Whalefall Director Brian Duffield and Star Austin Abrams Resisted the New Ending Before Embracing It

[This story contains major spoilers for Whalefall.]

Some of the most rewarding cinematic experiences leave questions unanswered. It’s better that we don’t know what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation or what’s inside the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Whatever conclusion you draw in your own mind will likely be more satisfying than anything Sofia Coppola or Quentin Tarantino could spell out. Whalefall writer-director Brian Duffield and his collaborators are now taking the same approach to the ending of their well-received survival tale.

Co-written with Whalefall author Daniel Kraus, Duffield’s adaptation reframes Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) as an Iowa college student returning home to the Central Coast a year after his estranged, terminally ill father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), died by suicide at sea. When Jay catches up with his older sisters, Eva and Nan (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd), it’s established that he still hasn’t opened the letter his father left behind for him.

The last time father and son Gardiner saw each other was aboard Mitt’s whale-watching vessel, where Mitt’s drinking and subsequent erratic behavior led Jay to openly reject the waterman way of life his father had instilled in him since birth. Jay then jumped off the boat and swam home, despite Mitt’s warning that his “soft lungs” wouldn’t get him back to shore.

Prompted by Nan’s lament about their father’s empty casket and his own desire for posthumous reconciliation, Jay sets out to find his dad’s underwater remains near the edge of the canyon at Monastery Beach. However, his half-baked plan quickly goes awry when a squid ensnares him while fighting for its own survival in the mouth of a sperm whale. Jay later wakes up in the multichambered stomach of the 80-foot-long, 60-ton leviathan with only an hour’s worth of oxygen left in his tank.

But thanks to the survival skills his dad drilled into him starting at 4:30 every morning, Jay eventually MacGyvers his way out of the whale by setting off an explosion. The makeshift bomb kills the already dying whale, setting in motion the titular ecological phenomenon of a whalefall. When a whale dies and sinks to the ocean floor, its carcass provides sustenance for deep-sea organisms for centuries, triggering a shockwave of life. In this instance, Jay is the first beneficiary, narrowly surviving the blast before being rescued by a nearby cabin cruiser.

Whalefall once ended with the latter rescue scene, at least until test screenings convinced 20th Century to champion an epilogue offering a sense of family closure. While away at college in Iowa, Jay remained in contact with his mom and sisters, unlike his father, but he was still emotionally disconnected from them. Even after returning home, he struggles to reminisce with them about Mitt.

The new final scene reunites a now-happy Gardiner family and their family friend Hewey (John Ortiz) out at sea. It also gives viewers a chance to take in the full extent of Jay’s injuries, including the severe scarring on his neck and the loss of his left arm, which he sacrificed to spark the explosion.

“That scene at the end was something the studio really pushed for, and Austin and I were both a little like, I don’t know. Isn’t it cool to just end with him getting fished out, seeing that he’s survived, and then be done with it? I love older movies that just end like that,” Duffield tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Additional photography took place earlier this year after Abrams finished another one-man torture exercise, Resident Evil, with Duffield’s friend and Siren Head collaborator, Zach Cregger. Upon seeing Abrams’ performance as a reborn Jay, Duffield quickly realized the familial coda was absolutely the right call. It also gave him the opportunity to tie up the loose end of Mitt’s letter. Although it wasn’t a story point in Kraus’ novel, the author knew what the note should say, and Duffield agreed. He then informed Abrams, who played the unseen reveal with a tearful laugh.

For now, Team Whalefall is keeping the contents of the letter under wraps. Duffield did shoot a close-up revealing Mitt’s parting message, but 20th later noted that it was better left ambiguous. “The studio was just like, ‘No, it’s better without it.’ And I was like, ‘Great! That suits me fine,’” Duffield recalls.

Duffield does hint, though, that the words are already embedded in the film. “It’s something that is textually within the movie. We play fair with that. It’s not a big long letter explaining, I was actually the whale. It’s a very short letter,” he says. “Mitt’s not going to write a long letter to someone that doesn’t want to speak with him, but it says enough that Austin was really excited once he heard what Daniel and I think it said.”

Given Jay’s laugh, did the letter borrow the final words of Kraus’ novel — “Sleeper, arise!” — recontextualizing the wake-up command that Mitt barked at Jay every morning at 4:30? (The phrase also echoes a similar line in the Book of Jonah.) Perhaps Mitt wrote something more sardonic: “You’ve still got soft lungs. I love you.” Or maybe he was so sincere that Jay couldn’t help but laugh at this rare display of earnestness from his gruff father. Thus, could Mitt have written the same poignant line that Jay hallucinated Mitt-Whale saying at the tail end of his stay inside the whale’s stomach: “You are my remains”?

