Interview: Shauna Macdonald/Natalie Mendoza

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Taking in about nine million U.S. dollars (about twice the film’s budget) in its opening weekend, and coming in fifth overall at the box office (behind four domestic summer blockbusters), The Descent now begins its second week of a nationwide North American. Starring an all-female cast, The Descent is the story of six women, who on a thrill-seeking girls-only weekend, enter and underground cave system deep in the Appalachian Mountains and are forced to battle a breed of flesh eating humanoid predators perfectly adapted to living in the pitch black subterranean environment. Directed by Neil Marshall, whose 2002 film Dog Soldiers has already achieved cult status, The Descent is the most original and scariest horror films to come along in years. It has already achieved critical and financial success overseas, thanks to an intelligent script, outstanding direction and cinematography, and brilliant performances by the cast.

Leading the cast of female daredevils are Shauna Macdonald (“Spooks”, The Rocket Post) and Natalie Mendoza (Code 46, Moulin Rouge, The Great Raid). Macdonald plays Sarah—athletic, intelligent, but emotionally shattered after a horrific accident claimed the lives of her husband and daughter one year earlier. Mendoza plays Juno, the group’s leader on the caving expedition, brave, tough, and up to any physical challenge, but in under certain circumstances, completely spineless. Miles underground and surrounded by darkness, Sarah and Juno must not only confront the monsters lurking in the cave, but also the demons of their history and the consequences of their actions.

The film is a dream for actresses that can handle the combination of emotional extremes, brutal physical demands, and subtle layers of character, and Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Mendoza take it to the next level, delivering tour de force performances with Sarah and Juno—there are moments where the audience will fall in love with them, and other moments where the women are the most dangerous—and terrifying—creatures in the film.

I was lucky to sit down to talk with Shauna and Natalie while they were in New York City promoting The Descent.

Jameson Kowalczyk: How did you become attached to The Descent? Were you approached with the script, did you audition?

Natalie Mendoza: I basically had to audition. I got the call from my agent and kind of went in dressed as the character in the way… I dressed up in cargos, I mean I’m wearing a pretty dress today, but I don’t normally go around like that. But I made an effort to kind of look tough, and Neil bought it [laughs].

JK: Had you seen Dog Soldiers?

NM: Yeah, well I’d seen it before, and we all watched it together when we were in Scotland, right before we were about to shoot, so we all had a point of reference of his filmmaking, but actually Dog Soldiers was very different from The Descent, and it’s much funnier and much lighter and it’s all guys. So it might have been easier not to watch it because it was a false sense of security. [laughs]

JK: And Shauna, how were you cast in the film?

Shauna Macdonald: Yeah I think I had a hard job, I had four auditions I think in the end, they kept putting me through my paces and wanted to make sure I was up to it, and actually my last audition I was auditioned with Alex Reid who had already been cast as Beth, my best mate, so we had to crawl through these chairs pretending it was a tunnel and getting stuck.

Both: [laughing]

SM: Interesting stuff you learn about me every day.

NM: [laughing] I did not know that.

JK: You didn’t have to do that?

NM: I had me and… What was her name? [to Shauna]She was playing your part, she had been cast already, but I think they hadn’t cast her yet. So that was my auditioning experience.

JK: What attracted you to the script?

SM: Well, what didn’t. It was more about why should I rather than why shouldn’t I do this film. It’s about six females which was interesting to me only because it’s never been done before, and I think it really needed to be… I think it needed to be explored in a film. If it’d been set on a desert island or something else, I think six females is great. The horror aspect, we got to do loads of our own stunts, we got to do… we all were fit by the end of it, we were all strong, physically strong, so that attracted me. And also just the layers of the characters. And if you took the crawlers out of the film, the film would still stand alone.

JK: I though the film was extremely scary even before the crawlers showed up.

SM: Exactly, and that’s why I knew it was great and even when… it’s hard sometimes when you read the script, action scripts, thriller scripts, when you’re reading about fights, it’s quite hard sometimes, but it was written in a way in which you were there, you were in the cave and you felt the darkness, you felt the claustrophobia and in the big fight sequences just where your mind was… it was really quite phenomenal. It was an easy decision.

