He continues: “The fear in the film really is driven by this sense of claustrophobia and isolation inside Dahlia. It’s the kind of terror that comes from inside your mind, the scariest of all.” The producers were thrilled with Yglesias’ probing psychological approach, which seemed to make the material completely fresh and unique to American culture. “Rafael took this Japanese story and brought an entirely American sensibility to it, while turning the tale of this haunted family into something even more evocative and mysterious,” notes executive producer Ashley Kramer. “He transformed the more passive Japanese heroine of the original into a very poignant and relatable American single mom trapped in a personal dilemma, creating a very strong and memorable female character that we knew would make for a compelling core of the film.”
The script’s compelling narrative also riveted the attention of director Walter Salles who, at first, seemed to be a highly unexpected choice to tackle a story of a haunted apartment. Having come to the fore with the award-winning Latin American films “Central Station,” “Behind the Sun” and most recently the acclaimed “Motorcycle Diaries” as well as producing the Brazilian tour de force “City of God,” Salles is known for his strong human subjects and cinematic artistry. But he has also been noted for an extraordinary visual energy, and it was this powerful combination that drew the producers to approach him for DARK WATER.
Adds Bill Mechanic: “Right from the start, Walter understood the very depths of these characters and was committed to grounding the film in reality. He had a very personal connection to the story’s themes. In both ‘Central Station’ and ‘Behind the Sun,’ he uses the relationship between a child and parent, or surrogate parent, as a unifying device. I felt that if he brought that to our script—that true-to-life quality of an indelible mother-daughter bond between Dahlia and Ceci—then the movie would be even more frightening because it would be that much more real.”
The producers also discovered to their delight that Salles had long been a horror-movie aficionado. Ashley Kramer recalls: “Walter told us that growing up, he’d lived for a while in Paris above a screening room where they screened a lot of Polanski and other filmmakers doing sophisticated horror. He told us that he’d always wanted to do a psychological horror movie, and when he began talking to us, there was no question that he was going to lift this movie above the genre. Right from the start, he had a full-fledged vision of how he wanted the film to look—of how the visuals of the movie would combine to subtly give you more and more a feeling of being claustrophobic, more and more a feeling of being vulnerable, and more and more a feeling of losing control.”
At the heart of DARK WATER’s spiraling suspense is something very primal: the human urge to explain the inexplicable. It was this underlying theme that most drew director Walter Salles to the story. “I’m attracted by the unknown, by the unexplainable,” he says. “I think we’re all in the same position of being in this world that we can’t quite decode completely—and those things in life that we can’t explain or resolve make for very interesting subjects for film. I think, more than anything else, DARK WATER is about those inner demons we carry with us but cannot quite see, and also the mystery of urban solitude— the way we often feel so remote and beyond communication even when we are surrounded by a big city full of people.” T
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