Opposing snipers (Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller) fall in love while guarding a mysterious ravine in The Gorge
Across a vast gorge, two solitary snipers develop a flirty relationship. Even though the 600-metre distance keeps them apart, these two are immediately struck with the sense that they have inexplicably found their equal at the end of the earth. Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Lithuanian assassin, is laying low after possibly being exposed after her last mission. Levi (Miles Teller), an American elite sniper for the military (and whoever has pockets deep enough), is struggling to come to terms with his life’s work. For both, the solitude promised for the duration of one year, guarding a mysterious valley, is a welcome reprieve. But to possibly have found a soulmate under these circumstances is beyond what either could have imagined.
A romance-at-a-distance sounds like a cozy setup for a film, but the premise came out of a far less romantic scenario for screenwriter Zach Dean (Fast X). “It was the darkest window of time during the pandemic, and the whole industry had shut down. Nobody knew when we were going to make movies again. People were freaking out. I was amongst those people,” he describes. “The one thing I knew that I could do is write original stories. One night I went out to my office and said, ‘Alright, what are you going to do next?’ I drew this big gorge and I put a tower on one side and a tower on the other side and put a little male symbol on one, a little female symbol on the other. I wrote at the bottom, ‘There’s snipers.
It’s a love story.’” Tapping horror aficionado Scott Derrickson to direct the film was not purely because The Exorcism of Emily Rose writer/director wanted to tread new territory. Once the bond-building between lead characters has taken place, whatever is inside the gorge is now hellbent on getting out — a cinematic scenario Derrickson would excel at. “On the most basic level, what appealed to me was the love story. I had never done one, and a few years before making this movie, I had fallen in love and gotten remarried and had this very powerful emotional experience, so it spoke to me and I felt like I could do a decent service to that element of the movie,” he says. “The thing that I thought was the most interesting, and also the most challenging — because you have a movie that is one way in the first half and it really switches gears significantly in the second half — I just know that when I read it, I thought, I’d like to see this.”
To sell a romance between two hardened characters that, for much of the film, communicate without speaking, and then maintain their connection throughout a more action-packed portion of the film, required two elements. “The first and most important thing is the script,” said Derrickson. “I felt like the strength of Zach Dean’s screenplay was that intimacy. I just bought that these two people really would fall in love.” For Dean, that meant building characters from the ground up. “You have to think about their lives before the movie began and where they came from and what they’ve been through,” he says. “You’ll know that in this case, maybe they don’t have anyone in the world that understands them, and then, hopefully, they find that other person.”
The second integral part was casting two people who could not just express affection towards each other, but Derrickson and the camera crew when the scenes across the gorge were filmed, individually. “We built those towers for real, so when I was shooting either one of them, they’re 30, 40 feet off the ground,” Derrickson describes the challenge of capturing that tension on film. “It was impossible to have them actually interacting with each other. And to make it cinematic and not become tedious, I found that to be a lot more challenging than I was expecting. But they really were game for it and they did a great job.”
For longtime friends Taylor-Joy and Teller, the film — much like its surprising genre-bending — turned out to have unexpected depths. “When Levi’s journey starts out, he’s still internalizing so much of [his past] and once he meets Drasa, he has somebody with a shared set of experiences,” explains Teller. “Your job to make it all truthful and working with Anya, it was very easy to find those moments together.” For Taylor-Joy, the real surprise and personal takeaway was the character’s approach to a hard life — something she will carry with her out of The Gorge. “Drasa does what could be considered an incredibly dark job, but she herself is so light and the approach that she takes to life is she really engages with it in a playful way,” she says. “So I got to spend a bunch of time rocking out to music that I loved in a character that I just felt very glad to spend that amount of time with.”
The Gorge, streaming on Apple TV+