In any case, Abrams explains why he will never publicly disclose the contents of the note, citing the earlier point about letting the audience fill in the blank. “If you put your own interpretation on it, that’s potentially going to be more meaningful and interesting than whatever was written,” Abrams recently told THR. “You’re also projecting whatever you wish a family member had said to you if they’d written you a letter before they died. So there’s value in the not knowing.”

Brolin, on the other hand, opted not to ask Duffield and Kraus about the matter, preferring to imagine his own version of Mitt’s parting words to his son. “I created what Mitt wrote in my head, and I never wrote it down,” Brolin shared with THR.

Below, during a spoiler conversation with THR, Duffield also discusses how Mitt’s unaddressed backstory informed his treatment of Jay, before shedding a little light on the third act’s surreal connection between Jay and Mitt.

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I mentioned in our pre-release piece how satisfying Mitt’s title drop is. Did the book serve that up? Or did you and co-writer Daniel Kraus engineer that?

God, that’s such a good question. Daniel Kraus and I were just talking yesterday about how we now have really fuzzy memories of what’s in the book versus what’s in the movie. It’s an unusual title, and people often think it’s because Jay is falling into the whale. But once you learn what it means, it’s such a beautiful idea that you’ll never forget. Daniel ties it to our humanity and how losing loved ones can ripple through time.

We also talked a lot about how, when these very intense things happen to Jay in the present, it’s hard to move to the next event in a linear way. It’s hard to go straight from Jay getting swallowed by the whale to Jay waking up inside it. The audience needs a second without the whale before they’re ready to reengage, and that’s how we used a lot of Josh’s flashback scenes as Mitt.

When everything happens toward the end of the movie, audiences once again needed a second, and we were always like, This feels like a really great last time to see Josh. It’s the one purely lovely scene between Jay and Mitt, and I like the idea that it bookends their contentious first boat scene together.

Our memory also doesn’t work linearly. The best memories can sometimes come to the forefront, but Jay’s first memories of his dad are really tragic ones. So I like the idea that, by the end, he gets to a place where he can really enjoy these other memories of him.

Mitt reminds me of a lot of these famous sports dads — Earl Woods, Richard Williams, Marv Marinovich — who raised their kids from birth to be this or that. Mitt tries to do something similar with Jay, but Jay just isn’t meant to go that way. He’s a sensitive kid, and a question is eventually raised about his sexuality. So is the root of the issue that Mitt didn’t accept Jay for who he is and kept thinking he could force him to be Mitt Jr?

There’s some of that in there. The Mitt character was always really excited to have a strapping, seafaring son. Josh also had conversations with me and Daniel about something that’s not really in the book, but Mitt probably had a really tumultuous upbringing and life before settling down. He looks like someone who’s been through it. He’s got some nasty scars on his body that we don’t explain.

What I love about Mitt — and what I think Josh plays so beautifully — is that Mitt doesn’t lie. He really is someone who’s genuinely concerned about Jay. So when he finds out he’s dying of cancer, his first instinct is, If what I went through happens to Jay, he’s not ready. He’s going to get chewed up, and I’m going to have failed him as a dad because I haven’t left him with the ability to take care of himself. So there’s a part of Mitt that deeply, deeply loves his son, but he really wants to be tough on him so that he doesn’t have the same life experiences he’s had.

You hear that in the movie, too. During the boat fight, Mitt straight-up says, “I failed you,” which I think Jay interprets as, “You suck, and my failing is that you’re not good enough.” But for Mitt, it’s, You’re not ready. I failed you. These are my mistakes.

Everything about the boat fight is terrible for Jay, but Mitt’s trying to be honest with him. And even in the moment with the knife, Mitt is very excited. He’s not trying to be scary. He’s like, We can do it together. I’m trying to figure out how to bond with you, and I don’t have the articulation necessary. I’m also just trying to get you to be tough so that when I’m gone, you’ll be okay. And weirdly, Mitt achieves that in the end.

The heartbreaking thing for me is that almost every scene between them in the movie is a version of Mitt wanting to spend time with Jay. It’s something that repeats throughout the movie, and they’re just not on the same page. Mitt just can’t figure out how to get out of his own way, and after a lifetime of this, he has just beaten Jay down.

