Caddo Lake, the new film from writer/directors Celine Held and Logan George, is named after the real-life location, a swampy expanse that borders Texas and Louisiana. Looking into its endless foggy abyss, one gets the sense that the lake holds countless secrets that can never be fully understood.
Teen Wolf’s Dylan O’BrienandLittle Women’s Eliza Scanlen star as Paris and Ellie, two young people who find their fates intertwined when a young child goes missing in the lake. What starts out as a fairly straightforward missing persons case quickly turns into aTwilight Zone-esque taleof supernatural events, shocking twists, and groundbreaking revalations that turn the story on its head.
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Screen Rant interviewed Celine Held and Logan George, who talked about their work onLake Caddo,streaming on Max from October 10. They talk about their hands-on approach to making movies, to the point of living out at Lake Caddo while writing the script. They discuss utilizing the local community and its denizens to help add authenticity to the film, and they talk about some of the underlying themes that make up the script’s subtextual messages.
Caddo Lake Filmmakers On Their Hands-On Approach To Creating The Film
“The location really drives the narrative work of how we piece the story together.”
The first thing that I did when I finished the movie was just go all the way back to the beginning and start watching it again.
Logan George: Great! That’s the goal.
Celine Held: Did you find Easter eggs?
Well, it doesn’t feel like Easter Eggs, it feels like storytelling! Like you just have to go through it, once again, with clarity.
Logan George: Yeah, there’s a quality of, you don’t really know what you’re watching until the pieces start to connect. But it’s all very purposeful. It’s a lot to set up!
I don’t want to give anything away because I want people to go into the movie as blind as they possibly can. But literally, like, everything is foreshadowing, everything is Chekhov’s guns, and everything means something to this story in a way that comes together so beautifully, I’m just like in awe of the script of this movie, to say nothing of the production design and acting. It’s the kind of old school Twilight Zone style storytelling Tell me like some of your inspirations were and how you came up with this marvelous idea.
Celine Held: We can say, the initial kind of inspiration was, we found a photo of Caddo Lake on Reddit. Love Reddit. May 2020, found a photo of Caddo Lake on Reddit, and we were immediately taken by this photo. We weren’t doing anything else, so we borrowed my mom’s car and we went down to the lake. We live in Brooklyn, so we drove all the way down. I remember parking, Logan was asleep in the passenger seat, and we were parked on the Louisiana side. The lake splits state lines, and the Louisiana side, it just looks like a lake. I was so confused. I was like, this is not what I expected. But the Texas side is full of these mazes and little pathways and pieces that feel like they’re constantly switching and moving.
Logan George: We’re very location-based storytellers. The location really drives the narrative work of how we piece the story together. And so finding this location and how inherently cinematic it was, right off the bat, was really exciting to us. We lived off the lake for about two months writing the first draft of the story.
Celine Held: The idea of everything that happens in the film really came from, COVID was a part of it. This idea of your parents, how well do you know them? Are we gonna see our parents again type thing during COVID? My dad has a lung condition, and not being able to kind of like hug him and seeing him only through glass for so long, it was really difficult.
Logan George: And my mom had passed away in 2019. And there was a specific moment where Celine was talking about these conversations she had with her, that just sounded like this totally different woman than I knew as my mother. And I was like, I can’t believe she did this. And she’s talking about my mom when she was, like, in her twenties. And so that just got us on the track of this idea: how well do you really know your parents before they give birth to you? They’ve led this whole other life. And so I think that infused with the location. We went out on the lake every single day, sometimes with guides, sometimes just in kayaks. And I mean, when we went out, we would just get lost all the time.
Celine Held: It was really scary.
Logan George: You just don’t know back to front once you get out in the middle of the trees. And that happens to a lot of people, apparently, when you’re out there. So it felt like that was how we could sort of infuse the genre element of this girl who goes missing and everything surrounding that, but still have this really strong emotional core of what we wanted to talk about, which is this idea of generations of families and how they connect.
Caddo Lake Filmmakers Utilized The Local Community To Help Make The Film
“They’re incredible human beings. This lake felt to us like another wonder of the world.”
