There’s a reason why large bodies of water are often referred to as an abyss. The limitless expanse of the sea acts as a sounding board for casual beachgoers and steadfast sailors alike, providing everything from a picturesque sunset to a vast and deeply unsettling look into one’s own soul.

For Emily (Julia Goldani Telles), she’s got her heart set on making her family proud, even if it means circumnavigating the world on a solo sailing trip with no GPS or any modern technology to guide her way. Emily echoes the sentiment of her bloodline, wholeheartedly believing that “there are no dangerous seas, only dangerous sailors,” a bold mindset that Mother Nature quickly humbles with a powerful storm.

Soon after her shipwreck, Emily finds herself awoken by a quaint lighthouse keeper named Ismael (Demián Bichir), who informs her that he’s nursed her back to health after her crash, he’s tried to call for help to no avail through the island’s only shoddy radio, and there’s no one around for miles. Now, stranded somewhere in the Southeastern Pacific Ocean, Emily and Ismael find the walls closing in on their already cramped conditions, as the paranoia and unease shared between two superstitious strangers gives way to an environment far more foreboding than anything waiting for them out in the infinite blue.

Behold Roxy Shih’s Beacon, a confident excursion into the darkest depths of a person’s heart through the vehicle of a thrilling story about a woman lost at sea. Filled to the brim with seafaring folklore, the Haunted Museum and Mira Mira director’s latest is a masterclass in pressure cooking, a power struggle played out between two great minds, brought to a boil within the confines of a contained environment.

I was fortunate enough to speak with director Shih on behalf of Screenopolis while her latest project played at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2024. In the interview, we discuss her affinity for telling stories in isolated worlds, the challenges of shooting in freezing cold temperatures on location in Newfoundland, why making a movie boasting nautical creatures feels like coming full circle for the filmmaker, and how both of her lead characters in their own way attempt to find refuge in the deep.

Kalyn Corrigan: Just to start, can you talk a little bit about the lineage of the film’s development from the initial pitch of “It’s The Lighthouse meets 10 Cloverfield Lane” to the final version?

Roxy Shih: The project came to me through my producer Neil Elman. We connected many years ago and have been wanting to find a project to work on together. He was like, “I’m gonna find the right one to like, hook Roxy with” – no pun intended, right? And I had been looking for something that really challenges my filmmaking voice. Something that I wanted to bring a lot of what I am interested in into the fold. I’ve always loved mythology.

My very first short film that I made, I guess as an adult, was called The Siren, and so it feels full circle being able to make Beacon. When I first read this script, I was ensnared because I love pressure cooker, minimal past contained locations. I always feel that these types of scenarios really bring out the best and worst in humans, and I love exploring nuanced, paradoxical characters because I don’t believe anyone’s truly good or evil. It’s just what we choose to tell ourselves, whether we’re the hero or the villain, and if the other person chooses to believe that or not.

There’s so many themes in this script that I was eager to sink my teeth into. So, he originally had a pitch, and then Julia Rojas, who is the amazing screenwriter, wrote the initial drafts first in Spanish and then we got them translated into English. Then, when they had a workable draft, I read it, and I was so down for this. My first feature film was called The Tribe and was very similar in the sense of like, contained space, five characters. The past few years I’ve been making more stuff for the TV world, and different genres as well, so it’s nice to feel like I’m coming home to who I truly am as a filmmaker. It’s been really nice exploring that.

So they attached me, thank God, I pitched for it and I was like, it’s The Lighthouse meets 10 Cloverfield Lane, exactly what you said. And it really became that,  in the best sense possible.

I’d also seen you talking about the movie being a mix of influences from Hitchcock to The Shining and even Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite.

Yes, again, these films all have the characters, the locations, and how the location transforms over time through the eyes of these characters. I feel that textures such as wind and Mother Nature are always at the center of the lore. It’s something that I love utilizing because as humans, we tend to put ourselves at the center of all of our stories. We put ourselves as the main character, as the alpha predator, in these ecosystems, but really, there’s so much we don’t understand. That’s what I love about horror, too. People have fear because they fear the unknown, but if we were to take a step into that space, we’d find that the monsters aren’t on the outside, it’s always what’s within. I always love utilizing the world as an immersive experience to determine where our characters go and how they lose their minds.

Exceedingly ambitious. The character of Emily sets out on this solo expedition, which finds her quite literally in over her head. It seems those cinematic influences that we were just talking about would help out with that storytelling.

