A taut tale of survival, Shelter is the story of Mason, an ex-Special Forces soldier in hiding and Jessie, the young girl he forms a bond with after rescuing her at sea from a deadly storm. When filmmaker Ric Roman Waugh encountered the script, written by Ward Parry (2015’s The Shattering), he was gripped. The director of some of contemporary Hollywood’s most visceral action movies, including Angel Has Fallen (2019) and Greenland (2020), he immediately tapped into the characters, right off the page.
To learn more about Waugh’s strong connection to Shelter’s script and bringing together a story about found family, The Koalition spoke to the director about this action-thriller that combines action sequences with grit and emotion.
“I loved the story of these two lost souls—these outcasts of society—who meet one another and help each other deal with their own demons and hardships and find love in this great familial way,” says Waugh. “Mason and Jessie are lost souls that find one another and that was there right from the beginning. When Jason told me that the emotional core was what really mattered to him, I knew we were making the same movie.”
Mason is a lonely, flawed man who, by his own choice, has excluded himself from society and is living in solitude on an island in the middle of nowhere. Initially Mason does everything he can do to avoid Jessie. She is a young girl dealing with her own tragedies and he is not in a place to deal with that. But he is drawn to Jessie, and ultimately, he finds purpose in protecting this child and puts her safety above his own.
“For me, great action movies should be rooted in great emotion and great drama. It’s why we go to the movies—to escape and live through characters that we have empathy for and that we care about. Otherwise, you’re watching action just for the sake of action, and it feels mindless, right?”
“I loved that it was about family. It was about two people in their own form of exile that find family and one another and want to do everything they can not to lose it. It reminded me of Man on Fire. It reminded me of The Professional, people that are feeling like outcasts and dealing with their own sense of trauma. It becomes relatable to us so that when we relate to these characters, then we’re living and breathing the action sequences with them versus just watching it. We feel like we’re participating and caring about how they get through it. This is about loss. It’s also about isolation also from the self and what is brought to you through what happens in the movie.”
Waugh and Statham have been wanting to work together for some time, with Statham’s emotion and Waugh’s ability to expertly shoot action sequences. This film comes with a strong emotional core and a challenging range of action sequences to design, and Ric knows better than most how to bring a team together to create both. There is a protective bond between Jason and Bodhi’s characters that allowed Ric to tap into, bringing a nuanced, energetic edge to both the action and the emotional tension between these two wounded people. Ric Roman Waugh calls production designer Tim Blake “the unsung hero” of Shelter, and with good reason. Despite the Outer Hebrides setting, the film chose to shoot in County Wicklow, Ireland—with Blake electing to build from scratch the old lighthouse where Mason lives. The setting was Travelahawk, a secluded pebble beach in Wicklow Town. “When we first scouted in Ireland, the minute I saw the photos of Travelahawk,it was exactly what I had envisioned.”
“A lot of times when you build on soundstages and backlots, you just don’t feel the organic sense of where you’re at,” he continues. “It was really important for me to that the lighthouse was on location, in the middle of the elements and you could feel the danger and the foreboding isolation of this place. So we built everything. We built the entire boathouse and lighthouse so that you can see and feel how it is for Jason to run from his living quarters or push his dory boat out into the water. You want it all to be real.”
The unusual pairing of the closed-off Mason and Jessie, a young girl in need of emotional support after suffering unfathomable loss, made for an intriguing dynamic. “For Jessie, a big part of her character is this feeling of abandonment,” adds Waugh, “because her mom has died of cancer, she never knew her dad, and then she loses her uncle—so she really doesn’t want to lose this other person that’s finally become a parental figure in her life. She doesn’t want to have to go through that loss again.”
While the story comes with “huge kick-ass moments,” says Waugh, it was the drama he wanted to focus on. “They are two people dealing with the sense of abandonment—one self-inflicted, the other one not by her own choice—who come together to create a family unit. She finds somebody that cares about her, that allows her to feel this attachment again, and a way forward, while he finds purpose in the protection of this child. He ultimately puts her safety above his own.”
These performances are all about “what’s internal. When you feel what they’re emoting and get the camera close and intimate to where they’re at, and a lot of times it’s the silence of the situation in the moment, it really comes about expression. It becomes about living and breathing it. What I love about this movie is you are watching one of the biggest action stars in the world, and we love to see him kick ass, but we’re reminded of what a tremendous actor Jason is and that he can emote great emotion and expression through living and breathing real vulnerability. The sensitivities of living in self-exile and then realizing this young girl he saves is dealing with her own version of exile, have loss of family and her losing her place in the world. And then they find that connection with one another through that. I love characters like that. I love how much they remind us of us, as people, as human beings that need one another, and we realize we’re not good at isolation. We’re social creatures that need that kind of bond with others.”
