Interview with Caddo Lake Director and Writer Duo Logan George And Celine Held

‘Caddo Lake’ is a mystery thriller released by the director and writer duo of Logan George And Celine Held. SciFiction spoke to them about what it was like to write and direct together, how the and what it was like to work with the legendary thriller mastermind M. Night Shyamalan.

SciFiction: What’s it like to write and direct as a duo?

Celine Held: We don’t know any other way.

Logan George: Yeah, we’ve sort of been doing it our entire career as writers and directors. So it’s become something that is intrinsic to the craft, and it’s what we love about it. We have a total respect and appreciation of each other’s aesthetic. And what is what Celine’s passionate about is more often than not something I want to get behind too. So it’s our goal to kind of be a consistent vision and to sort of hash out any disagreements or debates you have about characters or the way to film certain scenes before we arrive on set so that we’re a unified voice when we’re talking to cast and crew.

Personally, I love it as there’s someone else there who’s looking.

Celine Held (jokingly): It’s someone else’s fault! Who messed up the scene? 

Logan George: No, no, no, it’s someone else who is like did you see that? That weird thing happened in the background. We have to go again. Or this isn’t tracking with this. It’s like a whole other brain that is doing the same exact thing you’re doing. So it’s a real asset in my mind. We love it.

Celine Held: Yeah, we’re having fun.

SciFiction: On this film you worked with M. Night Shyamalan, who’s well known for his thrillers, but the twists that he likes to put into his films. And So what was that like?

Celine Held: Night was amazing on ‘Caddo’. We were working a show ‘Servant’ with him and Night just asked us if we had a feature script. We gave him what was really like the 3rd or 4th draft. And he read it right away. He was heavily involved in the making of this film, especially in post production. We edited with him every single day for a period of time and in production he watched the dailies every day, so he really was present but fully allowed us to be the writers and directors of this story.

Logan George: It was him and Blinding Edge Pictures, his production company, everyone on his team. They were doing this as producers. And it’s a real credit for that that they did that. We can’t imagine having been supported more than we were.

SciFiction: Was there any particular input of his that stands out to you or comment that he made?

Logan George: His overriding idea when we were in the edit was making sure that you were one to one with the audience. There’s so many sort of complications to the plot and twists and it’s really important that the audience is tracking all of these decisions that are in all these choices that the characters are making, and where you are because if too many things happen and they get lost, they could just tune out. It just becomes too complex. And that’s a really fine line, in the edit and in what you show and whether you need to tweak the line of dialogue to really be able to make sure that you’re centred and an audience is with you, but you’re not being too heavy-handed or not too subtle.

SciFiction: Why is this a different kind of thriller mystery film?

Celine Held: We wanted to tell a story that, you know, I think a lot of film makers actually would say would it’s a Trojan horse story we’re telling. We have this sci-fi wrap on the movie, but we actually, we hope that when you turn it off you just want to go call your mom, you know, which maybe it’s not your normal sci-fi. Which isn’t your normal kind of sci-fi film that you’d expect. So yeah, I think that makes it different

SciFiction: How were you inspired by the Texan wilderness and Caddo lake itself?

Logan George: We found a photo of the lake on Reddit and it just like looked at like this inherently cinematic place. This was, you know, May of 2020 and we weren’t doing anything else. So we bought Celine’s mom’s car and drove down to Texas and lived off the lake for two months. And it was better than we could have hoped it there. It is truly so vast.

The people that lived off the lake and the history and the sort of myth surrounding the place really got infused into the script and drove the story in so many ways.The whole thing really comes back to this location of the lake and and how iconic it is for us.

This interview has been edited for clarity.