Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, Night Swim stars Wyatt Russell (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) as Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home with his concerned wife Eve (Oscar® nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin), and their two children. Secretly hoping, against the odds, to return to pro ball, Ray persuades Eve that the new home’s shimmering backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for him. But a dark secret in the home’s past will unleash a malevolent force that will drag the family under, into the depths of inescapable terror.
Leading up to the release of Night Swim, Nick L’Barrow had the chance to chat with the minds behind the film, including the film’s writer and director Bryce McGuire about his journey from making the short film into this feature film, and shares a truly heartfelt answer about the emotional tolls that filmmaking away from family can take.
Nick: Bryce, it’s a pleasure to meet you. How are you going today?
Bryce McGuire: It’s going good, Nick. Nice to meet you. I like your DVD collection behind you!
Nick: Thank you! I’m a product of the Blockbuster generation. I worked at one for five years, and unfortunately when it closed down, that’s where the majority of my collection came from. Are you a big physical media guy?
Bryce McGuire: Well, I do have a lot of blu-rays and DVDs in the house somewhere. But they don’t get loved as much as they should actually. But that’s a great backdrop though. I really am digging that.
Nick: I appreciate that! I’m really excited to talk to you today because horror is my genre! And in regards to Night Swim, I know many people have asked you about the journey from your original short film and now adapting it into the feature film. But what I’m interested in finding out is what is one aspect of the evolution from short film to feature film that you feel like you really got right?
Bryce McGuire: Wow. You’re really putting a lot of pressure on me to own that accomplishment! Yes, you’re right, I have been asked a lot about that journey, and there’s a lot of good things to learn from that journey.
I will say that this is not a very philosophical answer. It’s actually a very practical answer. I’ll tell you this. When I pitched the feature film to Atomic Monster, to James Wan, he had seen the short film and was swimming in his pool at night. And he was doing the like, left, right, left thing [freestyle swimming] and you see someone standingthere, that was based on Wan’s experience watching Night Swim and thinking he saw someone in that breath.
So that was exciting that it scared him! We started talking, and I remember in our first pitch, I basically acted out the entire ‘Marco Polo’ scene in the room. I was around the room with my eyes shut and I was running into fucking chairs and tables, and I was committed to it. And I was like if I can get a jump scare, then like, I got this. And I do remember that was one idea that was going to be in the marketing campaign. Like, I just knew it! And I think seeing the movie, seeing that scene, that set piece, because it’s so “Night Swim”.
If you’re going to make a scary pool movie, what’s something specific to… you know, it’s never seen before, but it feels familiar, but it’s unique. I feel like, not just 2 days ago I watched a photo came, which is like the whole movie before they go out and make 3000 prints of it. You have to basically watch it and sign your life away. Like, there’s things I wish I had more time to do, or I wish I could have had reshoots for that, or I wish I could have done this or whatever. But that was the scene, ‘Marco Polo’ was the one that like… this rules! This feels so much like what was on the page. It feels so much like what I pitched to James Wan, you know, 7 years ago. Seeing that come to life with all the practical effects, and the visual effects, and the score, and the sound design of that just made me so happy that it really came through clearly from what was in my head. I just think people are gonna love that set piece.
Nick: That’s awesome! I want to talk about creating the characters for this story. What was the process of bringing someone like Ray [Wyatt Russell] to life, and navigating the character’s early stages of having Multiple Sclerosis? And why do you feel it’s important, especially in horror, to have characters that you genuinely care about in the story?
Bryce McGuire: Well, you know a big reference for this as you could probably imagine, just the vibe and tone, is Poltergeist. And in fact, some people on set kind of lovingly referred to this movie as ‘Pool-tergeist’ [laughs]. It’s just so goofy, but also like, I honestly see that. I got to own that! I love that movie. It’s like such an important movie to me.
