“Deep Water”: Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas travel deep into jealousy

Madrid, 17 Mar Twenty years after directing his last film, British filmmaker Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction”) returns with “Deep Water”, which will be released this Friday on Amazon Prime Video, a story of obsession, sensuality and mystery starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas that for the director has meant knowing a whole universe: filming in digital. “I loved everything and would do it again,” said the 81-year-old filmmaker in an interview with Efe, after acknowledging that the shooting of the film meant that he discovered “a totally different world”. When Lyne shot the film before this one (“Unfaithful”, 2002), the world of digital filming was still going through its dawn and it wasn't an option for most filmmakers. “I was really afraid to do it digitally because I'm used to filming on celluloid,” he says, but with “Deep Water” he decided to jump into the void and found “the process really great, much more immediate, spontaneous.” For example, the filmmaker added, “he was used to waiting for hours for a cameraman to light something” and now the scenes can be shot “with the available light” and retouched afterwards, so “he had much more time for the shooting itself”. In addition, he added, the fact that “being able to view the scenes on the same day as shooting” makes it possible to see everything more “in context”. “You can be much more focused on the film,” says the director of the film, which will be released on Amazon Prime Video worldwide (except the United States, China, Russia and the Middle East) next Friday, March 18. A box-office director in the 80s and 90s, (“Flashdance”), Lyne is an expert in the stories of couples, the universes of intimacy and sex and in the creation of couples for film history. He already did it with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (“Nine 1/2 Weeks”), Michael Douglas and Glenn Close (“Fatal Attraction”) and Robert Redford and Demi Moore (“Indecent Proposal”). And “Deep Water” couldn't be less. Filmed in 2019, it was the meeting place of Cuban actress Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck, who, following their meeting in the film, had a romantic relationship of more than a year. Based on Patricia Highsmith's novel of the same name, Affleck and De Armas play Vic and Melinda Van Allen, a well-to-do couple from New Orleans whose marriage falls apart under the weight of resentment, jealousy and mistrust. As their mutual provocations and mind games escalate, things quickly turn into a deadly game of cat and mouse when the young people with whom she has extramarital relations (Jacob Elordi, one of the stars of the series “Euphoria” included) begin to disappear. However, perfect and flawless, Vic always manages to keep the accusing finger away from himself, despite carrying the shadow of doubt. He is a man who “tries to be obedient, tries to take care of her affairs, but in the end he cannot” because “jealousy is very distracting, as seen in this film”. “It's a film about jealousy, I guess, when jealousy gets out of control, and he pretends to deal with it, but in the end he can't,” Lyne said. Although it is an adaptation of the novel by the American writer expert in suspense, “Deep Water” contains several very different ingredients to the book, which bear the hallmark of Lyne: “I introduced sexuality and complicity between them, which did not exist in the novel”. “I read the novel and I loved it. It was the story of a man who was sick of his wife cheating on him, but he wasn't really interested in sexually, and took refuge in his daughter and his obsession with snails. That was something that I changed in the film, I tried to create a kind of complicity between them, as if she had her affairs not only for herself but also for him,” he added. Thus, the script relies heavily on those “unconventional” moments full of tension and sensuality, when he sees what she does with others and “she doesn't turn around scared and stops, but continues to do it”. Along with Affleck and De Armas, actors such as Tracy Letts, Rachel Blanchard, Dash Mihok, Lil Rel Howery, Jacob Elordi, Finn Wittrock, and Kristen Connolly complete the film's cast. Paula Escalada Medrano