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“Dark, Difficult, Dank Spaces”: Rob Petit on His Tribeca World Premiere Underland
Underland Based on British author Robert Macfarlane’s non-fiction book of the same name, Underland, the feature debut from Rob Petit, investigates the world hidden beneath our feet. In particular, the film ventures into the depths of a cave system in Mexico once used for ancient Mayan rites; a Canadian dark matter research facility located two kilometers beneath the surface; the exhilarating, if treacherous, storm drain system beneath Las Vegas; and a haphazardly abandoned uranium mine in the American Southwest.
Composed of six chapters strung together by hypnotic narration from Sandra Hüller, Underland literally probes the human drive for discovery and, conversely, the inherent consequence of exploration. Some of these questions are existential: What if intricate, costly research yields no discernible answers? In what ways have our past excursions into the Earth caused incalculable environmental damage? How can our hyper-stratified society justify the migration of destitute people into the bowels of makeshift and highly perilous subterranean shelters?
At an economical 79 minutes, the film oscillates with remarkable precision between these locales while also crafting ample space to ruminate. The soundscape entrances almost as much as the striking cinematography, allowing senses of sight and hearing to realistically adapt or heighten depending on the place being documented. Produced in part by Sandbox Films and Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa Pictures—both organizations that have a history of championing films with stark scientific slants—Petit’s film finds unlikely illumination in the pitch black.
The London-based filmmaker and I dug into Underland during a Zoom call the week before its Tribeca world premiere on June 5. The filmmaker shed light on the mission to craft a “dark fairytale,” fears of channeling the folly of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and the ancient instrument utilized by composer Hannah Peel for the film’s haunting score.
Filmmaker: You’ve collaborated with Robert Macfarlane in the past, namely on the short film Upstream, but I’m interested in what motivated you to adapt this book as your feature debut.
Petit: Upstream is a strange little film. It follows the course of a river all the way to its source, and it’s all shot from the air. We did it as an experimental visual art piece; we didn’t really have any ambitions for it, but it did grow into this project that reached a few people via BBC Four.
Rob had written this mighty book, and I don’t think I’d even finished the first chapter when I was struck by the feeling that this has an inherent tension that would be a gift to a film. Like Upstream, this was a journey from the world that we know— in this case, the surface—into strange and unfamiliar places. Many of the stories that Rob tells in this remarkable non-fiction book are on the other side of the difficulty and the effort of going through these places. I was just completely gripped by the idea. I thought that it would be inherently cinematic, though I didn’t know how to do it at that point. I did reach out to Rob and say, “I think there’s a film in this. Do you give me permission to dream about what that might be?” Luckily I started working with the incredible team at Spring [Films], André Singer and Lauren Greenwood. Then we met Sandbox and Jess Harrop, who supported us through the development process, then Protozoa with Ari [Handel] and Darren [Aronofsky]. Fortunately, it just grew and grew. It’s been the best team.
Filmmaker: Tell me about the process of securing locations and sources for the shoot. A lot of these places are famously inaccessible—what was the process of getting your crew on the ground?
Petit: We were developing this project during a series of lockdowns that we had in the UK around COVID. What that did mean is that a lot of the people who we identified as potential protagonists for the film were available and willing to talk about what they do. Lauren Greenwood and I had the most incredible few months where we spoke to people that we came to call “terranauts”—as in astronauts of the underworld—who sink beneath the surface in order to pursue knowledge. It really started with people and the various places that they tend to inhabit, whether those are storm drains or the cave systems of the Yucatan Peninsula. As you’ve identified, we then had to tackle the very real problem of how to get crew and kit into these places and come out with something that’s cinematic. Very early on, I started talking with the absolutely visionary cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps. Ruben is not just a creative force, but also incredibly practically-minded and a really brilliant problem solver. As soon as I started working with him, I remember feeling like we were gonna be able to pull this off.
Filmmaker: Yes, the film looks gorgeous, but I’m also intrigued by some of the other visuals that were clearly shot by your subjects, particularly in the uranium mine and Mexican cave system. How did you balance Ruben’s footage with theirs?
Petit: As soon as you sink beneath the surface, your lines of sight are obliterated. So there’s this problem of, “How do you see in the underland?” Of course that presented a problem to us as filmmakers, but it is also part of the story because it presents a problem to anyone who’s there for their work. It made absolute sense that we would have to fold in whatever devices our characters were using, be it LIDAR, a camera on the end of a probe that goes down an ice bore hole, or a camera on a drone that is capable of throwing UV light. Really, it was a case of owning the problem of how [does one] see? One of the chapters in the film is called “Seeing in the Dark.” This is the big obstacle to get over. So in answer to your question, it was part of the story, essentially, to fold in some of that material. But we had a level of cinematic ambition. Ruben and I, quite early on, settled on the idea that we would like to shoot a lot of the scenes from “our camera,” as we called it, as if it’s from the perspective of darkness. If you could embody darkness as a sort of all-seeing creature, what might it look like? The answer is that we, the human explorers in the underworld, would start to look like the aliens. The little beam of light that comes in the sea of dark. Ruben really embraced that idea and ran with it. It was an utter joy to be collaborating with him in these incredibly dark, difficult, dank spaces. It was always a challenge, but to then surface with the kind of images that Ruben and his brilliant camera assistant, Rich Savage, are capable of capturing, was a hard-won joy.
