Scott Derrickson Explains What’s in The Gorge, What It Means, and How the Ending Changed

This article contains MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE GORGE.

There is a line of dialogue in the first act of The Gorge which is so grandiloquent, so full of genre promise, that it will give almost anyone pause. This includes Scott Derrickson, a director with more than 20 years in the business of crafting genre promises, and terrors, in films like Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

“The Gorge is the door to hell,” Miles Teller’s deeply troubled Army sniper Levi is warned in the script. “And we’re standing guard at the gate.” Upon coming across that gem of a line in Zach Dean’s screenplay, Derrickson realized he had to know what’s inside “the Gorge”—an almost mythical ravine shrouded in eternal fog and watched over by two sentries located on opposite watchtowers—and soon enough he’d make sure we all knew too.

“I got very excited and I felt like the mystery of what was down there was very compelling,” Derrickson says years later when we catch up with the filmmaker on the other side of entering that ravine. Indeed, that descent into the unknown became an obsession for a storyteller who admired Dean’s narrative tightrope-walk between a multitude of genres: horror, science fiction, paranoid political thriller, and even romance. But it was also an opportunity for the director of Doctor Strange and The Black Phone to create something new and relatively unseen even in the annals of genre cinema.

“I rewrote maybe a third of the script,” Derrickson confirms. “I felt when we got down into the Gorge, what was in there in the original script was too much like a traditional zombie movie. So most of the writing that I did on it was to try to create something more original down there.”

If you’ve seen the movie, you know what strange and weird shapes that ‘something’ took, and how it in turn shaped a story of a man, a woman, and the old-world divide between them. The implications of which extend far beyond just monsters waiting in the void…

What’s Inside The Gorge

When Anya Taylor-Joy’s Lithuanian sniper on the Eastern watchtower sees her counterpart fall beneath the mist at the midway point of The Gorge, more than just a cloud has been penetrated. The strangely idyllic and extended first act of the movie has likewise seen its serenity shattered. A lover is in danger, a line is crossed, and without hesitation Drasa is in free fall after him (albeit with a parachute in her case).

What awaits beneath is hellish, yet no less lyrical than the first act where the monsters beneath are described to be “Hollow Men,” a reference to a 1925 poem by T.S. Eliot. While Eliot was using images from folklore to describe the lost souls who returned home from World War I, Derrickson sought to literalize the ancient imagery of a dehumanized, infected presence. After all, the first thing we even see down there are roots which open up like the mouth of a Venus flytrap around poor Levi. 

“The attempt was to create a mythology that was not a populist mythology,” Derrickson explains. “I wasn’t drawing so much on cinema as I was on folk horror—the older classic idea of plant people, stickmen, sentient trees, which you get a bit of in Lord of the Rings. Things that cinema hasn’t been too preoccupied with.” Derrickson credits colleague David Bruckner’s The Ritual and the 1963 adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids as inspirations, but notes that in the realm of horror and science fiction cinema, he had a relatively wide-open field to make those ideas his own.

“The idea was to have this DNA blending of flora and fauna and insects, and to have very strange things like the tree roots that he is attacked by at the very beginning, and to set the tone that you might see just about anything down here.”

This includes a cavalry of Hollow (or plant) men that look like a pagan nightmare as they biologically blend with their steeds. It’s heavily teased that these were the soldiers sent into the Gorge during the late 1940s, but apparently the original plan was to be even darker. In the script, it’s confirmed that the leader among the Hollow Men is Levi’s predecessor in the West watchtower—the poor bastard who named these creatures after the Eliot poem.

“I actually shot more material revealing, for example, the Alpha… was Bradford Shaw, the first sentry in the West Tower, and who led the cavalry group down into the Gorge to try to destroy what was there and instead became infected and became part of it,” the director explains. “I thought dealing with the humanity of that was going to be necessary and important, but I continually found as I was making the movie that it was just getting in the way of the larger themes and the action, and tonally shifting things in a direction that wasn’t really working. So about a third of the way through production, I stopped shooting that and I instead tried to focus on the suffering that they were enduring.”

What’s left in the film raises a chilling question of how intelligent these creatures are, or what their intentions might be. Viewers can ascertain they probably do want to feed on Levi and Drasa, as indicated by the scraps of bones they keep in their hovels, but Derrickson admits he wanted to maintain an air of mystery about how unsettling things really get down there.

“Part of it is instinctive animal aggression,” Derrickson considers. “The intruder comes in and needs to be taken out. They’re sort of protecting on instinct what is their own space. That’s part of it, but it could be a lot of things. It could be sex. There’s no females down there. What happened to them?” 

The mystery invites second-guessing and speculation, but at the end of the day, the Gorge acts as a metaphor for several things, chief among them is a liberation from the type of compartmentalization and self-denial that can make a perfect soldier… and a broken human being. A hollow man. Says Derrickson, “What I discovered in the process of working on it is it is about truth revealed and it’s about secrecy, and the mutated, devastating results of secrets held for too long. The truth wants to get out. The truth wants to be known, and if you don’t let it out, it tends to come out in very terrible ways.”

This is indicative of the contrast between Levi and Drasa in the movie. While they are both soldiers pitted on literally opposing sides, Drasa seems much more balanced than Levi, who is selected by a woman called Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver) for this assignment because he admits he is unable to form personal attachments, either romantic or platonic. As he eventually tells Drasa though, if you keep burying your pain and secrets, eventually the graveyard gets full.