Yes, absolutely. There’s an ego with young people. There’s a sense of pride, and she just lost her father and wanted to honor him and her sailing lineage, because her grandfather was a sailor and her father was a sailor. She probably wasn’t ready for this, but she needed to do it anyway, just for a sense of closure. She’s also the first woman in her family to do it. So, there’s a lot of things here, where it’s like, we wanna prove to the world, and we wanna prove mostly to ourselves, what we can or cannot do. We always wanna think that we know everything. Both of our characters are really flawed in thinking they know everything, but that’s just what comes with having human pride. So, it’s nice to see how we gaslight each other and we end up gaslighting ourselves into certain circumstances.

For example, I could be like, “Oh, Kalyn, I’m a really awesome person”, and you’re just having to take my word for it, but then you also observe my actions, and if my actions don’t match with what I told you, there’s a sense of distrust. There’s no other person on the island that could give context to the other people. So I think what’s interesting here is that, whether or not we believe someone is good or bad, our minds will justify whatever we believe, whatever our bias is. It’s reflective of how I see society on a larger scale as well. You can see it happening with us with social media, with the internet, with creating polarizing echo chambers of each other. But really, Beacon is a microcosm of that. It’s just a smaller scale version of it. It was helpful to have lived through the pandemic to make this story, in a way, because the isolation drives us insane and then we continue to confirm our biases, even if it may not be true.

How did shooting on location in Newfoundland provide its challenges as well as its rewards?

Oh man, it was so painful to go through because it was really physically harsh. We went through four seasons in a day. You could go through a really intense snowstorm, and then we were dealing with 60 to 80 mile per hour winds. We were shooting on the coast of the North Atlantic. All the vapors from the ocean felt like needles on my face. My DP, Daphne Qin Wu, we had those little hand warmer things, and she was putting them inside her jacket next to her skin because it was that cold, and then when we got home she took off her clothes and saw that she burned herself, her skin was burned. That’s how cold it was, that’s how extreme the weather conditions were. We got shut down by the Coast Guard because it was literally too dangerous to continue shooting. We had to take like ATVs to set because we’re on the peninsula, so it was the real deal, but at the same time, being here looking back on it, I don’t regret it at all.

I totally felt like life was imitating art. It was an intense, immersive experience that we all had to live through together. We were all Emily and Ismael, because we were actually living the life that is in Beacon. There’s a certain magic that cannot be replaced if you were to do this completely on a soundstage through virtual production, it would just not be the same. The essence, the energy, right? You can’t infuse the project with that. It cannot be fabricated. You have to live through it for it to feel real.

Now that you’ve had this very formative experience, would you say that you prefer shooting on location or on a set?

I always love shooting on location. I know I complain about it, but I’m just a girl, you know? I’m just a girl who needs, as a Capricorn, her comforts, but I will always fight for practical locations. I will always fight for practical. I will always fight for that, because to me, it feels real that way. Having the actors be on location versus being on a green screen. With Gandalf, you know, holding up his staff and being like, “You shall not pass!” That’s hard for them, you know? Acting is reacting. So, it’s worth being able to live through that with all of my crew and my talent.

I was sick the whole time because it was so cold. It was below freezing. We were doing like thirty-five flights a day, climbing the terrain. I’m like, wow, this is my fit girl winter. Like I just got it. There’s always a way to look at things, but I don’t regret it. I love Newfoundland. The people are so kind and the seafood is delicious. But funny fact, after we wrapped, we had like icebergs in the background, the ones that took down the Titanic, quite literally. Those were the ones. Two weeks after we wrapped, the Titanic’s submersible thing happened. We even found out my producer was sharing the same hotel as some of those crew members. It was so wild.

We had some days shut down, so we technically shot the whole movie in 15 days, and no reshoots because the weather was really unpredictable. You have to love Mother Nature and her madness, because that’s what makes her really beautiful, so we just leaned into it. You could hear all the winds, all that’s real. None of that was fabricated. We actually shot all of the lighthouse stuff at the lighthouse. That was the actual location.

You touched on this a little bit already, but, how would you say in your own words the island itself is a character in this story?

I think humans tend to center ourselves. We are the center of every story because that’s how we view ourselves. We’re the alpha predator of the ecosystem. That’s human nature, that’s human narcissism. But Mother Nature is always at the lure. The lighthouse is there, but the ocean is just feet away, and you never know what temperament she’s going to be in. The storms, and also with all the mythology behind the siren, the message is that we are not the ones. We drive ourselves insane. We are the monsters. Because in the end, it’s not the siren that kills them, or destroys a sense of their identities. It’s what they do to each other, what they say to themselves.

How does a story involving two unreliable narrators benefit from existing within the confines of this contained environment?

