Could a whale swallow a human, ‘Whalefall’ style?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora, and you’re listening to Science Friday. If you’ve been scrolling or been to the movies lately, you may have seen the absolutely nutso trailer, and I mean that in the most loving way, for the movie Whalefall, which is about a guy who gets swallowed by a sperm whale.

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– I’m in the whale! Help me!

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FLORA LICHTMAN: It may sound far fetched, but the film and the book it’s based on really takes on the ins and outs, but especially the ins, of sperm whale biology. We’re here today with Whalefall director Brian Duffield. Hey, Brian.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Hello.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And Shane Gero, sperm whale expert. Hey, Shane.

SHANE GERO: Hello.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And a heads up, we reserve the right to give some minor spoilers, but we will not ruin the movie for you. OK, Brian, what do you think a whale would think of this movie?

BRIAN DUFFIELD: [LAUGHS] We talk about that a lot because they’re getting closer and closer to decoding the sperm whale language. And I’m really nervous about what that review will do to our tomato score.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because there’s a lot of clicks and sounds.

SHANE GERO: Well, I have to say, I was exceptionally happy about how the whales looked and how they sounded in particular.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Yeah.

SHANE GERO: That the sound wasn’t using elephants or other animals.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good.

SHANE GERO: They look great.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Because we don’t what they’re saying, and so it’s like, hopefully they’re saying somewhat appropriate stuff in the movie. But yeah, hopefully they would dig it, because I mean, we’re very fond of our whale and we definitely made the movie out of a love for these animals. So if anything, I think they would probably just be annoyed that this guy got in the way of lunch.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, Brian, do you have a relationship with whales that preceded this movie? Are you someone who’s been on 50 whale watching trips?

BRIAN DUFFIELD: I’ve been on a bunch, yeah. I always loved them. I grew up as a big dinosaur kid, and I think that’s the closest thing you can really get to it. And then also I grew up in a very conservative Christian household, and so Jonah was always my go to Bible story. And I remember getting a very Christian, I guess, just a comic book about Jonah where it talked about a guy who had been swallowed, in quotes, “in reality,” in the 1800s. And they had gotten him out and he was all burned up by his stomach acid and everything.

And a lot of the content I was growing up with, it was proving the Bible is true kind of stuff. And I just remember just being like, there’s acid in there, and this guy’s walking around burned all up. And so that was always just in my DNA.

And then as I got older, getting the chance to go on whale watching trips. And then I swam with whale sharks probably a decade ago, which aren’t technically whales, but that was a real moment of they’re so immense and they’re so beautiful. And I kind of had a reborn fascination of them through that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Shane, so the main storyline here is that a guy gets swallowed by a whale. Is that possible? Could a sperm whale swallow a human being?

SHANE GERO: I mean, you’re talking about the world’s largest toothed predator. And this is something that eats giant squid. That’s this amazing battle between a giant squid and a school bus sized whale that happens every day somewhere. It’s happening right now somewhere out in the oceans. And it turns out that actually, yeah, sperm whales have probably the largest esophagus. So if you get a really, really big sperm whale, it’s technically possible to be swallowed. Yeah.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: And a smaller person. Yeah. Jacob Elordi is not fitting down a throat. Yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But is it like a tube? Would I feel like I was going through a tube at the McDonald’s playland or?

SHANE GERO: Yeah I mean, it’s not going to happen without you noticing. I mean, yeah, I mean, their esophagus can be 30 to 40 centimeters in diameter. So that’s more like, I guess, fitting through a tennis racket or something, maybe a little bit bigger than that.

And that’s really different than a lot of the whales, because a lot of whales that we know like humpback whales, they have huge mouths, but actually tiny little esophaguses because they’re basically swallowing fish or krill slurry by the time it goes down. But giant squid are huge. They can be 30 to 60 feet long. And if anyone’s had calamari recently, this is a tough body that they’re swallowing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [INAUDIBLE]

SHANE GERO: Yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, Brian, you have an interesting challenge in this movie, because much of it takes place inside of a whale. Did you consider filming inside an actual sperm whale?

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BRIAN DUFFIELD: Hilariously, that’s not the first time I’ve been asked that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That makes me feel bad, actually.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: No, no, no. No, it’s funny, because they are typically such deep sea dwellers. There’s not a ton of endoscopy footage of sperm whales while they’re alive. And so it was really– and let alone sperm whales, there’s almost no footage of giant squid alive and definitely no footage of them really engaged in a hunt. I know while we were shooting, there was that one video that popped up of a dead squid in a sperm whale’s mouth, but that’s the extent of the footage we have on them.

