PRESSURE

Directed by Ron Scalpello

SUMMARY :

Beneath the most hostile ocean on earth and beyond the extremes of human endurance, four saturation divers are trapped. As they face their greatest fears, hold your breath! Plunge to the depths of fear with this claustrophobic, heart-stopping underwater suspense thriller.

DIRECTOR - Ron Scalpello

CAST MEMBERS
Danny Huston (Hitchcock, X-men Origins: Wolverine, 30 Days Of Night)
Matthew Goode (Stoker, The Watchmen)
Joe Cole (Offender, Peaky Blinders)
Alan McKenna

Full info:

Danny Huston, Matthew Goode and Joe Cole worked on the shoot at Pinewood Studios and in Scotland on underwater thriller Pressure, which was directed by Ron Scalpello and sold by Embankment Films. 

“Claustrophobia. Paranoia. Four men. Incarceration. Survival.” These are the words director Ron Scalpello uses to describe his follow up to last year’s prison set thriller Offender. 

Pressure centres on four deep sea divers who become trapped in their saturation bell at the bottom of the ocean off the Kenyan coast. Based on an original story by Louis Baxter, the script was written by Alan McKenna and Paul Staheli.

Huston as well as Goode were first choices for the project and Huston reveals that he usually approaches a film from a story point and not the role necessarily. What attracted him in this instance was Scalpello’s debut directorial effort as well as Pressure’s script. “What was fascinating about the script was that it struggles with the concept of faith and logic, and it has this wonderful, sort of quest about it. […] And there’s something cosmic about the story.”

Starring alongside Danny Huston, Matthew Goode and McKenna is Joe Cole, who made his big screen debut in Scalpello’s directorial debut Offender. Scalpello mentions that Cole was “in his mind” pretty early. Cole relished the chance to re-team with him as “he’s very bold, thinks about every detail and visually, I just knew he’d create something that we’ll want to watch on the screen”.

And because they had worked together before, Cole says: “he [Scalpello] knows he can push me to the limits”, which meant that Cole, overseen by stunt co-coordinator and co-producer Nick Chopping, performed the majority of the stunts himself for the underwater scenes, which were shot on Pinewood’s underwater stage. “I ended up doing 90% of the stuff, which was partly down to the fact that Ron knows I can”.