The actor explained that he made sure to breathe with his mouth closed after taking a bite of shells during his first attempt to enter the well. “The first time I’m going to try it, I go in and feel the space and take [in] a bite of this corn husk”, he recalled. He admitted that, since he is not claustrophobic, he found the filming process “cool”, but acknowledged that “it was a rather traumatic scene, as well as the fact that it comes out a bit funny with the physical aspects The final edit certainly bears this out; as someone who grew up in a farming family and heard horror stories about silo-related deaths, I was grimacing throughout the entire sequence.
Irby noted that for audiences, the scene takes a sudden turn, as the fun-loving criminals are totally blindsided by the twist of fate. “It’s a very high celebratory moment that we are moved by the dog,” she said. “We all look in one direction, and then all of a sudden the ground falls out from under us.” To achieve the effect of Christopher looking almost buried, Irby described a contraption that sounds as much like a magic trick as it does a piece of practical effects. “There was a little box that they had built at the bottom of this arena, and it had a very thick, heavy rubber wetsuit in it,” she said. “They had made five or six cuts to get the sand on top, but when I got my legs through there, I was able to reverse the birth and go back into the womb.”