Rob Petit’s documentary Underland takes us into a succession of subterranean worlds to consider notions of Deep Time and our place in the long arm of history. From caverns where Mayan forebears placed handprints on the walls to storm drains where more recent graffiti artists have left their mark and the scientific Snolab, the film – based on Robert Macfarlane’s book of the same name – looks into the past and possible futures. Narrated by German A-lister Sandra Hüller, this is a poetic and philosophical dive as well as a visually immersive one. We caught up with Petit shortly after his film had premiered at Tribeca Film Festival to talk about taking a deep dive into hidden worlds.
You’ve said that almost straight away as you were reading Macfarlane’s book that you felt like it should really be a film and you'd already collaborated with him before on Upstream, so was he immediately receptive to the idea and how did you collaborate?
Rob Petit: I remember I was on the end of a jetty on the shores of Lake Pocono when I was just reading the book and I was gripped right from the first sentence, which is the way into the underland through the riven trunk of an old ash tree and I remember thinking, oh, this is an inherent sort of cinema to the direction of travel that Rob has chosen for this book and I think I was only towards the end of the first chapter when I, when I messaged to say, look, I haven't finished the book yet, but I think there's a film in this because it is a story about leaving the world with which we're familiar, in this case the surface world, and heading into one that's stranger and older and I just thought this could be the most fantastic film. Rob was instantly excited about the idea of talking more, for sure. The book had just come out and naturally there were quite a few people who wanted to turn it into a film so we began to put together a creative proposal and I start to work with the most brilliant team at Spring. With Andre Singer and Lauren Greenwood, the producers, and it sort of grew from there.
Given the amount of ground that lies beneath our feet I presume that you had a wealth of stories to choose from. So how did your selection process work, not just for the places but for the people, who are also a crucial part of this story.
RP: That's right. We started developing the idea during the series of lockdowns that we had in the UK during Covid. What that meant is that people were reachable because most people were at home but also very willing to talk about their work and about the world outside the walls that we were all confined in during that time. So we were able to put together journey map of people and places. Of course, the great challenge was always going to be we can't make a film about everything underground. We can't even really make a film that is as sprawling in its geography as the book. Rob Macfarlane very early on gave his blessing for us to turn this into something new.
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| Underland. Rob Petit: 'It is a journey into an entirely new way of seeing and thinking about the legacies that we're leaving, the way that we inhabit this planet' |
So I was sort while being inspired by the book, also liberated from it, in the sense that we knew this was never going to be a page-for-page adaptation. The book is an unadaptable work of staggering genius, so it could only ever then really have been its own thing and a response to it.
There was a sort of pre-edit edit, as it were, of journeys to a few places that would satisfy the thesis of the film, which is really that it's a journey into deep time. It is a journey into an entirely new way of seeding and thinking about the legacies that we're leaving, the way that we inhabit this planet. Beyond that, during the actual edit, there was a further whittling down. A painful whittling but a necessary one.
There is some beautiful editing in the film which really helps forge the links from place to place. There is more than one editor’s name there so presumably there was quite a lot of editing work that happened throughout the course of this. Could you tell me a bit more about that?
RP:People have remarked that we made this as about as difficult for ourselves as we possibly could have done. Not only were we trying to shoot in places where there's no light and your lines of sight are stolen by stubbornness of matter – how do you see through things? How do you even cast light and make shadow. Trying to stitch together the journeys of characters who never meet is always going to be a challenge. Is there going to be enough gravity in the film, is there going to be enough stuff that keeps it together and stops it just spinning out into just a survey of underground spaces. It had to be more than that. We did, through the editing process, come to realise that all of these journeys are just sort of “into the woods” heroes journeys. They are all classic, mythological fairy tale journeys that sort of fit into these chapters.
We then realised the film can have its own sort of meta arc. So it was initially five acts and then it became six. Once we had sort of cracked that things started to move. I would say that the editing process required a lot of patience, not just from the editing team themselves but also from the producers, because we were constantly experimenting.
When David Hill came on board, we did about 15 or 16 weeks afterwards – we had already been six months of editing – things really started to move.
There’s no one like David and his mind. It was like playing chess without knowing the rules for both of us for a time, but I think we figured it out and that collaboration was invaluable.