There’s nothing Mitt’s more excited about than diving with Jay, but it’s not like playing soccer. It’s a life-or-death activity. If Jay messes up, he dies. So there should be a level of intensity that comes with that. Mitt is essentially telling him, If you don’t listen, you’re going to die. Jay would much rather have been playing soccer, but the ocean is Mitt’s favorite thing in the world, so he’s so excited to share it with his son.

Had Mitt not died when Jay was around 30, they’d probably find each other and have a good, healthy relationship later in life. But death doesn’t care about your character development. It comes when it wants, and it happens to come at a really terrible time for their relationship.

Mitt wanted to become one with the whales, and he gets his wish in a couple of ways, particularly when Jay speaks to him through the whale. Is Jay hallucinating because of the toxic air and dwindling oxygen?

Everyone has their own interpretations, but there are definitely textual reasons in the movie for why that would happen. As Jay makes peace with things, you start getting flashbacks that he could never remember. The scene with Mitt and Jay as a baby is something that I think happened, but Jay obviously wouldn’t be able to recall a memory from when he was an infant.

Also, I don’t know if there’s a movie that beats up a character more than we beat up Jay, physically, without killing him. So he’s definitely partially brain-damaged at that point in the movie, which is hopefully pretty clear. But ultimately, the movie allows for whatever interpretation you would like.

In the epilogue, when we see Jay on the boat, he’s heavily scarred and half his arm is gone. He’s not deaf, but his hearing is probably shot.

That’ll come back.

What kind of life do you imagine for him going forward?

No one can say he had a good time in the whale. He leaves it with a severely broken leg, a missing arm, collapsed lungs, blown-out ears, some brain damage and cracked ribs. He spent a long time in the hospital. But emotionally, he’s in a very different and healed place, which was always something I just enjoyed so much in Daniel’s novel. So when you see him on the boat at the end, he’s reconnected with his family, and there is a weight that is gone from him.

That scene at the end was something the studio really pushed for, and Austin and I were both a little like, I don’t know. Isn’t it cool to just end with him getting fished out, seeing that he’s survived, and then be done with it? I love older movies that just end like that. But I did love the idea of having Elisabeth [Shue], Jane [Levy] and John [Ortiz] back.

This happened all the time while we were shooting the movie, but Austin was so good in that scene that I was just like, Oh, of course this scene has to be in the movie. This is how we see that he has healed into a different man. He may be scarred and missing parts of his body, but there’s a real peace you feel with him at the end. It’s a type of peace you never see that throughout the rest of the movie, even before he is inside the whale. So he has some stories to tell, but the journey did what it needed to do for this guy. It was a really great therapy session.

Was that boat scene a pickup after the fact?

Yeah, it was a pickup we shot right after Austin finished Resident Evil. Just by happenstance, he had a much different haircut, which was great because it showed that time had passed. We also really didn’t want to do wigs.

It came out of a lot of test screenings. People just wanted to see Elisabeth and the family again. You can tell Jay isn’t quite connected with his family at the start of the movie, so it’s nice to see him embrace his family and be a little bit more connected. He’s forgiven himself for feeling like he’s let them down, and they’ve welcomed him back. Jane’s oldest sister character then helps him open the letter because he only has one hand. So the scene turned out really lovely. [Writer’s Note: Emily Rudd’s middle sibling character has her back to the camera the entire scene, as the actor was likely unavailable for additional photography due to One Piece season three commitments.]

Did you, Kraus or Brolin actually write Mitt’s letter to Jay?

Yeah, it’s something that Daniel always knew. So I know what it says, and Austin does too. There was one shot where the wind blew the paper just enough that you could kind of make it out, but we blurred it out a little bit.

Initially, I didn’t tell Austin what it said because we were kind of going back and forth on it. Then I was like, “Well, this is what Daniel and I think it said.” And Austin was like, “Perfect. I know how to play it.” That instantly unlocked it for him, and you see that with the laugh and the tears.

It’s something that is textually within the movie. We play fair with that. It’s not a big long letter explaining, I was actually the whale. It’s a very short letter. Mitt’s not going to write a long letter to someone that doesn’t want to speak with him, but it says enough that Austin was really excited once he heard what Daniel and I think it said. We also shot [a close-up of] it, but the studio was just like, “No, it’s better without it.” And I was like, “Great! That suits me fine.”

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Whalefall is now playing in movie theaters. Check out the rest of THR’s coverage including Brian Duffield, Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin.