Josh Brolin Says Whalefall Is Not Really About a Whale

Whalefall is now in theaters. Daniel Kraus (Angel Down) wrote the novel it’s based on. He also co-wrote the screenplay with director Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You, Cocaine Bear). The story follows a scuba diver (Austin Abrams) who goes looking for the remains of his father (Josh Brolin) in the Pacific Ocean. During the expedition, an enormous sperm whale swallows him. He has only an hour of oxygen and must find a way out from inside the animal.

Polygon spoke with Brolin, Abrams, Kraus and Duffield at New York Comic Con 2026, a week before the film’s release. We asked about the biggest challenges of adapting the book and what the movie is really about.

The most challenging scene

Kraus said the hardest part of the inside-the-whale sequence was building the whale’s stomach. More precisely, it was the first stomach, since a sperm whale’s stomach has four separate chambers.

Kraus tells Polygon:

“In the book, everything was equally difficult because I’m not a whale scientist. I was learning from the whale scientists and biologists and diving experts and trying to visualize it, looking at pictures and dissected parts, trying to figure this out. As difficult as that was, it’s much more difficult in the movie. I can obscure things in the writing, but in the movie, you have to build it and it all has to be there. That’s where Ramsey Avery came in, the production designer. As much as I thought I knew about whales, pretty soon he had overtaken me with all these incredible visual studies of what things really look like. The biggest challenge was the main stomach — stomach number one — because it has to do everything. It has to chew, it has to roll over, it has to incline, it has to be filled with liquid and water and animals and jellyfish and squid. As a set, it’s a huge problem. How do you build something that can do all that? And it’s living and it’s soft and it has bioluminescent lighting. It’s so much to ask of a set.”

Abrams plays the diver, Jay Gardiner. He named the same scene as the toughest part of the shoot and said the hardest thing was “the compression, being squeezed.”

The whale isn’t the villain

The film is about a man swallowed by a whale, but neither Kraus nor Duffield ever saw the whale as the villain.

Kraus again:

“The whale was never a being of fear or intimidation. It was always a figure of awe and majesty. As soon as you start researching whales, particularly sperm whales, they are the most bizarre, magical, mystical, strange beings that I almost saw as gods, being angelic and so intelligent. There are so many reports of them helping people in distress. They’re just these incredible creatures, so it’s more of a sense of, ‘this thing is so big that it doesn’t even know we exist’ in the way that God may just not even notice the ants of humanity.”

Duffield shares that view:

“Everyone involved loves whales. We approached it with a lot of love and respect. It’s the most innocent character in the movie. It’s just living its life and I think, by the end of the movie, you really view it as a hero of some sorts.”

It’s not really about the whale

The heart of Whalefall is the relationship between Abrams’ character and Brolin’s. The film has a claustrophobic, ticking-clock tension that tries to put viewers inside the experience of being swallowed. That’s only part of the story. Jay’s emotional journey has less to do with whale anatomy than with making peace with his difficult relationship with his father.

Brolin sums it up: “Whales are a symbol in this movie, to get you to a place where you get out of your own way.”

Whalefall is now in theaters.

Source: Polygon