Filmmaker: Were there any spots that wanted to film but weren’t able to during that preliminary process mapping out the underground world you wanted to explore?
Petit: When we were working out where to film, it was essentially a case of drawing a journey map. The process of pitching the film, working out what it might be and deciding where to shoot was not just about making a list of cool places underground, but thinking about how we can connect these spaces. From the beginning, I wanted the film to move progressively deeper through the earth, but also deeper into meaning. Otherwise you’d just end up with a list of quirky and interesting places. Of course, we had this list of incredibly interesting and cinematic places, but we had to ask if they spoke to the other parts of the film. Did they allow us to uphold the central thesis of the film, which is really about coming to understand ourselves as a species within this concept of deep time? It’s this idea that we need to be thinking beyond the sort of short-termism of human decades and even centuries into something that’s much more about the kind of fossils we are leaving. Are we being good ancestors? This is the central question of the book. In drawing up a list of places, they all had to connect to that idea. So essentially, yes, there were always places that pulled us because they were sort of visually exciting, but we had to leave them by the wayside because they’re not part of that story.
Filmmaker: What was the process of getting permission to shoot at SNOLAB or the Las Vegas storm drain?
Petit: With SNOLAB, that had to be a real collaboration. I think it’s one of the most strictly managed and cleanest spaces in the world. Although it’s at the bottom of a mine and you have to walk through what must be one of the dustiest places in the world, once you get into the laboratory, they permit no more than a teaspoon’s worth of dust to pass through those doors over the course of an entire year. As you can imagine, a film crew bringing down a load of kit needs to spend a good few hours cleaning all of that in order to then be able to shoot.
In the case of the urban exploration scenes, that’s a little different. That might be more what you’d call an old school documentary approach, where we’re following a character in the public interest. On some of those shoots, although we had a solid plan and a lot of experience on the crew, we wouldn’t know exactly how it would go. We wouldn’t know who we would meet [underground], we wouldn’t know if we’d be able to get into places. But we had the most incredible ground support team. Of course, Lauren Greenwood and Jess Harrop from Sandbox were just incredible at building all of the considerations that you need to put around a team who are sneaking into a storm drain beneath the casinos of the Las Vegas strip. So, not without planning is the short answer. But the slight sense of nervousness made for an interesting sequence.
Filmmaker: The sonic elements of the film are particularly enchanting; it almost mimics the heightened sensitivity for hearing one develops when their vision is compromised. Can you tell me about working with composer Hannah Peel on the score as well as Sandra Huller on the narration?
Petit: Well, it’s exactly that. When you go underground into any of these spaces, your sight lines are stolen. Indeed, one of the first times we hear anyone talk in the film after the narration is Fatima, the caving archaeologist in the Yucatan. She says the first thing you notice [when you descend] is how the sound changes. I knew right from the beginning that we should be making a film in which the score and the soundscape was as much of an element as the locations and the characters.
Hannah was absolutely the first choice for composers who might be able to pull this off. She’s a genius and was often working with found sounds and the most incredible array of instrumentation. She used an instrument called a carnyx, which was an old war instrument that was, I think, also buried by Anglo-Saxons as a sort of offering to the gods before battle. So it has its own underworld mythology and it’s shaped a bit like a Minotaur. It’s a sort of beast of a face and it’s got this low guttural sound in it. She was just brilliant the way that she embraced it and worked with our supervising sound designer, Joakim Sundström, to find that boundary between score and sound design. Of course, we had to work out where one ended and the other began. We knew that that boundary would be a little more fluid than it is on most films. We wanted that dance to happen between the two, which it did. It was incredible to work with those two people who are absolutely at the top of their game.
I was also quite clear from the beginning that I didn’t want to pace the whole film with narration. I didn’t want people to feel like they were being spoken to by a God-like narrator. Quite early on, we’d stopped using the word narrator and we just started calling her the storyteller because the film fell into a sort of dark fairy tale format. When we were drawing up a list of voices, we were thinking about who could bring this quite strange text to life. Sandra was absolutely at the top of that list, we were just so blessed that she accepted it. It was astonishing to work with her. She was rehearsing into the microphone, and as soon as she read that first line, I was like, “Oh, this is going to be great.” She got the film in seconds. It was an incredible experience to have her breathe life into those words.
