On his first feature film, Love, released in 2011, in addition to directorial and director of photography duties, Eubank also served as production designer.
[12] The second of four siblings, Eubank has one older sister and two younger brothers, and grew up in the Santa Ynez Valley, a noted wine-producing region north of Los Angeles.
At the time that he first watched the 1974 film Chinatown, set in the year 1937, Eubank was unaware that it was a period piece, assuming it to have been made contemporaneously in 1937.
He would meet with his Navy cinematographer grandfather, who lived in Salt Lake City, who insisted Eubank would someday attend with a film.
[8][15][25] While at Sundance and elsewhere, it was Eubank's job to promote and provide support for the Panavised CineAlta F900, which had singularly moved Hollywood into the digital cinema era with its use in the production of George Lucas's 2002 film Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, the third, and first major, feature film to be released that was shot entirely on a 24p digital camera.
[16][26] Using his position at Panavision, Eubank convinced the Australian cinema product manufacturer Blackmagic Design to send him an early edition of an SDI capture card.
The film was inspired by Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line and asks according to Eubank: "[W]hat are we, as human beings, going to leave behind when we cease to exist one day…?
[33][34] Eubank based his building of the ISS set on NASA photography and skateboard ramp designs and his staging of the battle scenes on Civil War paintings.
[36] In an interview, Eubank described his first thoughts for the project: "I'm a big fan of The Twilight Zone, of what Rod Serling used to do as a storyteller, and I always wanted to do one of those – a story with intangibility and strangeness that makes you say, 'What the heck is going on?'
[21] Eubank decided to shoot the film in 2.39:1 theatrical anamorphic format, saying: "No other ratio allows you to stare right into an actor’s eyes; the performance can erupt.
"[25] When it came to the film's pacing, scale and rhythm, Eubank began with a goal to make the film feel small and then suddenly large, explaining: "I wanted the opening to feel super free, and like a road movie, [and] in a weird way small, so that by the time [I] was going to ramp things up both emotionally [and] technically… it really was going to slowly burn until it got to that sort of firecracker end.
"[37] He and David Lanzenberg, the director of photography, chose to leave a LowCon filter on for the entire time to reduce digital edginess.
Eubank chose Brian Berdan, who had worked on David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, to edit the film.
[6][39] From a script by Black List screenwriter Brian Duffield, Underwater follows a crew of deep-sea researchers who must navigate across the ocean floor after their station is destroyed.
The film also features T. J. Miller, Vincent Cassel, John Gallagher Jr. and Gunner Wright, who worked with Eubank previously on Love.