SHANE GERO: No, yeah, it’s like a wildlife filmmaking holy grail to film a sperm whale.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Which knowing my luck, it’ll come out like next week. [INAUDIBLE] But yeah, no, like Shane said, it’s this weird challenge of we were filming for the first time in a movie something that happens probably hundreds or thousands of times a day on Earth between two of the biggest animals on Earth. And so it’s a really unique challenge to try to do something scientifically accurate that we’ve never seen before that happens all the time.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Did you build a set?

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Oh, yeah. We built all kinds of sets. Yeah, we built– our character goes through the esophagus, the first stomach, and the second stomach, and then is definitely too big to go to the further stomachs. So we didn’t build those. And then we built different versions of each one of those. And then we also built a giant whale one to one size animatronic head and had that in a tank that was spinning around and moving and swallowing poor Austin. Yeah.

SHANE GERO: Yeah, I mean, sperm whales are mammals like us, but they have really weird stomachs, because they eat squid and eat so far down where the pressure is unimaginable. So they actually have four separate chambers. And the movie does really well, I think, to show how that might look, despite it not being a place that anything would really want to try to survive in.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Yeah, we don’t make it seem ideal. Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Shane, I saw your eyes lighting up when Brian said that they built an animatronic one to one sperm whale head. Did it look pretty realistic to you?

SHANE GERO: I think that was the thing I was most nervous about is how well the whales look and how they’re portrayed and the sounds they make, because they live in a world of sound. Most of their world is darkness. So, yeah, I mean, they look fantastic, especially right down to the scarring around the face, which is one of the few cues that we actually get to see of them eating these squids and getting scars around their jaw.

And so they’re mostly like a dark gray color, but often their jaw is quite white from it being scraped up so much. These squid tentacles have barbs and suction cups that leave marks behind. And in fact, in many parts of the world’s oceans, we more about what squid are there, because we’ve been studying the stomach contents or the feces of the sperm whale, and not actually being able to get down to 3,000 feet or 6,000 feet to take a look at the squid that are there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Brian, did you consult with experts when you were trying to figure out the anatomy and what this whale looked like?

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it was great, because it’s adapted from Daniel Kraus’s novel, and he both co-wrote the screenplay with me and then was just an in general partner kind of throughout the whole project. And so he had talked to a lot of experts over the years for the novel. And so we were able to piggyback on those.

And then, yeah, because there wasn’t a lot of footage of the living insides of a sperm whale, it was a lot of– my poor family would just see me watching autopsies of sperm whales that had been beached. Or we had an endoscopy of a beluga whale that we watched a lot. And then we’re kind of trying to transpose there’s probably some similarities with the beluga as opposed to the sperm whale and some differences. And so just watching some pretty gnarly stuff.

In terms of the anatomy of it, we had Dr. Joy Reidenberg, who is a biologist, who, it was funny–

SHANE GERO: And all around legend. If anyone has cut open more sperm whales, it’s probably her.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Or anything. She had a show a decade ago where it was just her doing autopsies of a giraffe. And they flew her out to Ireland– maybe it was New Zealand, I can’t remember which now– where she does, on the beach, she does a as fast as she can autopsy of a sperm whale. And then she also had an autopsy of I don’t think it was a giant squid, but a very large squid.

And Ramsey Avery, our production designer, who just had the most insane task a production designer ever has, where they usually have to build buildings, and he had to build a living creature. But we watched those a lot just trying to figure it out. And then Ramsey would kind of run sketches or drawings or stuff by Dr. Joy and she would comment.

And I think what was so fun about this movie was the more scientifically accurate we went, but also it just made everything worse for Austin Abrams’ character. The whale is designed to digest food in a fascinating way, and poor Austin is a food source. And so it was great that every time a note would come back, we’d go, oh, that’s so much worse for him, and implement it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a break, but when we come back, I want to dive even deeper, I’m sorry, into the science of whale guts.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Happens all the time.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And whether someone could escape them. Don’t go away.

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Shane, no spoilers, but if a person were swallowed by a whale, could they get out?

SHANE GERO: I mean, I think that’s the $24,000 question here. I think once you’re inside, there’s a lot of things that are not working in your favor. This is not a place that has evolved for anything to live. In fact, quite the opposite. It expects everything to be dead once you’re there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Give me some examples, some colorful details.

