An Interview with Celine Held & Logan George, the Writers/Directors of ‘Caddo Lake’

Still from ‘Caddo Lake’ Courtesy of Max.

Celine Held and Logan George are a talented writing/directing duo that have worked on cutting edge shows such as Servant. Their most recent project, Caddo Lake, is available to stream on Max right now and we had the distinct honor of sitting down with them to discuss the depth they injected into this incredible feature.
 
John Betancourt: I'm curious to start with what it was that inspired the two of you to come together and create this complex story.
 
Logan George: Yeah, well, we… it was summer of 2020, and so we were kind of holed up in our 200 square foot apartment in Brooklyn. We were on Reddit a lot, and Celine just stumbled upon this photo of Caddo Lake itself. And it had this uncanny, like arresting quality to it. Just looked like something out of, you know, science fiction. It was so unreal and beautiful, and we decided to go down and see it for ourselves, because we found it to be this, like, inherently cinematic location. I think we're really driven as filmmakers by a location as a sort of a really inspiring set piece, in a way, to sort of get that foot in the door of something that you've never seen before.
 
Celine Held: Yeah, we got lost a lot on the lake ourselves. And when we went out with people who knew the lake very well, they told us stories about how everybody gets lost. And that was something that kind of like really stuck with us, this idea that they actually found people who were forced to stay out on the lake overnight because they couldn't find their way back. And at the same time, we were talking a lot about death, with the pandemic, and so in our parents, and it all kind of got wrapped up into the movie.
 
John Betancourt: Now, you filmed this on the water, you've got an incredibly complex story with all kinds of movie pieces. What kinds of challenges went into crafting something so ambitious and so intricate?
 
Logan George: Yeah, boat work. You just have to have safety, you know, above everything. So, there's a certain pace that you have to move at to make sure that everybody's being safe. You're stepping onto and off of boats, and Caddo Lake itself is quite shallow, so we had to have these very small boats, ultimately, only a couple crew members. You had to be really calculated about how much equipment you were bringing on and off of the boats and stuff. So, it became this very intimate experience a lot of the time when we would take only a handful of crew members out to go film something, you know, 15-minute drives into the water, away from everything we did, a lot of walking around in mud, like wearing waders for, you know, hours and hours on end, getting very, very dirty.
 
Celine Held: There's also the fact that for this story in particular, it can't rain because it will mean something else. So anytime it was raining, we had to, like, pivot and or that also the sun started setting earlier, because we began shooting, beginning of October. So then with the sun setting. So, it got a little bit hairy there for a bit. And to be as exact as we wanted to be with the knot of this story, we wanted to make sure things made sense, that you weren't able to say, like, “Oh, this happened at a different time of day. So, this has to be XYZ,” so to not spoil anything. Yeah, it got complicated.
 
John Betancourt: I do want to talk a little bit about there are a lot of layers to this story, which I really appreciated. And I want to talk a bit about some of those. I mean, we talked a little bit brief about the inspiration of family and death and those kinds of things, but I'm very curious what went into the inspiration of crafting such a beautiful tapestry about loss, about trauma and all the other elements that go into the story.
 
Logan George: Yeah. Well, my mom had passed away in 2019 and Celine had mentioned these conversations that she'd had with my mom where she was describing these memories from her life, and the stories I hadn't even heard some of them before. And so like, it didn't even sound like my mom in so many ways, and it was fascinating to me, and it sort of prompted this question for us of how well you really know your parents, because they lived this life, you know, before you were born. And so, in sort of imbuing that into the story, when we were crafting Paris and the loss that he goes through, we were trying to sort of maximize that sense of conflict, and, you know, guilt within him over the death of his mom, that happens in the story. And for Ellie, when she loses someone really close to her, how can we make that sort of the most, sort of dramatic and guilt inducing part of it as possible? Because we felt like guilt was like a really, really strong motivator for the characters, but also something that feels like it's so hyper connected to the way that we process grief and loss in our lives.
 
Celine Held: We also think the final scene of the film are when Ellie says… a line that we worked really hard on, because for us, it, the whole film is kind of this exploration of death in a lot of ways, of like the idea of what it is to… well, I can't wait for the movie to come out so we can talk about it plainly, because you don't want to spoil anything, But it is something that was a little near and dear to our hearts. And maybe most sci fi movies.
 
