[This story contains major spoilers from The Amateur, which is now playing in theaters.]
New fear unlocked.
“Even looking into it, you would never get me into it,” James Hawes, director of The Amateur, told The Hollywood Reporter about that terrifying pool-collapse moment in the film at last week’s premiere.
During the scene, Rami Malek‘s character, Charles Heller, a CIA decoder, confronts one of the men involved in the murder of his wife, Sarah (played by Rachel Brosnahan), on top of a pool based in Madrid. As Charles isn’t getting the answer he needs about who actually pulled the trigger on his wife, he pulls the trigger on the remote, which shatters the pool’s glass floor, and Mishka Blazhic (Marc Rissmann) falls to his death.
“The idea is inspired in the 1981 novel by a giant aquarium with people swimming in it, and so we’ve taken that and transitioned it and developed it into a skytop pool,” Hawes said. He added how the scene required the team to build “a life-size section of it in the studio so that we could explode it and drop it.” However, since it was also shot on location, Hawes reiterates that “It’s not just all CGI” and “there’s a fair bit of real effects in there.”
The pool, which actually exists in London, at the Embassy Gardens, drew some obstacles for the creative team, such as the constant moving of locations. They also had to secure permission from the Embassy to use drones for the sequence.
“That was our first and second day of shooting,” Dan Wilson, a producer on the film, told THR about the scene. “For this movie, it was challenging because we have that kind of mix of tricky big set pieces, the pool being the biggest, but also a really kind of heavy location-driven show every single day pretty much we’re moving on to the location. … Adding those set pieces like the pool are really complicated, take time to work out. It was tricky but it was a blast to shot that.”
However, the scene that the “actual breaking of the pool that you see where the guy goes down, that was one shot,” Wilson continued. “We did’t want to re-set that.”
While the sequence added to Charles’ mission of avenging his deceased wife, it’s not until the end that Charles gets his real revenge with the attackers — and he didn’t need to kill Schiller to do so. Instead, he sets them up to be arrested.
Charles’ growth throughout the film begins with him as a “geek” who is “scared to go behind the wheel of his own car,” Hawes described. But through the skills he’s gained, at the end of the film, “he takes to the skies.”
“He’s free. He’s become a new man. That is a kind of liberation,” Hawes continued. “It’s the kind of justice and it’s what his wife would have wanted for him.”
While spy thriller’s have been all the rage in recent years with Black Doves, The Day of the Jackal and Slow Horses (which Hawes also directed), Hawes spoke about why he believes the genre sparks such an interest with audiences.
“Especially in unstable times, people look to see what happens. Most spy thrillers turn the world upside down. They invert the world, and they throw our hero into a world that should be normal but where everything black is turned white and vice versa,” he said. “Therefore, it’s something about the world we live in. We love the idea of a single hero thrown into that kind of danger and having to cope with it.”
The Amateur is now out in theaters.