While the actors’ performances were key to generating the psychological fear at the heart of DARK WATER, there remained another equally essential element to bring to life: the Roosevelt Island apartment building itself, with its frightening, water-logged secrets of the past. Director Walter Salles wanted to assure that the audience would viscerally feel the dampness, the darkness and the mounting anxiety of Dahlia’s new environment as an omnipresent force from the minute they settled into their seats.
The first task for the filmmaking crew was journeying to Roosevelt Island, where Dahlia and Ceci retreat to make their new home in Apartment 9F. Roosevelt Island is a two-mile-long strip of land in the East River of New York City which, despite its remote location, is considered a part of Manhattan. Once known as Welfare Island—a depository for the sick, the mentally ill and the criminally sentenced—for years, the island’s main buildings were primarily hospitals and asylums. Later, the island became home to a number of sprawling, high-rise apartment projects, several completed in what is known in the architectural world as the “Brutalist Style,” consisting of massive, faceless, post-modern, concrete monoliths. The island’s mix of being another world unto itself, and yet part of Manhattan, as well as its water-bound location, made it the perfect setting for DARK WATER’s themes of alienation and torrential rages.
“Someone once said to me that when you’re driving on East River Drive in the rain and the fog and you look over at Roosevelt Island, it almost looks as though it’s a way station between this world and the next,” notes DARK WATER screenwriter Rafael Yglesias, who is a native New Yorker. “That was the feeling Walter wanted to capture in the filming.”
When Walter Salles first saw Roosevelt Island he too knew the location was custom-made for what he hoped to achieve. “I was really moved by the geography—it was very unique, and it reminded me oddly of places I have seen in Eastern Europe,” he says. “There is a sense of repetitive, industrial spaces that emphasizes a kind of loss of identity. From the minute I arrived there, I really began to understand the correlation between the island’s geography and film’s visual tone.”
Although Salles prefers to use authentic locations for their energy and unpredictability, there was little choice but to build the apartment interiors on soundstages in order to carefully control the inexorable changes that begin to plague them. The director handed over to production designer Therese DePrez the daunting task of recreating over 8,000 square feet of interior space with sets that would include a lobby, a working elevator, staircases, hallways and two apartments: Dahlia’s apartment in 9F, and the mysterious apartment above, 10F, where Natasha and her family lived. DePrez’s sets changed Salles’ mind about working on stages.
“Coming from a documentary background, reality has always been very important to me,” notes Salles. “Yet Therese DePrez managed somehow, miraculously, to transfer what I had felt on the real Roosevelt Island to the soundstage and bring these places to life. I also came to feel that working inside four walls pushes you to be very creative with the camera.”
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