Humans are paradoxical creatures and the story shifts whenever you give the microphone to whoever’s holding it. So I think in terms of this story, it’s a chess game and we always want to think that we’re right. Whoever has the microphone wants to think that they’re right. I think that’s what’s so interesting about this, because again, it’s a reflection of how we have discourse nowadays, how we argue and how we tend to have one-sided conversations in our modern world rather than having a proper dialogue.

There’s a quote from Plato that says, “The sea cures all ailments of man”. How would you say that Emily and Ismael, both in their own ways, attempt to find refuge in the deep?

I think in the end, it humbles them both. He sees her as someone he needed to save, but she didn’t really need saving. She thinks of him as someone who wants to destroy her in whatever means possible, but in the end, he’s the one that gets destroyed. I think in this sense, it really humbled them both and gave them a crash course on what reality actually is. Again, what is reality? It’s whatever we tell ourselves in our heads. So, whatever happens with Emily at the end, you don’t know if she is going to allow herself to be rescued or if she’s going to be the one for the sirens, or if she is a monster herself. It’s whatever we tell ourselves, and what we tell others is a constant form of gaslighting each other until we gaslight ourselves.

Clearly having such profound talent involved in this project also helps with the power dynamic played between the characters.

I mean, Emily brought so much to the table. I’m just so lucky. This is like the wet dream of any director, to have actors that are able to bring something to the table. Your script, your vision, is just the baseline, but both Damian and Julia have given me extra layers of nuance, spaces I haven’t even thought about, and cultivated such immense growth from these seeds that were planted in the script and through my conversations with them. Every scene became so alive based off of our conversations before and how we brought them to life in person. I just got really fucking lucky. This wouldn’t have happened without them. And shooting on such a tight timeline and with all these physical challenges – I just really got lucky, like the best of all worlds with who I ended up working with in my film.

Visually, this is a stunning film. Talk a little about collaborating with your cinematographer and your production designers to create an environment that feels as authentic as it does hauntingly beautiful.

Well, first, we’ve got to give major kudos to my incredible work wife, Daphne Qin Wu, who is my DP. We’ve shot three movies now together. and a couple of short films. This woman is incredible. She goes to war with you. She is so level-headed and grounded. For a crazy creative director, sometimes you lose your sense of grounding when things become challenging, but she’s always there to elevate everything. Whatever I see, she’s able to bring more to it. Again, it’s always about who’s bringing something to the table, and who’s making your vision even better than how you imagined it, and Daphne and Justin Reu, my production designer, are no exception.

I worked with Justin in Toronto on a few TV shows, and he’s always amazed me with how he’s able to make things with lack of resources, and he has such a big passion for genre. Being able to bring him to Newfoundland was such a great privilege. Seeing him and Daphne work together and be able to talk about what type of world we’re building, what type of visual language we’re creating for these characters and how to really have a visual arc all the way through the story – I just trust them so immensely.

I keep saying how lucky I am, but I can really focus on, you know, blocking and getting the character dynamics right, and getting the overall storytelling right and they just help amplify it. I don’t shot list with Daphne. I direct the scene and we might have had some conversations previously, but she really determines how the language is shot based on what I give her. It’s a shorthand of trust, building these friendships with these people over time, really respecting them as artists. I’m just so lucky to have these people along with me on the ride. The more I make movies, the more humbled I am, and how I just feel that I cultivated a community of not just talented artists, but incredible friends.

How much folklore and sea sailing tactics were you privy to before coming aboard this picture? Is this something you’ve been familiar with for a while, or did you go down a rabbit hole of research for this project?

I mean the very first short film I did was called The Siren, so again, it’s like full circle. I’ve always been drawn to characters like Medusa, characters that embody female rage, just the aftermath of what humans have done to them,like the sailors, what they have taken from the sea. They just are such iconic representations of female rage. That’s what Julie and I really leaned into for those elements. Cause I know that some people may have wanted us to lean more into the monster thing, but the monster is just the seasoning on the dish. It’s not the dish itself. The dish itself is the dynamic of these two humans, so it’s added just enough. I have a deep love of sirens and I have a deep love of mythology and a deep love for monsters. I have a deep compassion for monsters, because we are the ones who created them.

However it happened, Emily believes she’s becoming a siren. You see moments and beats where she’s almost intrigued by it, where she feels powerful because of it. There are things that she wasn’t able to do as just a human, like for example, lifting a paralyzed man up outside and lifting him all the way into the house. A normal girl can’t do that, but she believes that she’s turning into something else, and that enables her to do incredible things that show incredible physical strength. Sometimes we need to lean into our monster to become a little stronger.