But, you know, if you look at that family, that couple, that you know, are smoking weed in bed together and kind of getting frisky, it’s so real and messy, and like grounded. Like, man, you care about that family and you believe that family, and you don’t want something bad to happen to them. I just knew that, if you got invested on the level of, “Oh man, they’re in a tough sport. They’re trying to do the right thing. They’re trying to build this life together.” And then you know, this siren call kicks in and this other temptation rises to the surface, I just knew that the scary stuff would be scarier. If you cared about this family, and you believe it’s real people, and the moments of humanity, that was important to me.
And it was also very important to getting actors like Kerry Condon and Wyatt Russell. If you don’t give them real characters, they’re just not going to do it. They’re not going to be interested. So I think when they signed on, I guess truthfully, it was kind of like validation that we had done good work to build real characters and a journey worthy of that level of talent. Because they won’t fuck around with you if they think it’s just a haunted pool gimmick. The bad version is like repellent to an actor because they’re like, “what’s going on here?”
I always view it like the high concept premise has to be directly interlinked with the character journey. The character journey has to be built as one with the premise. So, if you think about what this pool can give, what it can take away, who is this family, and who is the character that has the most to gain, and therefore, has the most to lose by going through the gauntlet of this high concept premise. That’s always the way I’ve thought about that. And that’s just like the screenwriting background of going to AFI, and getting beat up there, and then writing professionally. I mean truthfully, screenwriter Bryce has saved director Bryce on many occasions!
I really needed the 10 years to happen between the short film and the feature film. That was really me writing Night Swim, adapting something for Amblin, selling another thing to Amblin, writing Baghead for StudioCanal, writing a TV show, doing rewrite work for Blumhouse! Just getting dropped into these high-pressure situations before production. I was a script doctor, right? So, I had been through every aspect of the writing process and how you can solve problems on the page. And you can get your way out of tough situations by having the right ideas, and I’m so grateful I didn’t make this movie right after the short film. I was not ready. I would have burned out and it just would have been a disaster. I’m so thankful it look as long as it did.
Nick: That’s an incredible process! I want to finish up by throwing a hypothetical at you. If this possessed, haunted pool was real – what would it show Bryce McGuire to lure him in?
Bryce McGuire: You know the honest answer? And this is why I felt really connected to be totally honest. I didn’t write Ray in a vacuum. I was doing a bunch of interviews for this character with a former professional baseball player named Cory Gearrin, and he was a pitcher for the Yankees, a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. And he was a journeyman where he was on the bubble. He was minor league, he was major league, he got hurt, he dropped back down, he worked his way back up. And he was telling me his story, and the amount of parallels I found between my journey as a filmmaker, and his journey as a baseball played was just like, astonishing!
Like, the way your family treats you when they think you’re big time, even though you’re broke, because you have an agent, or maybe things go the other way when things are going well and they think you’re different or expect things of you. Or the amount of time you have to spend away from your family. The amount of sacrifice you have to make.
I don’t live in LA, but I’ve been making this film in LA. I’ve been away from my two kids and my wife for like, 9 out of the last 12 months. I’ve missed shit. I’ve missed first words. I’ve missed potty training. I’ve missed a lot of stuff. And, you know, I feel like I wrote this movie in a way to ask myself the same question – if I had to walk away from doing this career, for the rest of my life, could I just be happy with the simplicity of just like, being a dad and being a husband? And just have that family in front of me. Could I find contentment in that? And that’s a tough question to answer for everyone.
I want to say my better self would be like, “No, I could let all of this go behind and choose the most important things in life”. But, you know, it’s the same question everyone has to ask themselves who quit something. So, for me, the pool would show me Bryce McGuire, sitting in a green room at the Four Seasons, doing an interview with international press, three weeks before his major motion picture comes out, with two movies stars in a 3000-plus screen release for Universal Pictures.
Nick: I really appreciate you sharing that, man. Family is so important, but it’s tough because we all love doing the things we’re passionate about, especially when you have an opportunity like this. I’m getting the wrap now, but I genuinely hope you and your family have a safe Christmas together, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat today.
Bryce McGuire: Thank you, Nick. Thanks for the great questions.
Thank you to Bryce for his time, and to Universal Pictures for organising the interview. Night Swim is in Australian cinemas on January 4.
