For Scott Derrickson, the romance at the center of The Gorge is what lets the film move between science fiction, action, horror, and political thriller without feeling like a string of unrelated stories. In a February 6, 2025, interview with Germain Lussier for Gizmodo, the director described that blend as a key reason he took on Zach Dean’s screenplay—and explained how the relationship, the constructed landscape, and a coming-of-age idea for Black Phone 2 shaped his thinking.
Why Derrickson embraced The Gorge’s genre mix
Derrickson’s description of The Gorge is deliberately expansive: it is romance, science fiction, action, horror, and political thriller. The combination appealed to him because the screenplay brought those modes together in ways he found original. As he told Lussier, “I felt that the originality of that and the audacity of that script to blend as many genres in such interesting ways really, really worked.” The word “audacity” is Derrickson’s judgment of the script’s ambition, not a measurable quality.
![Columbia River Gorge Part 2 - The BNSF Fallbridge Sub [Blu-ray] [2012]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61-Gv1IpLEL._SL160_.jpg)
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His answer to how the film holds together is more specific than simply saying it changes genres: “the glue is the romance.” The relationship gives the audience an emotional through-line as the story expands into larger-scale action and threat. Derrickson’s approach is to establish the intimacy early enough that viewers have a connection to carry with them when the film’s scale and genre shift.
How the romance stays present during the action
In a February 21, 2025, interview with Steve Prokopy at Third Coast Review, Derrickson described the directing challenge as keeping the couple’s relationship legible even in action scenes. “The challenge was to let the action itself be romantic, which is how they look to each other, watch each other, move as a team.” The romance, in this account, is not a pause between set pieces; it can be expressed through attention, coordination, and the way the leads respond to one another while facing danger.
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Derrickson also credited Dean’s screenplay with making the transitions between genres work. That distinction matters: the film’s cohesion was not, in his telling, solely a matter of adding romantic beats during production. It began with a script whose shifts he felt were already working, then continued through choices about how the characters behave within the action.
How the film’s gorge was built
The film’s vast gorge is a composite rather than simply a location photographed as one uninterrupted landscape. When Lussier suggested that the wide shots were mostly CGI, Derrickson corrected the premise: the production photographed canyons, rock walls, forest, and sky in Norway, then digitally stitched those elements together into the landscape the story required. He said most of what viewers see in the gorge is real photography manipulated into the desired shape.
That method combines the detail and texture of photographed terrain with the flexibility of digital construction. It explains why “real location” and “CGI” are not mutually exclusive descriptions here: the final vista was assembled from real photographed material, but shaped to create the film’s specific geography.
What Derrickson said about Black Phone 2
Derrickson told Lussier he did not feel obliged to make a sequel. The project became compelling when Joe Hill brought forward an idea that Derrickson found interesting, which he and the team then developed into a screenplay. The director’s central attraction was the chance to move the original film’s middle-school characters into high school and tell a different kind of coming-of-age story.
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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →In a February 10, 2025, ComingSoon interview with Jonathan Sim, Derrickson likewise described the high-school stage as a way for the sequel to mature and become, in some respects, more intense and serious than the first film. A later June 1, 2025, report by Drew Taylor for TheWrap added further context: Derrickson discussed combining Hill’s idea with the characters’ new life stage and drawing on his own winter experiences in the Rocky Mountains for the sequel’s setting. Those setting comments were made later, not in the February Gizmodo interview.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Release context
The February 2025 Gizmodo interview identified Apple TV+ as The Gorge’s release platform. That is historical release information; it does not establish current availability in any particular country or territory.
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