NM: Yeah I think like I kind of actually wrote down… for my character I wrote down what she did as opposed to what she says. And I kind of took that perspective for all the characters. And I loved the fact that it was six females. But when I actually broke it down to what they did, which for me sums up the characters—the characters defined by their actions and not necessarily for what they say, because we as humans often don’t say what we mean. But so, that… then I saw all our journeys, and I kind of established that for me, I was like, ‘Oh my god, they all have incredible journeys and arcs to their stories.’ So it was a real gift for the girls who were chosen, because we were put in these extreme circumstances where we were allowed to express these extreme emotions, which in a lot of films you don’t get to. So we start off quite fluffy and happy and together, and then where we get to go emotionally, it’s brilliant, you know?

SM: Basically the thing about this cast is everyone was lucky because they did… they picked actresses who kind of are… everyone was kind of serious actually. Not serious in such a boring sense at all, but we took it all really seriously. We wanted it to be so rounded, layered characters in an extreme situation, and I think that’s why it really works. And at first… we had four or five days rehearsal at the start, and then we sort of rehearsed it throughout it. But it was that period, with meeting the girls, and I met the director properly and we discussed our back stories and all that, I thought ‘This is gonna be great!’ because we’re taking it to the next level of horror films, we’re not being the fluffy one dimensional characters, we’re actually trying to tell a story of friendships and stuff. And Neil gave us full reign over it, didn’t he?

NM: Yeah, I mean we were usually on the floor, kind of working through stuff, what was our history, what actually really happened between Shauna’s character and her husband, what happened between him and Juno, so I knew exactly what the story was, and we all got really clear. None of that stuff is in the film…

SM: None of it’s in the script…

NM: Yeah none of it’s in the script, but we fleshed it out, and that’s what people are picking up on, the critics in London are certainly picking up on it.

JK: It definitely kind of shines through in the film.

NM: Yeah. So it appealed to a broad spectrum of people. I mean we were getting reviews in the most credible papers and magazines and stuff and they were all like five star and we were just like… it was brilliant, you don’t get for horror normally. But I think because we were allowed to flesh everything out, we were encouraged to…

SM: We were encouraged to.

NM: Yeah, we were encouraged to. It was brilliant.

JK: So it was a very collaborative process?

SM: Yeah.

NM: Absolutely.

JK: How did you prepare for the film physically? What kind of training did you do?

NM: Well, Shauna and I are both pretty physical people. And so is Alex, actually. So he was kind of lucky to cast people that were all pretty passionate about fitness and stuff. So we all had a strong basis, and then we ended up doing a sort of two week boot camp, where we did rock climbing…

SM: We went caving for real as well.

JK: What was that like?

SM: I find it… I think it was the most harrowing moment because I hate dark enclosed spaces, and you’re in a cave. But it was a great point of reference for the film. But it was scary. It’s cold and it’s dark and it’s wet and you don’t know where you’re going, we had these two experts who helped us throughout the whole film, but they took us underground, and we were underground for about three and a half, four hours, and you are really disoriented, and you totally have to trust the person that’s leading you in the cave, because you don’t know how to get out.

NM: And there was that genuine moment of seeing light for the first time coming out of the cave…

SM: Yeah, exactly.

NM: And you see the sun light and you kind of… well, I started running. I’d look ahead and the girl had gone on and you kept turning corners and you wouldn’t see anyone behind or in front of you.

SM: Torturous really. It’s like why do they put people in solitary confinement? Because dark enclosed spaces freak people out. They don’t put them in a nice open field with the sunshine, that’s what humans kind of want, that’s what we like. You go mad if you are in the dark for too long. As we do in the film.

JK: You said you did a lot of your own stunt work, were there any close calls during filming? Or any scenes that were especially difficult?

NM: The moment when… I’m really flexible because I was a dancer and a gymnast and stuff when I was younger… there’s a moment when I’m hanging off a… when we were sort of going across… what do you call that?

SM: Oh, the rocks, when you’re hang there and like…

NM: Anyway, when we’re crossing the big gorge, and I’m kind of like doing that [pretending to hang from roof of cave with one arm/laughing] on the ceiling, and literally I remember thinking… because I’m flexible to a fault almost, so I was just thinking that my arm’s gonna pop out at any second, because I was twisting around in a 360… so then I had to just sort of muscle up and swing myself around… but there were moments like that, small budget, not enough money for stunt doubles, and also I love doing my own stunts, so I would always opt to do that.

SM: Yeah they can never use your face when you use stunt doubles and you really want your face on it as much as you can.

