Interview: Shauna Macdonald Talks The Descent: Part 2

The Descent: Part 2 spelunked onto DVD this week, with actress Shauna Macdonald returning as the sole survivor of Neil Marshall's original outing. The first film's bleak ending (depending on whether you watched the American or British cut) left Sarah stranded and hallucinating in a warren of caves swarming with blind, cannibalistic sub-humans...things didn't look good. Part 2 opens with her having somehow made her way out to daylight, running up to a random car on the road, streaked with blood and near catatonic. Soon she's under the wing of the local authorities who are trying to figure out what happened to Sarah's friends, including a suspicious and antagonistic Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O'Herlihy). The sheriff has the bright idea to lead an expedition into the caves to get answers, and he insists that Sarah come with them, since he's half convinced she murdered the rest of the party in the first place. Soon Sarah is pulling a Ripley headed right back into the shit she just escaped from, and without the benefit of any Colonial Marines.

Shauna Macdonald took a few minutes to chat with us on the phone about what attracted her back for the sequel, finding the balance between authenticity and personal safety, and how to give a convincing drowning performance by almost actually drowning.

Warning: This interview contains spoilers for The Descent: Part 2.

What attracted you to the first Descent, and what made you want to come back for the sequel?

Well, the first one was a no-brainer when I read the script, really. I read it on the train coming up from London. My flat-mate at the time, I said [to him], “I’ve got this horror script to read. I don’t know, I’m not really into horror.” And he went, “Brilliant, horror! Are you joking? Let’s have a look!” So he played all the other characters and I played Sarah, and by the end of the script we were just busting. He said, “Shauna, that’s an amazing story. I can’t believe you’re up for that part.” It was such a blast, just to have someone else’s perspective on it. I think if I’d read it on my own I would have realized anyway, but he was like, “Shauna, this is a fucking brilliant script!”

So you had an enthusiastic cheerleader.

Exactly. I was like, “Isn’t that a little bit corny?” And he was like, “No, that’s genius! Six girls in a cave!” [laughs] But Sarah gets to do such fantastic stuff. She goes on such a journey in the first one, and all the fighting, the layers coming off. There was nothing not to like about The Descent, to be perfectly honest. It was a new idea, and it was clear that there wouldn’t be any stars involved. It would be a group of good actors who had nothing to lose and everything to gain. It was just an amazing experience.

So, when they said, “We think we should do Descent 2, and it’s just going to be Sarah’s story,” I was like, “But all my friends are dead! I’m gonna miss them…” [laughs] And she was stuck in the cave, so how was she gonna get out? And they said, “Shauna, don’t be so narrow-minded. You can tell whatever story you like with a good storyteller. That’s what storytelling is.”

I got involved maybe a year after The Descent had been made, maybe earlier. I can’t remember, because the years went on and on, you know. I signed to do it without seeing anything, without a script, just the idea to do it. Then nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened. The producer would keep checking in, and there was a clause in my contract where the year of it kept changing, so I had to keep signing this thing. I was like, I will be singing “Shauna Macdonald will do The Descent 2" until I’m 40. They kept hold of me but never showed me the goods. I had a kid, got married, and I was like, “My life is moving on, come on!” And then, finally, they said, “We are going to go, and Natalie Mendoza is in it.” And I was like, “But she’s dead!”

Horror movies always find a way.

Exactly. [They said] “She’s not dead, you didn’t see her die, we found a way.” Okay, that is very true. I didn’t hang around, so she could have survived. [laughs] God, Ripley dies; she has a big alien burst out of her and she jumps into a big, hot pan of hot things, and she comes back for Alien: Resurrection. So, there is always a way.

At least Juno’s survival seems slightly more plausible than that example.

Yeah, she’s patched up her knee. She head-butted all the crawlers. She was fine. Even when Natalie Mendoza signed, it all went quiet again. Finally, the script started to circulate. There were quite a few rewrites, and then we got the final shooting script. But not just rewrites: complete story-hauling, all over the place, very different each time we read it. Eventually we got to a point where everybody was happy with the script. But it was quite a big task: there’s lots of people emotionally attached to the script, and it’s hard to please everybody. And they were also trying to please two leading actresses, and that can be tricky sometimes [laughs]. We were lucky that we were given the luxury that they would listen to us. Usually you get the job and you just say the lines. Don’t try to change the lines, never mind the story.

In the first one, you had the emotional arc of your family’s death and all the tension amongst the girls. What were you excited to play in this one?

