When you're on a tight budget and a tight timeline, you can't afford to slow down because you've got to move the camera around.' 'From the ground up, everything was carefully planned. 'We didn't want have to continually reconfigure things,' Wight says. 'With my experience in cave exploration, being to lots of places in the world, I said 'You know what? We can create the environments that we need to film, and then we'll do second-unit stuff in the real caves,'' he says.ĭesigning the faux caverns was no easy task: The sets needed to accommodate all the needs of the production, including camera cranes. But it quickly became clear that filming in real locations would be too dangerous. Wight initially wanted to film Sanctum in real caves, so filmmakers searched all over the world for the perfect spot. Then a flash flood cuts off the entrance and everything goes to hell. Billionaire Carl Hurley (Ioan Gruffudd), who is funding the expedition, brings along his girlfriend Victoria (Alice Parkinson) to check out the caves. In the film, diver Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) is trying to map a previously unexplored cave system he's enlisted his 17-year-old son, expert climber and reluctant volunteer Josh (Rhys Wakefield), to help. This real-life event was the inspiration for Sanctum, out February 4. People who you thought might become the heroes and the leaders of the group don't necessarily do what you think they're going to do, and others rise to the occasion.'

The struggle to survive was the thing that really struck me. 'It was one of those moments where you come very close to your own demise and afterward you start reflecting on what has happened. 'It took nearly two days to find a new way out of the cave,' Wight says. In 1988, Andrew Wight was leading an expedition of 14 people in exploring a large underwater cave in Australia's Nullarbor Plains when a storm flooded the entrance and caused the cave to collapse, trapping them inside.

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