This Friday marks Valentine’s Day, and while many lovebirds across the world will be celebrating by cozying up with their favorite rom-coms, filmmaker Scott Derrickson will be unleashing an entirely different kind of love story with The Gorge. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller, the film tells the story of two elite snipers separated by a massive gorge, yet the two still find a way to develop emotional intimacy despite their physical distance. There’s even more to the story, though, as the gorge separating them is home to a frightening secret. The Gorge debuts on Apple TV+ on February 14th.
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“We did a lot of sniper training,” Teller recalled to ComicBook about how he prepared for the role. “I’ve certainly went through boot camps with different military characters that I’ve played. I’ve never had proper sniper training. It’s difficult. It’s the level of — the attention to detail and the precision required. But we were getting up there and we’re shooting, with ranges of hundreds of yards away and moving, a lot of tactical movements and things. And we were trained completely differently because we were coming from different, backgrounds, cultural military backgrounds.”
Taylor-Joy added, “I’m pretty blind and I have startling accuracy, considering the fact that I cannot see, it’s almost better when I don’t have my contact lenses. And it’s a weird thing.” When detailing how the two characters’ sniper training was different, Taylor-Joy continued, “The American style has more awareness of the individual. Eastern Europeans move more as a team, with slightly less care for the individual in that way.”
The film is described, “Two highly-trained operatives (Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy) are appointed to posts in guard towers on opposite sides of a vast and highly classified gorge, protecting the world from an undisclosed, mysterious evil that lurks within. They bond from a distance while trying to stay vigilant in defending against an unseen enemy. When the cataclysmic threat to humanity is revealed to them, they must work together in a test of both their physical and mental strength to keep the secret in the gorge before it’s too late.”
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While the film is debuting with a PG-13 rating, the intensity of the subject matter meant Derrickson filmed it with an R-rating in mind, which allowed him to show restraint in key scenes to maintain a more accessible MPA rating.
“I shot an R-rated movie,” the filmmaker confirmed. “If you try to make a PG-13 movie and be safe about it, you’re going to find yourself wishing it was more edgy or more scary or more intense. And then trying to bolster that in post is very hard. If you want a PG-13 movie, shoot an R-rated movie, it’s much easier to trim it back to PG-13 than it is trying to build it up to be a scary or an intense or an exciting PG-13.”
As far as whether there were significant cuts made from the final product, Derrickson detailed, “No, not really. I was frankly surprised with what we got away with … I thought that I had made a pretty intense movie with some pretty graphic imagery and some pretty disturbing imagery. And the things that we had to change were small and I was very happy that I basically got to keep the cut that I wanted without doing any real damage.”
The Gorge lands on Apple TV+ on February 14th.