NM: And the other thing you just like the energy of doing something…

SM: Usually it comes down to an insurance and a money thing. The first shot of the film they have to… Neil Marshall had us in a white water raft, and we go down this rapid, but every time there was one expert with a wig on, and the other two were the real actresses, but the producers really wanted a shot of the three… so phone calls, phone calls, phone calls, how much would it be to insure the three leads? 250,00 pounds for one shot. They got the insurance and we did it and were fine. And so that was a close call in terms of if this goes hideously wrong, you a lot of money, you lose your lead actresses, and it can all go… [laughing].

NM: The funny thing was though in that, they had these experts, and every time they went down, they actually got flipped out of the raft. And when we went down, we did it like three times, we never fell out. So it was quite funny. I don’t know what we were doing right, but…

SM: But we were all really good. He could have cast a whole load of sissies. Because every actress when they go into an audition, ‘Yeah I can do that, I can do that, I can do that,’ and whether you can or not you still say… Natalie it turns out, she can’t swim or drive…

SM: But we didn’t find that out till she was on set [laughing].

NM: [laughing] So they changed the script so Shauna ended up driving us to the cave.

SM: And you were just surrounded by life boats in the shot…

NM: And in the water I had a… well, in the cave I was standing on a table which wasn’t very sturdy, but you know, just made out like I was swimming. It was funny.

JK: What was it like the first time you saw a crawler on set?

SM: I’ll let Nat talk about that because she was in the group that saw it all together, I saw one before that.

NM: There was such a massive lead up to that because we filmed the whole thing in sequence. So the first time seeing a crawler was genuinely the first time, and Neil deliberately kept them separate from us so that he could get a genuine reaction. So, someone asked me just before, what do you think you’re going to feel like, because we were doing a documentary, and we’re like, ‘We’re gonna be fine, we’re actors, you know? We’ll act surprised.’ And sure enough, when the moment came, I genuinely screamed, and then I knew I was really scared when I started running around just laughing hysterically… Because it wasn’t I found it funny, I was just really flipping out about it… no, it was terrifying, and we didn’t really get to know the actors as well, so it just… they were quite menacing…

SM: Neil kept them apart from us for the whole… however many months. I think… yeah because we had a break for Christmas as well, so they had been talked about for six weeks… we had the suspense weighing on us, ‘What… do… they… look… like? Oh… my… god…’ And when we finally saw they it was like, ‘Ah!’ Because when you know it is coming, those are the worst scares… when you know something is coming…

JK: Did you see the actors outside the set, with their make-up off? Or were they kept totally separate?

SM: Only afterwards, only after the initial exposing of the monsters. But we didn’t even get to meet the actors, which was a shame because they were really funny blokes… the main actors were guys, and then there were females and kids there as well, but the main three are really nice, funny actors, and we get to laugh… and we met them at the wrap party and I had no idea who they were.

NM: I think the first time I met them was at the first screening. And it was bizarre, this guy going, ‘You don’t even know who I am.’ And I’m like, ‘No… Why are you talking to me?’ [laughs] That was pretty scary, but yeah, it’s a shame, because normally I love hanging out with anybody, but it just… yeah, it was better to stay away from them.

SM: And also at the end of a working day they’ve got to go back into make-up for a couple of hours and then get whisked off, so kind of practically they were kept apart from us as well.

JK: Do you have a favorite scene in the film?

SM: I think the coming together of minds at the end, when my character Sarah and Nat’s character Juno have that face off at the end, I’d say that.

NM: The fight sequences were pretty amazing I though.

SM: And we shot that at the end, that was Natalie’s last day working. So it kind of fitted.

JK: What was the most challenging part of the project?

NM: Every day it was extremely difficult, just because we were covered in muck, it was cold, we were wet… you know, it was just tough in terms of that, and it took a lot of mental discipline to kind of deal with that… it was just ongoing. But every now and again they’d throw in a massive fight sequence, which wasn’t really rehearsed, so, you know, we were just told to go for it. And I… we were fighting on sand, so literally my arms were being shredded.

SM: And builder’s sand, not nice fluffy Bahamas sand. Builder’s sand.

NM: Initially it was like glass cutting my skin, so I had like… my arms were raw. You would not believe it, people could just not believe my arms. It looked like I had been burned or something, like I had third degree burns and massive bruises and stuff. And because I was genuinely fighting these guys… and just sort of climbing and stuff, you get these knocks and you have sort of pick axes and you get these little cuts and things, so you just… that was really, really hard, but I remember my whole body actually burning with pain after having to throw these guys in this fight sequence… we totally hadn’t rehearsed [laughs]… so literally I was fighting.

