grierson:Oh, yeah. We’re freaking people out. (laughs) It’s just so great when you hear 400 people gasp together, or laugh together.