Because they made a big deal about the redemption and the atonement with Juno, that it was unfinished business, and the sacrifice at the end. For me, it meant something is released, her anger is released, her guilt. She does feel guilty about leaving Juno for dead. Everything is released, then she can make that positive choice to sacrifice herself for the good of another mother. She doesn’t really have anything left. It’s the best choice for her in that situation. I don’t think she could live with herself had she not taken that choice, if she managed to be part of Rios’ death as well. So that’s what attracted me to it emotionally, and also I was quite curious as to, you know, she’s got amnesia -- how is that going to work? When am I going to realize all these things had happened? And also, you’ve got to realize that what we shot was edited; it’s quite different. [Sarah] was a bit more clued up when we filmed it, because in the script it says there are flashbacks. I think they still appear in the film, but later on than what they had originally said in the script. I was excited that I had to play some sort of emotional confusion. Also, we had a huge discussion about what drugs she would be on, and then we realized that if we did it medically it just wouldn’t work. If we got bogged down in the medical facts of what happens to you when you’re on anti-psychotics, it doesn’t actually help your performance, because the story doesn’t really flow. Even when we had to ditch ideas, it was exciting that I got to do research and make choices about stuff.

Both of these movies tap into very primal fears like claustrophobia and fear of the dark. Were there any personal fears that you were able to tap into for your performance.

We shot a lot more water stuff. I’m a very strong swimmer, so I’m really comfortable in the water. However…[laughs] When you’re in a half-submerged tunnel and they put a helmet on you, something about these bloody helmets, they make you feel instantly claustrophobic. A lot of the actors found reasons really early on to ditch these helmets, because it just makes you feel like something is squeezing your brain.

There were these scenes where I’m leading Rios through the flooded tunnel, and Krysten was really having to do her slow breathing, because she was like, “Oh my god, I am so fucking scared.” It’s quite frightening, because it’s dark and you know that if you panic you’ve still got to go under and get yourself out. There were safety people about, but we still had to go under to get to the air, because there’s no way else of getting on dry land. We had a camera in front of our faces, and there’s some stuff where we were on our backs, kissing the rock. The camera man is right at my head, and at my feet is another actress, and the only way out is to somehow go back onto my stomach and go out for air. That moment, even though I was supposed to be quite calm…I was supposed to be like, “Everything is totally fine; I’ve done it before.” But I felt the horror of the claustrophobia.

We shot this great scene that didn’t make the movie, and it didn’t even make the deleted scenes unfortunately. The end of the first film, there’s a pan out of the cleft in the rock. The beginning of the second film starts there, but it’s a pan in. We used another actress playing the little girl, because Molly had got too old. So we did the whole set-up again, we had the firebrand and the cake and the little girl, but the angle was cheated so you only saw the shot over her left shoulder. Then we go up from them and [Sarah's daughter] stands up to give Sarah her hand, and Sarah takes it. She beckons for her to jump, and they both jump down into the abyss, which is an underground river.

All the water-sequence stuff was us being in this tunnel that they kept rejigging to make it look longer than it was. The last day of filming -- funny that, when they put the actresses in the water on the last day of filming -- we thought it would be a really great idea to do lots of shots. When they figured out that I was quite comfortable in the water, they were like, “Okay, Shauna, we’ve hooked up this rapid, and we’re gonna push all this water down this tunnel to create all these bubbles and waves and currents. We’re gonna create a current, Shauna! And then we’re gonna tie a rope around your ankle and tow you down there.” And I said yes! I said, “That’s gonna look really good!” So I did it a few times, and oh my god, it was horrendous. They were like, “Shauna, that was brilliant! You really looked like you were drowning there.” And I was like, “Yeah, no shit. That’s because I was drowning.” So we do all that stuff, and then it doesn’t make the film. They half-drowned me for no reason.

So have these two movies put you off any movies in caves for the foreseeable future?

Ugh. For the second film I knew what I was getting myself into. For the first film I was like, “I won’t wear the knee pads or the elbow pads. I’ll make it authentic!” It’s not authentic. You do the scene like 12 times, so you’re battering yourself 12 more times than the character would get battered [laughs]. This time I was like, “I think I’ll have the knee pads.” Regardless of that, you still get battered and bruised, and they just found different ways to torture me. Everything seemed to be amped up for the second film. I think I called the doctor out, and I never see the doctor in my real life. The doctor got called a few times. “What is this weird rash that’s all over my body?” [laughs] We got some weird rash from the liquid they used in the shit pit, because we’d been filming in it for a couple of days, doing a big fight sequence. But it was exciting. I love it, really.

Was there anything you got to do this time that was your favorite moment from the second film?

I would say the shit pit, because that was quite fun. It was a laugh. It was two days of me and Krysten and a naked man in a bath of poo. [laughs] We found it quite funny.