SM: Nat was a bit of a guinea pig, she did the first fight, and it looks amazing, but both the guy playing the crawler and Natalie were torn to shreds… Afterwards it was a bit more choreographed, certainly the last sequence but that was also more to do with not having all the actors there… But that fight you’re talking about does look phenomenal, but you couldn’t ask an actress to do that everyday for the next four weeks because there would be nothing left, her skin would be hanging off… That would be a horror film in itself.

JK: What was it like being submerged in all that blood?

SM: That was great fun actually. That was loads of fun. That was in… it’s like a Jacuzzi bath with the step down. And then they filled it up so much so it goes over the bath and it looks like a huge big pool… And it was really hot… and sort of slimy… and it was just this weird sort of mud treatment like you get at the spa… and they’d do the shot and I’d be sitting in there, and there was no point in me getting out of the bath just to get back in the bath, so I just sat in the bath all day and waited for my fight sequence. But what happened was it started to dye my elbows and like my eyebrows… like when you get a bad… have you ever had a fake tan?

JK: [laughs] No.

SM: Well, girls who have fake tans… it sort of seeps into all your porous areas… so your heels, your knees, your elbows and your sort of eyebrowy bits all sort of suck in all this moisture, so I had pink eyebrows and pink elbows and pink knees… pink hair as well. So apart from being extremely vain when I’m in my social life… going out with a pink head… it was loads of fun… but also because we did it in sequence, we kind of just covered up the pinkness with mud and more blood and guts. But that fight sequence was amazing, and in that part of the film my character sort of clicks and turns and becomes this sort of savage… she changes, she actually has to kill… oh wait, I can’t say it… anyway she has to do something no girl wants to do… and then she just clicks and goes mad and that’s it.

B: [laughing]

JK: What scares you?

NM: For me… the idea of losing my mind is probably definitely the scariest thing, and I think we really explore that in a lot of the characters in the film. And yeah, because it’s just that primal thing in us where we either deal with something frightening by fight or flight, and I think… I’m guessing there’s a part of me that my mind starts to go a bit, starts to crumble, and then I click back into gear and I’m going to fight my way through this until the end. And I think we all kind of have to deal with that at different parts during the story.

SM: I think the thought of me being in a locked cell with Natalie, who has lost her mind, is…

NM: [laughing]

SM: …what scares me the most. [laughing] Because I know she can fight, and she doesn’t have any reasoning left. I don’t like dark enclosed spaces, really. I think the type of horror films that scare me the most are the ones with a person…

NM: Thrillers mostly…

SM: A person whose lost their mind… Mad men, mad women who do things, and they can’t control their minds. Like I heard this mad story about sleepwalkers who kill! That’s mental, that scares me! Sleepwalkers who go around killing people!

NM: [laughing] Yeah!

SM: The things that humans do… it’s scary.

JK: What made you want to be actors? Was it a childhood ambition, was it something you kind of stumbled into?

NM: Not really, for me… I came from a… My father was a musician, my mother was a dancer. I have six brothers and sisters and we all sort of do everything. But I was actually the really shy one out of the bunch, and I think for me, acting was a way of escaping that world where I felt really sort of… I don’t know, I really couldn’t express myself… so the stage attracted me first, where I could be in this space that all of the sudden I was quite capable of doing anything. And I couldn’t see the audience, because when you look out you don’t see the audience, it’s all sort of pitch black. So that’s where I first really kind of found my feet, and then eventually film really appealed to me, because just the subtleties you can explore with film, when giving a performance is brilliant, and the audience can see all that.

[At this point someone interrupts to bring Natalie to her next interview, but Shauna is able to talk for another minute.]

SM: Still want me to answer?

JK: Please.

SM: It’s pretty dull, it’s not as exciting as hers. You see, when I was about thirteen and just realized that acting… like now, I was quite shy—god, watching the film you wouldn’t think that we were shy girls. But you do just get to sort of play around and be different characters and do things you wouldn’t dare do as a normal person I suppose.

JK: Do you remember the first character you played, ever?

SM: Well, I was always cast as the fucking fairy, because I did this kids stuff for a few years, I was a fairy for a long time, which I rebelled against and said, ‘I’m not going to be a fairy anymore!’ so they went, ‘Okay, you can be the crippled peasant.’ And [laughing] that was my promotion… But the first proper I was playing this… in something called Earth Cracker, I was fourteen, my first lead role. I was playing someone running away from the war in Russia… my name was Villa… and we had broken through the earth into some sort of den of gods… yeah, whatever. But yeah, Villa, a Russian refugee [laughing].

Lionsgate Films released The Descent on August 4th nation wide.