inspired to direct the film upon reading the screenplay after returning from Peru: "I had been robbed by a group of 13-year-old, glue-sniffing kids and gotten shot at. I went to the cops, and they basically told us, 'If you give us $300, we'll let you kill these kids.' And I thought, if that kind of [stuff] is possible.... I came home and read the script and it resonated." On the violence depicted in the screenplay, Stockwell added: "I wasn't really getting into a race to see who can make people squirm. I was just really interested in taking people into a world and situation that they could, maybe, see themselves also being in and wondering how they would react. It also, honestly, just taps into America's fears of traveling abroad. How we're perceived outside of our borders today." Casting Olivia Wilde was cast in the role of Bea after auditioning, while Beau Garrett was offered an audition by director Stockwell, with whom she had worked in the past. Filming Filming took place in the Chapada Diamantina, a region of Bahia state, and in the Litoral Norte, the easternmost coastal part of the São Paulo state. Turistas was the first American film to be shot exclusively on location in Brazil. The shoot was described as "low-key," with many locals hired as extras and to work behind-the-scenes. The underwater sequences in the cave system were filmed largely without stunt people, and according to Stockwell, one shot required Josh Duhamel to swim to escape through a hole. Olivia Wilde recalled losing consciousness while filming in the caves after using oxygen in an air pocket too quickly: "I start flailing around, having forgotten the emergency signal. But, of course, my character is supposed to be flailing, so every time I look frightened, they're like, 'Great, Olivia, great!'" Stockwell shot the film without hair and makeup artists present, and without trailers for the actors. Melissa George described the filming experience as being completely free of "comforts": "We had no trailers, no shoes on, no clothing, no makeup artists. He [Stockwell] strips away everything to the point that it's like [shooting] a Dogme film." For her evisceration sequence in the film, actress Beau Garrett had to have a body cast made, which took seven hours to construct; the scene itself took a further twelve hours to film, during which Garrett remained on the operating table,