But this is still an action film, but for Waugh, his approach to directing the action isn’t action for action’s sake; each fight scene has a purpose and a perspective. “Action is doing it all from a character point of view and being in the emotional journey of the character so that when the action is happening, it’s not forced just because of choreography. It’s dictated by the moments, the quiet moments, the suspenseful moments of knowing somebody’s on the other side of the door and you only have a fire poker to protect yourself and suddenly bullets are flying through and then suddenly you’re into this mayhem of like when real fights happen, how frenetic they are, how everything just becomes electric in the room. It’s really letting the actors and the story dictate your pacing of suspense and also of the action itself.”
The film was shot in County Wicklow, Ireland—with production designer Tim Blake electing to build from scratch the old lighthouse where Mason lives. The setting was Travelahawk, a secluded pebble beach in Wicklow Town. “When we first scouted in Ireland, the minute I saw the photos of Travelahawk,it was exactly what I had envisioned.”
“A lot of times when you build on soundstages and backlots, you just don’t feel the organic sense of where you’re at,” he continues. “It was really important for me that the lighthouse was on location, in the middle of the elements, and you could feel the danger and the foreboding isolation of this place. So we built everything. We built the entire boathouse and lighthouse so that you can see and feel how it is for Jason to run from his living quarters or push his dory boat out into the water. You want it all to be real.”
“I really envisioned what the lighthouse would be in that location, and we were able to find it. We found this amazing cliff in South Ireland that was right on the sea. We knew it was real. It had the real ruins of an old castle on it. We built the full-scale lighthouse so that that vision came true. When you’re in this lighthouse area, inside and outside, it’s all done for real; nothing’s fake; you’re not looking at a green screen; you’re looking at the real sea. You’re looking at the real environment. That way the actors are living and breathing the real thing and not hearing the bell go off as they sit in a sound stage drinking coffee. No, they’re in the real inclement weather in the real environment.”
With Ric Roman Waugh determined to shoot the action scenes on location, rather than on a soundstage, he turned to Steve Griffin, the film’s stunt coordinator and second unit director, to put the audience in this thrill ride where they’re living vicariously through the characters, and where they’re not watching action, they’re participating in it. Waugh’s experience in the world of stunts was a huge advantage in creating a film like Shelter that contained multiple action sequences, from car chases and gunfights to the hugely complex stunt that opens the film, as Mason rescues Jessie in a deadly storm at sea—shot in Travelahawk Bay.
Frequently, Waugh thought in thematic terms when working with others to orchestrate the action. Like the nightclub scene, in which they choreographed the shoot-out to spill from the club to the streets. “That nightclub sequence was like a chess game—which is a theme we have running through the movie. You meet Michael Mason at the beginning of the movie, living in isolation to the point that he’s playing chess by himself. Then he and Jessie bond over the game, and then in this third act, I want the audience to see he’s playing chess in real life.”
“It’s really about the two wrecking balls that take you through those places so that it’s about how the choreography and how the actors, in this case Jason and Brian, who play Workman (a ruthless killer with the same skillset as his target). Workman is basically who Michael Mason was 20 years earlier; use their physicality to take us through that. We did want to travel. We did want the action to travel like our nightclub sequence. If you were inside of a nightclub and trying to get out and you saw the hounds coming in and the wolves were there to kill you, how would you get yourself out? What would happen if you actually lost your precious cargo like Jesse? How would you get her back? We did want a lot of movement to make the movie feel like it starts in a place where you’re isolated and stuck in this little, small place in the world that nobody knows where you’re at and then really feel the journey of the movie getting to the end.”
With commando raids and car chases also to choreograph, the action concludes on location, with another violent fight between Mason and Workman. “We had these two guys fighting to the death on top of this quay out in the middle of the Thames. That’s what I love about this industry—the 100 or so people who come together to safely deliver the choreography of the scene. It was the middle of the night; it was cold, and yet everybody was having a great time. That comes from the top. That comes from Jason.”
Above all, Waugh feels the making of Shelter reflects the very story they were filming. “The movie is about family, and it’s about people coming together to fight adversity and the odds to stay together, and I think that’s what we all strive for. A sense of love and kindness, and to be a part of something that feels like family. We had a family in front of the camera and behind it. Everybody came together. It’s an emotional action thriller. It’s about a movie that grips you with two amazing characters that you feel empathy for, reminding us how much we need each other because they find family in one another and they can not to lose it. It’s the great anti-hero story of the movies, like Man on Fire, The Professional, going back to The Searchers, or even Shane. I love these types of films. It’s a big, BIG ride.
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