SHANE GERO: Well, first of all, you’re surrounded. It’s not a very big place. These are animals that are diving 3,000 or more feet down, and the ocean is crushing them. Their lungs collapse and their ribs get compressed. So this is not a place where you’re going to have lots of space. And it’s going to be full of things that even the sperm whale can’t digest, like squid beaks. I’ve laid beside an actual giant squid corpse that we found off the Azores, and that squid beak is bigger than the size of my fist. So imagine a parrot beak the size of your fist and hundreds or thousands of them surrounding you. I mean, these are like teeth being pushed against you in every direction while it’s trying to digest you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Like a hideous ball pit.

SHANE GERO: Yes, like the worst IKEA ball pit you could ever think of. And so I don’t think you would have very much time to consider how you’re going to get out. Millions of years of evolution of the digestive tract have decided that this is a place that kills things and absorbs them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The main character had a scuba tank, but could you breathe inside a whale’s belly?

SHANE GERO: You know, I don’t that anyone’s really tried or that isn’t really a question that’s come up in the annals of the scientific journals.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Everyone we asked said that it was the first time someone had seriously asked them that question.

SHANE GERO: Yes. Yeah. But I think that’s the fun of this movie is like, OK, well, if we suspend our disbelief about how this might happen, what would that look like and how exciting could it be and how do we match the science with the thrilling action that is this movie? So I think it’s hard to talk about it without talking about it, but I think there are lots of resources that you might find in the belly of a whale, both that should be there and unfortunately that shouldn’t, that you could use to MacGyver your way out should you ever find yourself in this impossible predicament.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s news you can use, everybody. Just tips.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Yeah, the movie’s a great how to guide. Yeah.

SHANE GERO: Ways to live by.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Shane, do sperm whales know what they’re eating?

SHANE GERO: Yeah, I mean, so we put small suction cup computers on the backs of the whales that allow us to record their movements and the sounds they make, and increasingly also to collect video and heart rate. So we know from some of the work that they can see hundreds of different potential prey targets, and they’re choosing one of those out of this giant biomass that’s down there long before the squid can see it.

The squid and the sperm whale, it’s like this arms race between the most powerful natural sonar system, how the sperm whale gets to see in the dark, and these giant eyeballs that the squid have evolved to get out of the way at the last minute. And it’s pretty clear that the sperm whales are winning that arms race.

But unfortunately, yeah, I think other things do get sucked in. And anytime you cut open a whale, you find a lot of things that shouldn’t be there, like plastics and other human things that are down there. And I think those are probably eaten accidentally, because unfortunately, they’re pervasive.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have there been any sperm whale attacks on humans? Is there any documentation of a person being eaten by a sperm whale?

SHANE GERO: Well, I think sperm whales have been the villain of the ocean, that biblical Leviathan or the monster from the deep, for a long time, especially when we were hunting them extensively. Before we had fossil fuel, we had whale oil in our machines and in our lamps, and it powered our economy.

So it’s hard to know, because I think a lot of those stories are fairly warning to other potential sailors in that when you’re trying to kill a family of whales, they will defend themselves. But there hasn’t been any stories of humans being eaten by whales, although there’s been recently a few stories about people ending up in the mouth of humpback whales because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Yeah, this book came out of one of those videos of the kayaker kind of getting gummed by a humpback and how when you see the footage, it does give you this weird caveman urge of like, oh no, something bigger is eating us. And of course, they can’t fit anywhere past their mouth on a humpback.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Brian, what’s your dream theater going experience for this? Do you want the audience screaming, laughing, crying, throwing up?

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Yeah. And as many of them as possible. So, yeah, I remember when we were going around pitching this movie to people and the pitch was always it’s about a whale that swallows two people, Jay and the audience, and really wanting the audience to feel like they were going on this really insane journey with him and learning more about whales than they probably ever thought they would before. And I think that for me, that’s why I like to go to the movies is to go to places that I’ve never been before, even if it means inside of another animal.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Whalefall comes out today in theaters, and if you have the stomach for it, or four, go check it out. It will make, I promise, a fun thing to talk about at your next party. Brian, Shane, thank you for being here.

BRIAN DUFFIELD: Thank you, Flora.

SHANE GERO: Absolutely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Brian Duffield, director of Whalefall, and Shane Gera, whale biologist and biology lead for Project CETI.

This podcast was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you had a whale of a good time listening to it, let us know. 877-4-SciFi is our number, or you can leave us a review wherever you listen to the podcast. It really, genuinely does help. We’ll catch you next time. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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