“Drasa didn’t have that damage because she had a confessor, a priest-like confessor in her father who literally says ‘give me your shame,’” Derrickson notes. “He takes the cartridge that killed the man in the opening scene… and Levi didn’t have that.” Thus the only way he has to find that equilibrium is by digging up the secrets. Bringing truth of the Gorge to light.

Sigourney Weaver Finally Gets Her ‘Goddamn Percentage’

If the creature feature elements inside the Gorge, with their snake beards and carnivorous tree trunks, represent a nigh Lovecraftian horror, then Weaver’s Bartholomew represents something else that’s far chillier and more timely: a corporate stooge who, as another Weaver character once surmised about such folk, is out “to get a goddamn percentage.”

“You can’t cast Sigourney Weaver in a science fiction movie and not be conscious and conscientious about what she brings to the table in terms of genre credibility and influence, and homage by her mere presence,” Derrickson laughs when we bring up comparisons between Bartholomew and the kind of company men Ellen Ripley stared down. Yet there is a modern insidiousness to Weaver’s latest character.

Here is a film about two people of similar temperament and spirit being ordered to distrust and fear one another. They are literally divided along old Cold War lines of “East” and “West,” complete with the ‘80s vinyl soundtrack that goes with it. Both are also being played off each other by a modern tech company that has privatized warfare, turning soldiers into mercenaries and guinea pigs.

“I think that’s the importance of [her] role,” says Derrickson, “and boy is it ever relevant right now. The idea of high-dollar corporate presence and their involvement in, and I’ll try not to get too political, but their involvement in use of the American military is really troublesome and blood-curdling when you take a hard look at it.” With that said, one of the reasons Weaver did the role is she nor Derrickson wanted Bartholomew to be complete slime.

“She’s not evil like Burke in Aliens, she’s not driven by greed,” Derrickson insists. Instead she, as with perhaps many well-dressed contractors, believes private research (and privatized frontlines) is where breakthroughs are now made. “What she’s doing is in her mind not just justifiable but necessary.”

The Biggest Leap of All

The Gorge acts as a metaphor for many an unpleasant thing. It represents the need for an individual to let the truth out; for a government or corporation to have it ripped free; and as a gateway to a primeval, animalistic past. Above all, however, it could just be a literal manifestation of the terror, and exhilaration, of crossing the gulf between you and another person. How else do you describe a movie that culminates with Levi and Drasa emerging from the abyss, and for shut-off Levi to only then say “I love you”?

As Derrickson points out: “I sort of see the movie genre-wise as not just a double rainbow but like a quintet of rainbows. And the largest overarching rainbow is the romance. It’s a romantic movie from beginning to end, and under that is like sci-fi, then action, then horror, then political thriller.”

While the first half of the bifurcated movie has the obvious structure of a meet-cute, albeit with a distinctly peculiar setting above the mouth of hell, it is the second half of the movie where the sparks really fly.

“I think the most romantic gesture in the entire movie is the speed with which she just jumps in after he falls in,” says the director. “I just think that’s the most romantic moment in the movie, and then coming out of that, surviving and facing the underworld.”

In the darkness below, there is plenty of horrifying imagery, which the helmer happily compares to even a video game. “But,” he adds, “I was very focused in every one of those scenes with how they watch each other, check on each other, defend each other, put themselves in harm’s way for the other person. All of that is a continuing extension of the romance.” When they emerge, they have the ability to be true to each other—and to the world by ridding it of that damn Gorge.

The Ending(s) Not Taken

After the heroes escape the underworld, the distractions of man seem a trifle. Bartholomew and the Gorge itself are destroyed, and the lovers briefly separated before a reunion in the sunny South of France. It is, in other words, a happy ending. It was also the happiest version of the alternatives considered.

“We talked a lot about the ending, and I shot an ending initially that wasn’t really different, but it ended in the same graveyard where she was with her [father],” Derrickson reveals. “That was a little more bittersweet in its tone, ending with the gravestones all around them. Even though it was beautiful, the reality of surrounding death was also there. And then we reshot it [and replaced it with] the one that’s in the movie, which I quite like.”

The director contends he is “neutral” about which filmed ending he prefers, stating he sees advantages to both the more elegiac road not taken and the idyllic one finally chosen. However, he contends he knew it needed to always conclude with the lovers together after initial discussions considered the idea of one or both of them being infected by the biological virus inside the Gorge.

“There was definitely conversations about one of them being infected and what would happen to the other one,” Derrickson says, “because a lot of great romances—Titanic being the classic one—[prove] the death of a character doesn’t take away but adds to the frozen in time quality of the romance.” Yet in a movie about redemption for two people, separating them after an emotional breakthrough might have been too cruel… even for the director of Sinister’s infamously nihilistic conclusion.

“Look at the ending of some of my films, I don’t have any problem with an extraordinarily bleak ending,” the director laughs. “But yeah, in this case, I felt like it was important for me as a storyteller to see them get their reward for what they had put themselves through willingly, and for what they had accomplished, and what Levi had done in dealing with himself and facing himself. I thought if you take all that away from one of them in death, I felt like the story would somehow deplete the value of what they had been through.”

Of the many genres Derrickson, Teller, Taylor-Joy, and Dean got to play fast and loose with, it is romance which climbed above them all.

The Gorge is streaming now on Apple TV+.

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