Director Ishana Night Shyamalan directs Dakota Fanning in the new thriller The Watchers, which was filmed in Ireland and, like the A.M. Shine horror novel upon which it is based, is influenced by Irish folklore and the enchanting landscape of the Emerald Isle.
Shyamalan’s film follows Mina (Fanning), an American living in Galway whose car breaks down while driving through an untouched forest in the west of Ireland. Mina finds shelter with three other people trapped in the woods. Come sundown, they must remain inside their structure – “the coop” – lest they be attacked by the mysterious creatures of the forest that come out at night. These beings observe them from outside through one-way glass. To paraphrase the film’s tagline, you can’t see the Watchers, but they see everything.
The discovery of the Watchers’ identity and backstory is obviously a huge spoiler that neither Shyamalan nor Fanning would directly address during their recent interviews with IGN. Nevertheless, they did their best to shed light on the world of The Watchers and why Ireland itself is integral to the film. (These interviews have been paired and edited for clarity.)
IGN: What do you think it is about Ireland and its land that makes so many of its people truly believe in the supernatural?
Ishana Night Shyamalan: I don't know. Probably, there must be some historical grounding for it. But truly when I was there, I just felt this kind of otherworldly essence to the place. I think it feels very much like the trees there and the hills and all, and even the water is very spiritually charged. I'm always of the belief that I think mythology must come from somewhere that's real, and I think Ireland is one where it's really existed for a long time. It still exists within the psyche of the people there, which is so cool to me.
Dakota Fanning: Well, I think that Irish people in Ireland, like you're saying, they have such a strong connection to that folklore and to the Celtic myth and those ancient fairy tales. And I think it's such a wonderful thing. And you do feel it when you're there, and the nature there is so next-level beautiful. And it feels magical and it feels very spiritual because it's so postcard perfect, most things that you're looking at. So definitely, you can feel that ancient myth that's very present when you're there and the stories that people tell and the songs that they sing and how that mixes with the pub culture. You know what I mean? It's just all of it, and it's very special.
I feel so grateful that we filmed it there because the book is set there and it was written there. And so we filmed in Galway and we filmed in these forests in Wicklow right outside of Dublin and really got the Irish spirit authentically. And sometimes, you're supposed to be somewhere, but you're in Cleveland or something, pretending that it's somewhere else, which sometimes that's just the way it has to be. But when you are able to actually go to the place where the movie's set, it's always extra special.
IGN: What makes the character of Mina a good vessel through which to explore this world?
Shyamalan: I was very interested, and this is also how it exists in the book, but in, kind of, putting someone who felt hyper-grounded at the center of the story, which is somewhat more surreal and experiential. So it was very much about putting a very modern, with-it person in this anomalous storyline and seeing how they would react as a voice of the audience. So she, throughout the piece, is sort of meant to mimic the questions that you're having and challenge in the way that you would as an audience member. So that's the intention there, is that you have that kind of human grounding amongst it all.
IGN: I have not read the book. Was she an American in the book as well?
Shyamalan: She was not. She wasn't quite designated where she was from in the book, but I believe she was supposed to be from Galway. And I sort of made this choice of making her American because I am, because I just felt like I could write her better in that sense, and to make the feeling of her isolation and her being far from home even more extreme.
IGN: Dakota, can you talk about Mina’s psychology and what she learns from this horrible experience she goes through?
Fanning: I think we meet her at a time where she's really still running from her past. She hasn't reconciled the traumas that she's been through and the grief that she's experienced, and she feels very still broken inside and doesn't really know who she is or where she's going and has isolated herself because of that. And I really thought of her as a character that's a searcher. I think we all know those people that are always searching, always looking, always dabbling. And so I felt like that really was who she was to me. And I can obviously relate to feeling moments of stagnation or moments of uncertainty. I think that we all can relate to that. So I could see parts of myself in her experience.