John Betancourt: But I do want to ask too, I mean, without any spoilers there as well. Obviously, when you put a story out that's cathartic. When you put a story out that has so much to it, there's something, obviously, you're hoping to kind of accomplish for the audience. And I'm curious what deeper meaning each of you hope the audience takes away from Caddo Lake.
 
Celine Held: I think we want you to, it would be cool if you wanted to call your mom. There's something you know, I think that maybe calling your mom, calling your dad, or, like, thinking about them in a different way, is something that I want you to hopefully pull away. But also, we hope you watch this movie with a friend where you can, like, start to dissect, like, what is actually happening, and that maybe you both saw something slightly different, and a rewatch would be worth it.
 
Logan George: You know your family, chosen or otherwise, this is a really very specific intimate relationships in your life, and our characters are sort of pushing these people away in so many respects at the beginning of the film, and come to have like a newfound understanding and appreciation of these relationships that are in their life. And I think that's something that as we've gotten older and we've started to create a family of our own, you have a real full circle moment of understanding just how important your parents, the people that raised you, were to, like, your whole sense of self and your place in the world. So, we're sort of just trying to cast a light on that in a very like, propulsive and exciting and fun way.
 
John Betancourt: Obviously I can tell now, since it's been a project since, you know, kind of the pandemic that you've been working on, and I hear the passion your voices about the work that went into it. What does it mean to you now to be literally days away from having this out to the world?
 
Celine Held: It's weird. It's so weird. There's part of me that's it's felt safe to have it not released. Like, I'm like, “No,” you know? But I'm so excited for people to see it. I also, I think we both feel like different filmmakers. Now it's been a minute. You know, the strike delayed it, and like Logan alluded to, we have, we had a baby girl, and actually just gave birth again. So, we have another baby, and now we're done, but, and so, I feel like a changed person in a lot of ways. And the new pieces we're working on now, we realize don't involve any children, and it feels like that's a… every -- the next piece of work that you work on is just an answer to, or like a response to what you did before. So, you know, there are obviously, we're never trying to make a perfect film. We're trying to do a swing. We're trying to do something that feels like, you know, you can be passionate about it. You're not going to sit back and watch it and let it pass by. So, we hope you know, it's exciting for people to have, hopefully, what will be passionate responses to it, that they can see themselves in the characters. And, yeah, I think it'll feel… it's exciting. It's exciting across the board.
 
Logan George: I mean, I share Celine’s sentiment that, like, in a lot of ways, we've, you know, moved on, you know, creatively from this project, because we made it so long ago, but sort of having interviews about it now, and sort of like bringing back up all the memories, like the community that we built around it and all the cast and crew, it's been incredibly cathartic for us, like, on an artistic level, to sort of get to relive something that was ultimately, like, a very joyous experience. We've met so many people that we feel like are lifelong collaborators now, and to get to celebrate the film like this now and have a release is something special.
 
John Betancourt: Last question for you today, what are you each most proud of when it comes to this project?
 
Logan George: Well, I'm certainly, proud of the production itself, in that, like everything that we asked of the crew, which felt like really impossible asks sometimes, they delivered. So, there wasn't something that we couldn't accomplish, you know, budgetarily or execution wise. And we're talking about, you know, tons of boat work, a huge amount of stunts, sort of really challenging VFX work, and the fact that all of it exists now in the film and is executed so well, it's a testament to our crew, and it's just like, ultimately, something I'm so proud of that, like, on an execution level, the film is presented exactly as we want to.
 
Celine Held: I'm proud of the way we captured the lake in the community. Yeah, that’s, what you see, what you get like, truly, we there's no like, major VFX of the lake at all, and there's so many members of the community who are actually in the film or helped behind the scenes. And we just had the premiere a couple days ago here in New York, and we had some people from the lake, like one of the, our very first boat tour captains, fly up with his wife, and he watched it, and his review, where he was just like “You got our lake,” that felt like the biggest win. So, I'm… I'm proud of that.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

---