Lost in a storm, transient Jack (Lou Diamond Phillips) seeks shelter in a
remote woodland cabin and suddenly finds himself held at gunpoint by a
deranged mountain man who lives there with his child bride. The storm is
but the harbinger of a hurricane and though the reclusive Lyle Yates
(Charles Dance) knows it, he is too paranoid to leave and so forces his
wife Willie (Mia Sara) and Jack to flee. It's a small cabin and as the
storm rages on, tensions mount. Matters reach one of several climaxes
when Jack tries to
persuade Willie to escape with him. Eventually the situation escalates
into deadly violence, meaning that only two will walk away from their
lonely shelter.
interview of the director Eric Red
A: Undertow was one of your
early scripts.
ER: Yes.
A: And it got made like…pretty
later on…I don’t have the date…
ER: It took ten years to get a
movie made about three people in a house and a storm.
A: I’ve been following your
career since "Cohen and Tate" but after "Bad Moon"" I
lost sight of you. "Undertow" and "Vindicator" I know
nothing about.
ER: Actually "Undertow"
was before "Bad Moon". I made it for Showtime and it was the second
highest rated film on Showtime in 1996. It was then released on video.
A: Who stars in it?
ER: Lou Diamond Phillips, Mia
Sara and Charles Dance. Charles Dance is
a terrific British actor.
A: He played in "Alien
3".
ER: Yeah, and in
"Undertow" he plays a
psychotic American mountain man. He gives a tour-de-force performance.
A: Is it an action picture?
ER: It has action in it. It’s about a drifter that gets
washed off the road during a storm and gets rescued by a backwoods moon shiner
and his wife in the moon shiner’s fortress of a house. The three of them get
caught together during the terrific storm and the drifter gets involved with
the moon shiner who’s quite psychotic and the abused wife. Gradually the
drifter and the wife get together which amounts to a tremendous confrontation
with the mountain man and his house full of weapons. The last half hour is
pretty much straight action.
A: And are you satisfied with the final outcome?
ER: I loved it. I shot it in Lithuania in about 24 days.
It was a terrific experience to film. It was critically reviled but was
extremely popular. It’s not a critics film. I don’t know if any of my films are
"critic films".
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.PNG)