I didn’t think of the COVID angle, but we’re in this post-COVID cinematic era where there are a lot of movies that really touch upon what we were feeling in 2020. The script is so dense and layered that there’s so much that I think people are going to get out of the movie. Tell me about some of the people you met who kind of became part of the story and learning the voice. How did that extend to actually shooting?
Celine Held: Yeah, I mean, the people are the lake. We met people in 2020, who actually passed away before we shot the film. Yeah, one of whom was Billy Carter, who owned Johnson’s Ranch, where we took off a lot with our boats. And his son, Will Carter, his wife, Dottie Carter, we stayed in her cabins on Taylor Island. Her handyman, Stoney Jackson, actually plays the fisherman who picks up Eliza in the middle of the film.
Logan George: There’s a couple of really good cameos. Will’s also in the film.
Celine Held: Yeah, Will’s in the film, and his son Bugs. And John Wynn, who was dear, dear to our heart, he grew up on the lake. And his father was an alcoholic. He used to stay out on the islands, on different islands every night. He told us he dropped out of school and the lake became to him, he was, like, married to it.
Logan George: You’d drive out on these boat tours for like an hour, two hours, and it’s just you and the boat captain. So you get to have these like really intimate conversations with them. You know, when the boat motor’s not running and you’re sort of just drifting through this place and it’s just you guys. So we got to know a lot of people really well.
Celine Held: They were amazing. They’re incredible human beings. This lake felt to us like another wonder of the world.
Logan George: They were so gracious with like their time and how excited they were that we were writing this movie, and now it’s finally coming to fruition. We’re really excited for them to see the final product.
Celine Held: A couple of them are coming to the premiere!
Caddo Lake’s Filmmakers On Practicing Gator Safety
“It’s definitely something that people tell you to be mindful of.”
I’m from New York as well. Maybe this is a ‘me’ thing, but I feel like depending on your worldliness, how long does it take to not fear alligators around every corner? Because when you said sleeping on different islands, my thought was, no, I would have to fortify anti-gator defenses first. How do you get over that?
Celine Held: I’m going to be super honest: I never saw any. The whole time. And altogether, the amount of time we actually lived out there, probably like eight months. Maybe nine.
Logan George: And I can’t count the number of boat tours we did, you’re just on the water so much. We were a presence in production with our, like, fleet of boats going through these pathways. So that’s going to scare off any alligator. We didn’t have to worry about production so much. When you’re like a lone figure, though, it’s definitely something that people tell you to be mindful of. But they only attack when threatened. They’re not going to go out looking for humans.
Celine Held: I’m still scared of them.
Logan George: The only the only thing you want to do is not like accidentally disturb one and have them lash out.
Celine Held: They eat gator. All the restaurants serve gator.
Logan George: And there are tours where you can go out looking for them. Because at night, when you shine a flashlight, it reflects off their eyes. We didn’t do any one of those.
Celine Held: Not creepy at all! (Laughs)
Logan George: So for us, it became less and less of something on our brain just because of how little we ever interacted.
Celine Held: Well, I will say, we have our own little camera and we like to go out and do like test shots in like the middle of the night or whenever. And I remember once when we were staying in a cabin and you woke us up, we had to go out on kayaks in the middle of the night. I was like, Logan, there’s alligators out there!
Logan George: Yeah, but there was a lightning storm. There were these beautiful streaks of lightning across the lake. A lot of these shots are in the film, too.
Celine Held: To the chagrin of our cinematographer.
Logan George: Something I’ll say about the lake, every trip out is a totally different experience. It’s different every time. So you want to be there to capture it.
More About Caddo Lake (2024)
When an eight-year-old girl mysteriously vanishes, a series of past deaths and disappearances start to link together, forever altering a broken family’s history. The inspiration for CADDO LAKE was sparked after filmmakers, Celine Held and Logan George, came across a photograph of the real Caddo Lake online, leading to many visits to the cypress forest that rests on the border of Texas and Louisiana. The film was shot in late 2021 and 2022 in and around Karnack, Texas.
Caddo Lake (2024)
Cast
Caddo Lake follows a chilling mystery centered around a young girl’s disappearance in a small Texas town. As the community grapples with the unsettling events, hidden secrets and tensions unfold. Directed by nan, this suspenseful narrative explores themes of fear and the unknown surrounding Caddo Lake.
