Your new favorite twisting-and-turning mystery has arrived. Caddo Lake is now streaming on Max, and it’s perfect for the autumnal season. But is magic or madness at play in the wild world of Caddo Lake? We guess you’ll have to tune in to find out. But to help shed light on some of the secrets at the core of this eerie new film, Nerdist spoke to Caddo Lake‘s writer and director duo, Celine Held and Logan George. From making the lake a character to how they determined the unexpected paths the movie would take (hint: a big whiteboard was involved), Held and Logan take us deep into the heart of Caddo Lake.
You can read the full interview below—spoilers begin at the spoiler warning.
Nerdist: Caddo Lake begins by having the viewer really wonder if there’s a kind of magic or madness in play in the film. How important was it for you to strike that balance early on, and which way were you hoping for viewers to lean first?
Celine Held: Magic or madness? I love that. I think we want them to lean toward madness at first, if I were to pick.
Logan George: Yeah, you have to start laying some of the groundwork for what satisfies the genre. What we’re setting up, though, we can’t really tell you that we’re setting up, but there’s a lot of groundwork that you have to lay for the payoffs that come later. And within that, you also have to infuse the story with the tone and tension of where you’re going to get to. So it was a really delicate balance in the beginning of finding out how to communicate that, but also do the exposition necessary for what the story requires.
I was really curious about what brought you to set the movie in Caddo Lake. What did you feel this specific setting added to your overall narrative?
Held: The whole movie came from the setting of Caddo Lake.
It was like the other opposite way around that you’d normally write a movie. I found a photo of this lake on Reddit in May 2020. We weren’t doing anything else. Shout out to the “ EarthPorn” subreddit! And so we just borrowed my mom’s car from Pittsburgh and drove down to Texas. We lived there for a couple of months, and we wrote this awful first draft. Came back to Brooklyn, then got out a giant whiteboard after we gave it to our producer, and she was like, this is awful. And so we got out this giant whiteboard, and we’re like, okay, let’s figure this out because there’s something here. We’d been kind of talking about this idea for a while. It was COVID, so it was also in a response to COVID in a lot of ways.
George: And not being able to see our families. My mom had died in 2019, and so months later, Celine was talking about this conversation she’d had with her and these memories that she was telling Celine about. And I was like, I’ve never heard this story. This doesn’t even sound like my mom. This is wild. And it sort of prompted this idea of “how well do you really know your parents?” They’ve lived this life before you were born, and can you ever really understand that aspect of ’em? So infused with the location built the story.
Held: The location was a thousand times more than that photo gave us. It was way and above what we thought.
George: All the people on Caddo Lake, the people who live in this part of the world, and the myths that surround the lake were also all invaluable in building it.
The lake is really a being of its own in Caddo Lake. What did you want the character of the lake to feel like throughout the film?
Held: I think it was funny, we made that producer we were talking about, she and our cinematographer, who we work with all the time, Kara Durrett and Lowell Meyer. We made them come down and we were like “Come down to the lake,” while we were there initially. And his initial response was “Spooky, spooky.” And I never felt that. I never felt like that spooky that he was feeling.
George: He kept saying, “There’s a trope of the cypress trees, spanish moss blowing in the wind, that’s like Louisiana Bayou-type murder crime.” And so we recognize all that, but we do feel like that aesthetic only gets you so far. So we just try to incorporate the specificity of this lake and the actual history of the lake and…
Held: How big it is.
George: How big it is, the specifics of all the names, and a lot of the people who live off there, they have cameos in the film and stuff. So I think that was sort of how we had to bridge the gap.
Held: We learned as much as we could about Caddo Lake. We learned all the names like Starr Ditch, Goverment Ditch, Carter’s Chute, and Alligator Bayou, these places that then feel like we know like the back of our hands, as much as we can.
As we got into it, I was delighted to find that there was really magic at play. I was very happy when this really intense time travel eerie element occurred. I feel that creating a coherent system of time travel is one of the hardest things a film can ask of itself. How did you decide about the details of your version of it in Caddo Lake?
Held: We didn’t want anyone to be the mastermind, so we didn’t want any older version of a character to be the puppet master pulling the strings.
George: That felt like sort of the new way in. Is there enough cultural cache around time travel, the way there is on ghosts or aliens, that we can tell a time travel story, but this one is just of nature. This is a natural phenomenon, and our characters are just sucked into it.
Held: We also were inspired by that mountain that all those Monarch butterflies traveled to in Mexico every year; that felt really specific. And those sheep in Bangladesh that walked in circles for like 10 days, these wild occurrences of nature that feel like, why? What are these animals? What are these bugs? What does the earth know that we can’t figure out? And it felt like that place could exist on Caddo Lake. So, in creating this massive maze of the film, it was honestly, again, the whiteboard that saved us.
Did you know you were writing the scariest scene in fiction when Ellie is trapped in different dimensions and hears her phone ringing, but she can’t get to it?
Held: That’s amazing. We did not know that was so scary, but now, in retrospect, yes.
I found it interesting that Paris and Ellie never meet in Caddo Lake, and I thought that was really a fascinating facet of it. Why did you choose for their path to never cross?
Held: There was a version where they could, of course there was.
George: Yeah, it is tricky. We talked about it…
Held: But they didn’t know who each other were.
George: It was part of the wish-fulfillment aspect of the story and how it felt, considering the grief and the loss that’s part of the story. And because of the mechanics of time travel and how it all has to be predetermined, these things have to go a certain way. We always knew what would happen to Paris. And so it felt important that they were never going to get that aspect of wish fulfillment from each other. I mean, there’s a world where it could have happened, but we’ve made a choice for them never to overlap because it’s almost the expectation, and we wanted to go in a different direction.
Yes, Caddo Lake, and its ending, are really bittersweet. I feel like some wounds are healed, and some wounds are healed, but they still hurt, and others kind of stay open. What were you kind of hoping the viewers would take away from that bittersweetness?
Held: The line that we came up with for the ending, “They didn’t mean to leave us.” That was kind of the beginning of understanding what Ellie would understand at the end. And we felt like it stood for more than just time travel. It stands for death and grief and that no one really means to leave us. So we hope that you leave this thriller horror, this wild film, that you want to call your mom.
Caddo Lake really accomplished that. Another line that really stuck with me was that nature built this place. I think we touched on it a little, but I guess what were you really trying to convey in that very evocative moment?
George: I think we as storytellers don’t want to tie the story up in a perfectly neat bow so that when the film’s over, you can sort of compartmentalize it and be like, okay, cool, I saw that. So there’s a lot about the aspects and the nature of how time travel works in the story that is left open to interpretation. Those things are not explicitly spelled out. But in watching the whole film, it felt important that someone gave voice to sort of the origin of this strange experience, that this isn’t coming from a manmade device or anything. And that Ellie walks away from the experience and has that kind of understanding that she can take home with her and that the audience, in turn, can sort of take that as well.
What did you feel was the smallest time travel hint that maybe viewers might have missed out on while watching Caddo Lake?
Held: There are a bunch at the beginning, so when on a rewatch you’d see a lot of little pieces. I think
George: I dunno if I want to give any away…
Held: I could say that. Well, yeah, I mean a hint of what’s to come is the thing that gets tied up in Paris’ boat motor—the reason why they originally can’t leave is that Ellie’s yellow rope gets caught in the motor.
George: Yeah, maybe the bridge too. The bridge is explicitly seen. You see it in different timelines, way before the reveal. And so to an astute viewer who sees that, maybe they could start to get an inkling of what’s going on.
Caddo Lake is streaming now on Max.