Filmmaker: I was delighted to read that you are also part of a comedy collective. Were there any particular moments where you found humor during the production of this film?
Petit: The one that does spring to mind is the absolute absurdity of taking 14 large cases of film equipment down through a cave system that is barely wider than your chest when you’re standing. We did that for two days, and the folly of that felt—not to draw too hefty a comparison—but you know that film Fitzcarraldo, where they dragged the steamboat over the mountain? It’s like, “Are we destined for madness here?” I think that we had to develop a bit of gallows humor about whether or not we were frankly even going to emerge with a film. So there were definitely some moments where all you could do was laugh, really.
Filmmaker: Did you or any of the crew have to overcome any feelings of claustrophobia?
Petit: We tested the whole crew before we even went down with the camera. We learned how to move underground and operate in caving environments, specifically in a cave system that actually does actually grow from the old ash tree where the film begins. You crawl through the trunk of this tree and you enter a 33,000 long foot cave system—and that’s just the bit that’s been explored. They know it’s longer because they’ve put tracer dye in and it’s popped out in a valley 12 miles to the south. Thankfully, no one had a freak out.
But then the next challenge became, “How do we light these spaces and what is the light?” Because if we were being completely factual about this, we’d all be sitting in the dark. But before we even got to that, we had to learn how to move with stuff and how to get it in and out of these places without knackering ourselves to such an extent that we’re then useless in terms of serving the film. There was a lot to learn and we made all sorts of mistakes. We learned things about spatial relativity. We’d spend all this time rigging complicated vertical descents and then we’d get the footage back into the edit suite and be like, “You can’t even tell it’s vertical.” So you then go, “Okay, well, if you want the camera on the Z axis looking down, you need falling water in order to tell the eye that it’s vertical.” There was a lot of experimenting in order to work out things that might now sound obvious, but you just don’t think of until you’re in that situation. Thankfully, we had the best producers who were not just tolerant of, but encouraging of that experimentation.
Filmmaker: You just mentioned the edit, and I noticed you worked with a variety of editors. Something impressive about the film is how tight the narrative is. Tell me about collaborating on the edit and keeping the film trim.
Petit: You know, we had to take a long, windy and very experimental path in order in order to get there. We had to let go of quite a lot of footage, some stuff that we had shot that we were wedded to because it had been incredibly effortful to get in the first place. I would say the process of editing was also a process of mapping, in that we were holding onto the idea that once the camera descends after the title, it doesn’t surface again until the end. Just before the end is our deepest point, not just topographically, but also in terms of meaning. I actually had this sketch on the back of a napkin—which I don’t have here, I don’t know why I’m looking around—but it’s in my studio and it’s an abstract shape that looks like a vortex. It was sort of the only note we needed. David Hill is an absolutely brilliant editor and very patient. We built the film, got two thirds of the way through [the edit] and went, “No, what we thought we knew was wrong, let’s go again.” We just kept doing it until it got as lean as it is.
Jess and Lauren [from Sandbox] and Ari Handel and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa, these guys were all so brilliant at giving notes. As a director, it’s always a scary thing getting notes from the team. But these guys were all absolutely top [notch] note-givers. Eventually, we settled on [the film being] a dark fairy tale. It’s Into the Woods, it’s one of the oldest stories there is.
Filmmaker: Are there any immediate recollections of a scene that was really incredible to capture that you were really sad to let go of in the edit?
Petit: Oh, for sure. I’m going through the filing cabinet here in my mind. We shot a lot more underwater [footage] of the cave diving sequence than is in the film. Ultimately, we had to ask the question of, “Are we repeating ourselves? “ If we were, then something had to give. I was very pleased that we were able to fold in some of that footage because we have the storyteller who is there as a guide and a ghost. Sometimes we were able to save footage that would become part of her world; it would be metabolized by her. So it could still remain as part of the fabric of the film. That felt very important because she was able to gently gesture at these other worlds and then steer us back onto the main thread.
Filmmaker: I read that you have a project about folkloric rites and rituals in England on the horizon, and I’d love to hear any other details or endeavors you’re willing to share.
Petit: I keep coming back to two things: rivers and ghosts. Ghosts and rivers—and possibly ghost rivers—are things that I’m writing about now. I tend to go into phases of writing and then generating images, so I’m having a period now where I’m concentrating more on words.
I’d really love to do some theater. I love the idea of working in something that ‘s only permanence is memory, those moments around the fire that can’t be replicated or even unnecessarily captured. Those are the fields I’m sort of turning to next, and I’d be honored if I got to make a film again soon with this team.
