Your new favorite twist and turn puzzle is here. Caddo Lake is now streaming on Max and is perfect for the fall season. But is there magic or madness at play in the wild world? Caddo Lake? We're guessing you'll have to tune in to find out. But to unearth some of the secrets of this eerie new film, Nerdist spoke with Caddo LakeThe author and director duo Celine Held and Logan George. From turning the lake into a character to determining the unexpected paths the film would take (hint: it was a big whiteboard), Hero and Logan take us deep into the heart of Caddo Lake.

You can read the full interview below – spoilers start at the spoiler warning.

Nerdist: Caddo Lake begins by really leaving the viewer wondering if there is some kind of magic or madness at play in the film. How important was it for you to find this balance early on, and which direction did you want the audience to take first?

Celine Held: Magic or madness? I love this. I think we want them to be inclined to insanity at first if I were to choose.

LoganGeorge: Yes, you have to start laying the foundation for what will do justice to the genre. However, we can't really tell you what we are preparing, but there is a lot of groundwork that you need to do for the eventual returns. And in doing so, you also have to give the story the tone and tension that points to where you're going. So it was a really delicate balance in the beginning, figuring out how to communicate that but also create the necessary representation for what the story required.

I was really curious about what motivated you to shoot the film in Caddo Lake. How do you think this particular setting contributed to your overall narrative?

Held: The entire film was made against the backdrop of Caddo Lake.

It was the opposite of how you would normally write a film. I found a photo of this lake on Reddit in May 2020. We didn't do anything else. Many thanks to the EarthPorn subreddit! And so we just borrowed my mom's car from Pittsburgh and drove to Texas. We lived there for a few months and wrote this terrible first draft. Came back to Brooklyn, then pulled out a huge whiteboard after we gave it to our producer and she was like, “This is terrible.” And so we pulled out this huge whiteboard and were like, Okay, let's figure this out, because here is something. We've been talking about this idea for some time. It was COVID, so in many ways it was a response to COVID.

George: And that we can't see our families. My mother had died in 2019, and so months later Celine spoke about the conversation she had with her and the memories she told Celine about. And I thought, I've never heard this story before. That doesn't even sound like my mother. That's wild. And that kind of begged the question, “How well do you really know your parents?” They've lived this life since before you were born, and can you ever really understand that aspect of them? The story was so strongly influenced by the place that it came into being.

Held: The place was a thousand times bigger than the photo we were shown. It was far better than we thought.

George: Also, all of the people of Caddo Lake, the people who live in this part of the world, and the myths that surround the lake were invaluable in the construction of the lake.

The lake is truly its own entity Caddo Lake. How should the character of the lake feel throughout the film?

Held: I think it's funny, we did the producer we were talking about, her and our cinematographer that we work with all the time, Kara Durrett and Lowell Meyer. We had them come down and said, “Come down to the lake,” when we were there initially. And his first response was, “Creepy, scary.” And I never felt that. I've never felt as scary as him.

George: He kept saying, “There's an image of cypress trees and Spanish moss blowing in the wind, that's like a Louisiana bayou-style murder crime.” And so we recognize all of that, but feel like with that aesthetic only progresses to a limited extent. So we're just trying to incorporate the specificity of this lake and the actual history of the lake and…

Held: How big it is.

George: How big it is, the details of all the names and many of the people who live there make cameo appearances in the film and stuff. So I think we had to close the gap in that way.

Held: We learned as much as we could about Caddo Lake. We all learned names like Starr Ditch, Government Ditch, Carter's Chute and Alligator Bayou, these places that we then knew as best we could, like we knew them like the back of our hand.

As we got into it, I was pleased to discover that there really was magic at play. I was very happy when this really intense, scary time travel element occurred. In my opinion, creating a coherent time travel system is one of the most difficult tasks a film can set of itself. How did you decide on the details of your version? Caddo Lake?

Held: We didn't want anyone to be the mastermind, so we didn't want an older version of a character to be the mastermind pulling the strings.

George: This somehow felt like a new path. When it comes to time travel, like ghosts or aliens, is there enough cultural knowledge that we can tell a time travel story, but this one is just natural. This is a natural phenomenon and our characters just get sucked into it.

Held: We were also inspired by the mountain that all these monarch butterflies in Mexico traveled to every year; that felt really specific. And those sheep in Bangladesh that ran in circles for about ten days, those wild events in nature that made you wonder, “Why?” What kind of animals are they? What are these errors? What does Earth know that we can't find out? And it felt like this place could exist on Caddo Lake. So in creating this huge maze of the film, to be honest, once again it was the whiteboard that saved us.

Did you know that you are currently writing the scariest scene in history where Ellie is trapped in different dimensions and hears her phone ringing but can't reach her?

Held: This is amazing. We didn't know it was that scary, but now, in hindsight, yes.

I found it interesting that Paris and Ellie never meet Caddo Lakeand I thought that was a really fascinating aspect of it. Why did you choose to never cross paths with them?

Held: There was, of course, a version in which they could.

George: Yes, it is difficult. We talked about it…

Held: But they didn't know who the other was.

George: It was part of the wish fulfillment aspect of the story and how it felt considering the grief and loss that is part of the story. And because of the mechanics of time travel and the fact that everything has to be predetermined, these things have to go in a certain direction. We always knew what would happen to Paris. And that's why it was important that they would never get that wish fulfillment aspect from each other. I mean, there's a world where it could have happened, but we chose to never have them overlap because it's almost the expectation, and we wanted to go in a different direction.

Yes, Caddo Lakeand its ending are truly bittersweet. I feel like some wounds have healed, and some wounds have healed, but they still hurt, and others remain kind of open. What did you hope viewers would take away from this bittersweetness?

Held: The sentence we came up with at the end was: “They didn't want to leave us.” That was kind of the beginning of understanding what Ellie would understand at the end. And we felt like it meant more than just traveling back in time. It represents death and sadness and the fact that no one really plans to leave us. So we hope you walk away from this thriller-horror, this wild film that you want to call your mother.

Caddo Lake I really succeeded. Another thing that really stuck with me was that nature created this place. I think we touched on it a little bit, but I think what did you really want to convey in this very powerful moment?

George: I think that as storytellers we don't want to tie the story together perfectly so that when the movie is over you can kind of compartmentalize it and say, “Okay, cool, I saw that.” So there's a lot of aspects and the way and ways in which time travel works in history, leaving room for interpretation. These things are not explicitly stated. However, while watching the entire film, it was important to me that someone expressed the origin of this strange experience and that it didn't come from an artificial device or something. And that Ellie comes away from the experience with a certain understanding that she can take home with her and that the audience can take with them as well, so to speak.

What do you think was the smallest hint of time travel that viewers might have missed while watching? Caddo Lake?

Held: There's a lot of it in the beginning, so if you rewatched it you'd see a lot of little bits and pieces. I find

George: I don't know if I want to give something away…

Held: I could say that. Well, I mean, a hint of what's to come is the thing that gets stuck in the engine of the Paris boat – the reason they couldn't leave originally is because Ellie's yellow rope gets stuck in the engine.

George: Yes, maybe the bridge too. The bridge can be clearly seen. You see it in different timelines, long before the reveal. And so an attentive viewer who sees this might get some idea of ​​what's going on.

Caddo Lake is now streaming on Max.