The Gorge movie 2025: The Gorge,” a new thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, is the latest film from northern Michigan born-and-raised screenwriter Zach Dean
Dean wrote the Amazon Prime Video hit, 2021's “The Tomorrow War." The Gorge,” a new thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, is the latest film from northern Michigan born-and-raised screenwriter Zach Dean.
With the world locked down by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, screenwriter Zach Dean sketched an idea involving isolation and separation that became “The Gorge.”
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| The Gorge movie 2025: The Gorge,” a new thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, is the latest film from northern Michigan born-and-raised screenwriter Zach Dean |
“I literally drew the gorge on a dry erase board. I drew fog on the bottom. And I drew a tower on one side and a tower on the other side,” he recalls. “I put a little male symbol here and a little female symbol over there. And I wrote: ‘They’re snipers. It’s a love story.’ Then I had a drink and I went to bed.”
Sometimes, a quick drawing and a few notes can lead to a major movie. Arriving Friday on Apple TV+, “The Gorge” is directed by Scott Derrickson and stars Miles Teller (“Top Gun Maverick”) and Anya Taylor-Joy (“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”) as two expert sharpshooters, Levi and Drasa, who are stationed on opposite sides of a vast, mysterious canyon.
Their top-secret assignment, carried out in separate towers, is to guard whatever terrifying, occasionally screaming evil is hiding in the densely foggy depths of the gorge. But though they are kept apart by geography, Levi and Drasa begin to fall for each other with the help of binoculars and conversations written on large sheets of paper. Their efforts to be together eventually lead them to confront an existential threat to human survival, a force so deadly that they must defeat it if they — and people everywhere — are going to have a chance at a future.
"The Gorge," co-starring Sigourney Weaver as the powerful figure who recruits Levi for the task, is a thriller that combines elements of various film genres (romance, sci-fi, action-adventure) as it unravels what’s really behind Levi and Drasa’s mission.
It is one of many stories that Dean, who was born and raised in northern Michigan, has written on a journey that has taken him from doing odd jobs to working on some of the best-known films of the past few years.
Dean’s early credits as a screenwriter include 2012’s “Deadfall,” which starred Eric Bana, Olivia Wilde and Charlie Hunnam in a crime drama about siblings in the aftermath of a botched casino heist, and 2017’s “24 Hours to Live,” with Ethan Hawke as an assassin who seeks revenge and redemption.
Dean experienced a game-changer with his screenplay for the popular sci-fi flick “The Tomorrow War.” The project featuring Chris Pratt and a story about soldiers and civilians transported to the future to fight space invaders proved to be a huge success for Amazon Prime Video, which released it on July 2, 2021, while the COVID-19 pandemic was still impacting movie theaters.
Dean also worked on the story for 2023’s “Fast X” and is working now on the eagerly awaited next project in the "Fast & Furious" franchise.
Screenwriter Zach Dean, whose credits include "The Tomorrow War" with Chris Pratt, is back with a new thriller, "The Gorge," starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.
Speaking by phone from Beverly Hills, California, Dean says he is grateful for the opportunities he continues to have to fulfill what has been a lifelong dream. Born in Traverse City and raised a short drive from there near Interlochen around Green Lake, he is the son of two former teachers at the Interlochen Arts Academy. His father was a history instructor, while his mother taught visual arts, in particular weaving.
Dean says he always wanted to tell stories and “because I was a faculty kid, even when I was little, 8, 9, 10 years old, I would go to the readings — short story readings, poetry readings.”
He especially recalls an event with author and noted Interlochen faculty member (and Dean's eventual teacher) Jack Driscoll, who died in 2024. “I remember being little and having him read short stories and I was, like, 'That’s what I want to do,'" he says.
Dean was a student at many Interlochen summer camps and went to high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he is a 1992 alum. Along with writing, he grew up loving all sorts of movies, especially those with heroic storylines. “Movies and stories ... they kind of saved me when I was a kid, and they made me feel like I was less alone,” he explains.
After high school, Dean attended various colleges, including Western Michigan University, Northwestern Michigan College and Washtenaw Community College, where he earned an associate's degree in general studies.
Through his early years, he held down various odd jobs. “I worked in Ann Arbor as a bartender for years," says Dean, citing locations like Full Moon and the old One-Eyed Moose. He also was a dealer at tribal casinos in northern Michigan, built houses for a while and eventually became a teacher.
Regardless of whatever else he was doing, writing remained a constant. “I always wrote. That was my process. That’s how I felt OK in life is to write stories,” says Dean.
When he was about 20, his then-girlfriend and now “awesome wife" who is a University of Michigan alum, came home with “The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script,” a well-known guide by David Trottier.
“She was like, ‘You should try writing one of these,’” he says.
Eventually, all that writing opened several doors. Dean says he got a scholarship to go to film school in Chicago. In 2005, he earned a master's degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Seven years later, his first film, “Deadfall,” was released.
Dean says persistence was a huge help to his career. ”I certainly learned that you just have to keep hustling all the time; you have to keep creating.”
For him, writing stories comes with its own rewards. “Whether you sell them or not, the process of creating them has such incredible value to me," he says. "It helps me process my fear, my anxieties, my uncertainties, my hopes, all that stuff. … If we end up selling it, if we end up making it, that’s the bonus.”
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