You talk about the difficulties of shooting underground but its also notable that being underground is a very sensory experience for the participants. Some mentioned sounds or smells. What was it that struck you most about being underground?
RP: Before we started shooting, we as a team had done enough sort of descending to become as familiar as you can with the sort of sensory trickiness in a way. Of what happens to the body of how your sense of sound is heightened, your sense of smell changes almost to compensate for the lack of visuals. Certainly in those underlit spaces like the cave systems. We also filmed in quite a few British caves as well. So right from the beginning I knew in a way that the film would have to be a sensory cinematic experience. Working with cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps, he got that right from the beginning. And before we even took a camera down, we wanted to become familiar with that by a physical response, in order to, then be able to represent it.
Were you shocked by anything you found. There are some wonderful things but there’s also an abandoned uranium mine?
RP: There’s a wonderful line in the book which became a line in the narration, which is that we don't only place into the Earth things that we love and wish to save but also the things that we fear and wish to lose. I remember when I first read that in the book, I sort of took it as a warning, I didn't quite know exactly what that meant. And working with Bradley Garrett, the urban explorer, writer, geographer, who is one of the characters in the film, following him on his various adventures underground in pursuit of things that we have tried to forget was utterly eye-opening, disturbing, mind expanding. We saw absolutely sore things that we as a species have thrown into the Earth that we would hope have been forgotten. A literal mountain of car wrecks that smells of petrochemicals, caskets of radioactive waste that, of course, we produce. Uranium remains radioactive for thousands of years after it is useful to us as a species. So that presents a problem, how do we dispose of it safely?
The only solution that we have, imperfect as it is, is to inter it underground. There was a sort of note of hope in that storyline and Bradley was very good at finding it. It relates to how we as the species warn those that might come after us, even if possibly a post-human species, about the horrors that we’ve buried down. That ultimately speaks to the fact that we can think along this Deep Time scale, we can think beyond ourselves and our immediate descendants.
There’s a sort of folkloric element, although it’s not overt, but I was thinking of the dream sequence you’ve included. I got the impression you’re striving to suggest that Deep Time idea of things that become almost a story through the passage of time. Reality becomes something slightly different. Is that something that appeals to you?
RP: The dream sequence… it was quite early in the process where I realised that something inherently dreamlike about the act of descending. And maybe it's something to do with the fact that when you are underground for any prolonged period of time, you have to develop new frames of reference and the surface world feels so far away.
Even after you spend a night underground, you dream of sunlight. As Fatima Tec Pool, one of the characters in the film says, the dreams that she has when she's underground are nothing like the ones that she has on the surface. So, I certainly wanted to sort of pass through the dream world as if that was the sort of threshold and the question then became well, what lies on the other side of that? Reuben and I discussed the idea that once we enter one of our character’s dreams, maybe we never quite get out of that dream space. The whole time, we had to keep in mind that we had to deliver the audience back to the surface.
There's always the question, where do you want to leave the audience, how to we want them to feel? I would love them to feel the way that you do feel when you ascend after a prolonged period underground and that is what did I see down there? What was that? The world looks a little different and if there’s something of that that web’e managed to achieve, then we’re happy.
Given that this film is about Deep Time, what sort of legacy would you like to leave?
RP: Wow, what a question. When we were discussing the ambitions for the film as a team, we sort of joked about the audacious ambition to make a film that would stand the test of Deep Time. I don't know what that looks like but we tried. Who knows what will survive of us as a species, but I know that if we were to ask Bradley Garrett, he would say it’s the things that are currently underground – our cities may erode to dust but it's our subterranean infrastructure. These are the fossils of the future. So I think the question is indeed what sort of fossils are we leaving? I don't have the answer to it. But I do know that from the book itself, I remember being very inspired by the Deep Time thesis that sits sort of nestled within the book's heart. And that is the idea that we are bound in this intricate web of legacy that stretches far into the past through our ancestors and puts us as the ancestors of tomorrow. So the book, at its heart, has their question: are we being good ancestors? And if we're able to sort of keep asking ourselves that and have that somehow guide our behaviour, then maybe that's enough.