I think she's only able to confront all of that when she's confronted by these supernatural, surreal things or this experience in the forest allows her to confront those parts of herself that she's buried so deep. And then being able to actually heal from it and forgive herself is a big part of it in the story and to let people back in and, yeah, to heal. I love with movies like this when you're making a film that is of a very specific genre when you can still weave in a very human story. And I felt like this, when I read it, had the possibility to really do that. And that's also what I tried to bring to it.
IGN: What do you think "the coop" symbolizes?
Shyamalan: To me, the coop is very much a sort of space, a representation of the human essence. So we designed it to have these various vignettes within it that were representative of human life. So somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat, somewhere to watch, somewhere to listen. It was very much thinking about the archetype of humanity and then putting anyone in there, having that kind of dynamics that would develop being on this kind of stage. So it's like, to me, the box, it's like humans. This is what humans are, this is what we feel, and this is what we do within a very isolated space.
IGN: You could totally do a stage show version of this story too.
Shyamalan: Oh, yeah. Oh, that's cool. I love it. Yeah, that was very intentional in terms of the style of the coop as well. Me and my production designer looked at a lot of images of stage lighting and the kind of various pieces that would be there that looked like they've been pulled from different times. So it was a very intentional thing to make it feel that way.
IGN: Obviously, you can't get away from M. Night Shyamalan. You're his daughter, he's a producer on this film. But as you were designing the film, the shots, the sequences, and writing it and everything, were there things in your mind like, "People will think that's too much like my dad," or there are things that you know from having worked with him like, "Oh, he would do it that way, so I deliberately don't want to call attention to something that he might do"?
Shyamalan: Yeah. I think it crossed my mind at certain moments that if it felt too similar to him, his work, that maybe there might be a detriment there, but I really found that all of the decisions for me became very natural as soon as I started making them. I think my dad and I have very different approaches to shot-making, and though there's a similar tone to our visuals, I think we're drawn to different colors and different patterns and things like that. So it was very natural that this world feels of a similar place but is very different when you're actually experiencing it. So I just tried to listen to myself as much as possible and kind of hone in on those things that I found beautiful about each frame and each image in the movie.
IGN: Could you talk about filming in an actual forest and the visual shot-making challenges of that? Did you have everything mapped out in your head of how you were going to shoot these things ahead of time and did that change on the day you got there?
Shyamalan: It was quite a rude awakening at the beginning, I think, to discover that the shots that I had boarded and planned were going to be very hard to accomplish just in terms of getting equipment up there. I'm very much a filmmaker who loves to move the camera. I love to, every shot, have some different movement and it to all be connecting. And that's very difficult to get those precise moves in a very dense, uneven space. So it took a lot of exploring different techniques and different types of camera moves and equipment to get the things that we wanted to get and a lot of zoom lenses in there, so we didn't have to build dolly tracks, but it was wonderful.
And then the other thing was, from the beginning, I really wanted to create this sense that anywhere you look, the forest is unending, so you can never catch a glimpse of anything that feels like an exit. So that was actually one of the greatest challenges, being in there is that, once you have your lens up, anything, even light coming from very far away, feels like an opening. So we had to be very particular about what sections of the forest we shot in and where we were pointed at.
IGN: Did you guys have to hike half an hour or something into the woods with the cast and crew? How far into the woods did you actually go?
Shyamalan: It wasn't crazy. This was kind of a large set of woods that was set above in the Wicklow Mountains, sort of above a parking lot. There was about, I would say, we had to do a five-, 10-minute hike uphill to get to the spot where we were shooting, and ended up paving something so we could get a little bit easier access into the forest, but it was quite difficult. We really were shooting in the middle of this massive thing. I was out of breath a lot. I had to use my inhaler a lot. So it's wonderful.
IGN: I hope you get to go back to Ireland sometime, just as a tourist to have some fun.
Shyamalan: Thank you. I'm eager to go back.
The Watchers opens in North America on June 7 and internationally June 5.
