When Mike P. Nelson was first approached with the proposition of making a giant snake movie, he initially passed on the opportunity, but a question kept coming back into his head: “Is there a way to make an actual giant snake movie that’s scary and maybe even takes itself a little serious?” He set out to find the answer.
Nelson first signed on to BEWARE BOUÌNA in 2021, when the working title was “Titan.” When the film was first brought to him, his instinct was to say no. Constantin Film, his previous collaborator on Wrong Turn, approached him with a vague idea of what they wanted their next project together to be.
Nelson recalls, “I’d had a good experience with Constantin on Wrong Turn, and they were like, ‘Hey, we have this thing, this idea. How would you like to do a giant snake movie?’ That was, for better or for worse, basically the pitch.”
The renowned director had always wanted to make a creature feature, but he wasn’t totally connecting with the script that was brought to him. After giving it some thought, he realized this might be the perfect opportunity to make something he had always wanted to, even if it looked a little different than he expected.
“If they wanna do something with a giant snake, that’s cool. I just want to do something different with the characters. I want to do something different with the structure. I wanted to do something that felt a little bit more grounded. Because I’d never seen that before in this subgenre. Everything was always a little tongue in cheek, and I understand why. It is a little bit ridiculous. When I go into these things, I always like to think, what is the thing that I could do to challenge myself as a storyteller, as a filmmaker? Those were the checkboxes that I wanted to mark. This was an opportunity to give it a go.”
Since Nelson viewed the project as an opportunity to play around in several different genres he had always wanted to explore, he went back to the films that felt closest to the heart of what he wanted BEWARE BOUÌNA to become. He did not, however, watch the movie he knew it would inevitably be compared to.
“I actually made a point not to watch Anaconda before I made this movie,” Nelson says. “A lot of times, I will not watch the movies that are directly supposed to inspire the movie that I’m making. I’ll actually surround myself with other films that maybe fall into the same genre or outside the genre. No, you’re not going to watch Anaconda. You are gonna watch Jurassic Park. You are gonna watch Jaws. You are gonna watch Alien. You are gonna watch Tremors.”
Far and away, he cites William Friedkin’s Sorcerer as his greatest inspiration for the film. “When I watched that, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I wanna do something more like this, and what happens if I put a giant snake in it?’” For BEWARE BOUÌNA to take its giant-snake premise seriously, the people caught in its path needed their own histories and problems that the audience cared about.
The characters of the film can also be seen as reflections of the changes and destruction happening within the Amazon itself. “You also have the character of the Amazon,” Nelson says. “It’s going through a lot. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the Amazon, and I think being able to show a snippet of that, and the fact that Bouìna can be an extension of that jungle and what it will do to fight back to reclaim itself.”
The idea was for everyone, and everywhere, in the film to be experiencing similar desperation, just in different forms. Nelson describes the thematic through line as: “No, this is where I belong. This is my home. I will fight for it.”
Filming BEWARE BOUÌNA took place in Colombia in late 2024. Nelson recalls, “We would get up very early in the morning, take a boat at 5:00 a.m. down the Amazon River to our set, which is in this jungle at this reserve. It’s dewy and humid, and you immediately start sweating, and you just go do a ten-minute walk into the jungle to get to set, and you just start doing it.” He calls the Colombian filmmaking crew “amazing” and credits them for much of
what the film was able to capture, along with their ability to anticipate and solve the environment-specific difficulties that came with the shoot. Nelson says he would eagerly return to the Amazon to film another movie.
“Every day you tell yourself, ‘I can’t believe I am here doing this right now.’”
Being on location also helped Nelson navigate how to approach implementing an 80-foot, 3000-pound snake. “It also helps that we’re really there, and we are deep in this dense jungle, in all these incredible locations,” he explains. “When you’re there, you can see that you have this huge snake that’s crawling through the jungle or slithering through the water. There’s only so much of this thing that you’re gonna be able to see. You’re literally standing there and you’re like, ‘I wouldn’t know if this thing was, like, fifteen feet over there.’ There’s literally no way you can see.”
Figuring out fun and creative ways to subtly reveal Bouìna became part of the filmmaking process. “One of my favorite moments is when we literally are showing the biggest snake that ever existed through the smallest little slats in a floor,” Nelson says. “That made me super giddy. When we were on set that day, I was like, ‘This is gonna be amazing.’ You feel how big she is and her weight underneath this, and all you see is the size of her scales through this very small slat. That, to me, is the best way to show how big this snake is.”
Rather than toting around an enormous practical snake, the team found ways to make Bouìna’s presence physically felt while filming. They moved trees and vegetation when the snake was supposed to be passing through, at one point even dragging a large piece of HVAC material through the jungle to create the effect of something massive moving through the environment.
The goal was to give the actors more to react to than “just a tennis ball out in the woods that they could make eye contact with.” Nelson recalls, “We did a big cutout of the snake’s head, which even at that point we hadn’t quite figured out her face yet. We just had a huge cutout of how big that head was gonna be and put it back into the woods.” Giving the actors something tangible to play off of helped deepen the authenticity of a creature that would ultimately be realized largely through visual effects.
Nelson believes it is more than a horror film and more than a giant snake movie. “Just immerse yourself in this crazy Amazonian adventure,” he says. “What happens when all these characters that are all going through this stuff, that happen to be in the Amazon together, suddenly come against something that is far bigger than anybody? You’re given that time to really immerse yourself, and then finally, what happens when all those characters that you’ve immersed yourself with suddenly fall prey to something that you have no control over?”
