To promote the release of Immaculate, director Michael Mohan participated in post-screening Q&As at select locations throughout the weekend. At last night’s showing at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Boston Seaport, an audience query about post-production challenges led the filmmaker to reveal how the editor of Saw helped save one of the film’s horror sequences.
“The biggest scene that did not work and I’m still not happy with is the scene when Isabelle tries to drown [Cecilia, played by Sydney Sweeney]. I studied a lot of ’70s exploitation movies featuring two women getting in fights, and I wanted it to be like a more direct homage to a genre known as nunsploitation,” Mohan explained.
“I studied some of Jack Hill’s work. Typically what they would do with those types of scenes is they would leave them in a medium-wide shot and just let it play out. The only thing I was doing differently was I wanted a slow push-in just to make it a little more elegant.
“Sydney can hold her breath for three minutes, so to not cut away would be really thrilling, because the audience would be like, ‘Wait a minute. We can see there’s no tank down there.’ I thought it would be really cool… and it wasn’t. It was boring!” he lamented with a grin.
“When you put this pulse-pounding music over it, it was like, the music doesn’t match what I’m seeing. When you took the music out, it was just flat. On the day, I knew something wasn’t working with it, so I shot a little bit of extra coverage. We tried re-cutting it a million times, and we finally got a pair of fresh eyes to actually look at that sequence.”
That fresh set of eyes belonged to none other than Kevin Greutert, veteran editor of the Saw franchise dating back to the original and director of Saw VI, Saw 3D, Saw X, and the forthcoming Saw XI.
“Weirdly enough, Kevin Greutert — he’s a director/editor who directed Saw X — he came in and touched up that scene for us and gave us an idea of how we could repurpose our footage to make it a little bit more thrilling. We sort of jumped off from there.”
Mohan concludes, “If I could go back and do anything over, it would be that and take more time with the underwater camera for it. You needed to see more of her reaction when she was under, and that’s what we didn’t get.”
Immaculate opened at #4 at the box office with $5.3 million, earning Neon its highest opening weekend in the company’s history. You can catch the film in theaters nationwide now.
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