Caddo Lake is a new thriller streaming on Max produced by M. Night Shyamalan and his company, Blinding Edge Pictures. Filmmakers Logan George and Celine Held were inspired to write the story when they “came across a photograph of the real Caddo Lake online, leading to many visits to the cypress forest that rests on the border of Texas and Louisiana.”
Shot on location in East Texas, the film follows a young woman (Eliza Scanlen) whose eight-year-old stepsister (Caroline Falk) unexpectedly disappears on the lake. Simultaneously, a man (Dylan O’Brien) investigates his mother’s death, which he feels is linked to the lake. They start to discover that the events connect in unexpected ways.
Held and George chatted with us about filming on Caddo Lake and their potential future projects.
HGL: I’m in Texas, just a few hours from Caddo Lake. I wanted to ask about filming on location and the challenges that come with it.
Celine Held: We specifically decided to film in the fall so there were no mosquitoes. But this film, in particular, is so specific with even weather. If it was raining, we could not do a scene because rain factors into the plot. You can’t just change the weather of a scene and be like, oh no, it’ll be this way. It has to be very specific every time. But that kind of stuff, we would have experienced whatever location unless we were on a stage.
Caddo Lake is very shallow, so you could only take these small johnboats out that were a flat bottom. Otherwise, you’d get stuck in the mud. We got stuck in the mud several times. We were in waders. Our cinematographer’s waders got a little rip in it when he came off the boat at one time, and he’s standing in the water with a camera on his shoulder and could not walk forward. It’s stuff like that.
Oh, and the mud was so intense. We had this perfect location, but we were there for five days. For the first two days, it was usable. By the third day, it was like we had to get trees on sea stands and fake another part of the location for the original because the mud was so turned over and thick.
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HGL: That is exactly what I imagined, being a bit familiar with that area. But I love that you filmed in Texas and on location.
Logan George: Well, the pro of it is that every trip out onto the lake was like a unique experience. You really never know what you’re going to get or see. Because we’re beholden to the elements and so much is shot outside, there’s magic that gets to come in, in so many ways. When wind passes through the Spanish moss, those are things that we couldn’t anticipate. But we were out there to capture so much of it, which is cool.
HGL: Caddo Lake becomes its own character. It has such a vast presence in the film. And Dylan O’Brien and Eliza Scanlen were really out there on these boats; how did they handle that while filming emotional scenes?
Logan George: Yeah, it was super important to us. We knew we were going to see full-body shots of them boating around. They had to look like it was the car they’d driven for dozens of years. So we had them come out weeks before production and started to learn how to drive their specific boats, how to tie off correctly, just all the ins and outs of that. That was the last thing they were thinking about when we’re throwing a scene and emotional dialogue on top of that moment. They could feel really confident in those vehicles.
Celine Held: There’s a moment where Ellie is trying to get back fast to her parent’s house because her stepsister has just gone missing. She is driving it super fast, and she’s on the phone. So she’s on the phone driving incredibly fast in this boat, and we have a walkie in the boat to communicate with her. It’s basically completely up to Eliza.
Logan George: She’s parallel with our boat, not trying to have our wakes cross it, super challenging stuff.
Celine Held: It was taxing and unglamorous, and they were so, so down.
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HGL: That was the exact scene I had in mind with my question. M. Night Shyamalan is known for plot twists, and Caddo Lake has plenty, which we won’t go into here. Can you discuss the complexities of unraveling a story while keeping audiences in the dark until you’re ready to reveal it?
Logan George: Yeah, it was a very delicate exercise for us in the way the story is constructed with these dual protagonists. You’re following these two people, and seeing how they connect became one of the fundamental structure points of how the story was told. And that was exciting to us because it’s something, hopefully, you’ve never seen before.
But it meant being beholden to this inner cutting between them and making sure that both characters are progressing in their plots at the same time and getting to the same emotional stakes, relatively at around the same time. We found that that was really important.
I think the biggest thing that Night and his Blinding Edge team were continually challenging us on was this idea of just being one-to-one with those characters. If you ever got too far ahead in terms of the machinations of the twists or what the character was deciding to do, an audience could just disconnect. It’s too confusing. I can’t invest in this emotionally. So really making sure that all those revelations have the space within the edit to play out and land. Giving an audience clues to be able to stay tethered and connected to the story, but not spoon-feeding them. It’s a really delicate balance.
HGL: I can confirm there’s no spoon-feeding on this one. Did you feel pressure to ensure Caddo Lake met the expectations that come with a Shyamalan-produced film?
Celine Held: Yeah, totally. He’s a household name. This is our second feature. We’ve had some shorts that have done well in festivals and done a first feature that went to some cool festivals. So, reading that first draft for him, he made us take bigger swings. I think that’s a testament to the type of filmmaker he is.
For now, in our career, we’re so happy to be under his tutelage. He made sure the movie lived up to his name, I think, in so many respects. But we do hope as we continue on, the audience will have us in a genre space where we’re able to make our own name for ourselves.
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HGL: Absolutely. I covered as press at SXSW when you had film screenings. I wanted to ask if there’s a genre that you feel more comfortable in.
Celine Held: Okay, so, this was a thing for us; we realized in our first feature that the last 20 minutes turned into a bit of a thriller. We’re like, I think we love it. Mouse and Caroline both went to SXSW, and Topside also went to SXSW; they’re all kind of thrillers, really. They’re all these real-time narratives. And then it’s in this one space.
You think it’s a drama like Caroline, which stars Caroline Falk, who also stars in Caddo Lake, and you feel like you’re walking into a drama. But then it becomes this thing where, hopefully, you get into a weird position on your seat, and you’re sweating through your shirt; that’s our goal. We realized we love this space.
The next things we’re writing right now, they’re all in this space. So we’re gonna stay here for a bit.
HGL: Can you speak about what you’re working on?
Logan George: We’re very location-based filmmakers. If you can find a location that is so inspiring right off the ground, that’s your first foot in the door in terms of unlocking an experience that someone hasn’t had before while watching a movie. So, our next feature right now takes place in a diamond mine in Mongolia.
HGL: Oh, my gosh.
Logan George: Don’t hold us to that in a couple of years when we get to making it. But we’re really excited about it. And it feels like the next step, the next evolution. Our first feature was all in a tunnel underground in New York City. Now we’re in this bayou lake on the Texas-Louisiana border.
Celine Held: It’s all about mazes and pathways…
Logan George: The most difficult, the most dirty, and dangerous.
