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From Globe and Mail:


Acting can be a shark pit

Sometimes a role in a movie can literally mean swimming with the sharks, as actors Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis found out shooting Open Water, writes GUY DIXON

By GUY DIXON
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 - Page R1


Actor Blanchard Ryan had a right to be nervous.

She had already received an unscripted bite from a barracuda on the first day of shooting the scuba-diving-nightmare film Open Water. Then it came time to shoot the scenes where she and fellow lead Daniel Travis swim with frenetic, darting 220-kilogram sharks -- real sharks in the real ocean.

The film's premise is straightforward. A young couple take a tropical vacation to ease their overburdened yuppie lives. While scuba diving, they are accidentally left behind by their boat and are stranded miles from land, two bobbing heads in the vast sea. The hours pass. Panic grows. They aren't doing so well. Then the sharks come.

The filmmakers insisted on real sharks. Shooting the whole project on digital video, they aspired to transfer some of the Dogme 95 filmmaking ethos to the deep sea, making sure, like other Dogme-influenced films, to shoot only in natural settings and use real props, or real predators in this case. With a minuscule budget of only $120,000, special effects weren't an option anyway.

They did splurge on one of thebest-known shark wranglers in the business, Stuart Cove, known for his work on James Bond films. And they paid to have both actors receive diving certifications before shooting began. Everyone had been up-front from the start that the film would involve working with actual sharks in the wild. Both of the two leading actors said they were fine with that.

Then came the do-or-die dive. The boat pulled to a spot off the Bahamas where the sharks regularly corral. Teams of thrashing grey reef sharks and a few bull sharks, some more than three metres long, surfaced en masse. They are so used to working with the wranglers, they flock like pigeons to the boat. They know the boat means feeding time.

But Ryan hadn't let on throughout the auditioning process how terrified she was. She wasn't sure herself what her reaction would be, she said. She had wanted the part so badly that she had even managed to shoulder aside another actor who had been pretty much cast for the role. Now Ryan had to go through with it.

"This grey haze floats to the surface. And you're like, oh my God, that's not a shadow, that's 50 sharks. And I just went white," Ryan said, flashing a relaxed, toothy smile in the comfort of the Toronto Four Seasons Hotel, far removed from her teeth-gritting, utterly pained look throughout much of the film.

"When I had to step off the side of that boat in the middle of all those sharks -- I mean, they don't get out of your way when you get in. You just sort of jump in on top of them. You just think to yourself, could I possibly be any more stupid?" she said.

New York-based husband and wife filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who had already made the 1997 feature Grind together, are avid divers and made Open Water as a labour of love. They had no expectations for it to have a shot at becoming a summer hit in theatres (it opens Friday across Canada).

"The greatest hope that crept into my mind was that maybe it'll go to festivals, maybe it'll show on cable or video or something. That was my wildest fantasy," Kentis said.

Kentis had become fascinated by reports of the disappearance of Americans Thomas and Eileen Lonergan off Australia's Great Barrier Reef in 1998. After writing a script based purely on the idea of what the Lonergans must have suffered on the water, Kentis and Lau were only interested in making a small, entirely self-financed film based on the story. Apart from some help from Lau's sister Estelle, various sea-creature wranglers and some locals on location, the entire crew was just the two filmmakers and the two actors.

They took every precaution, Kentis and Lau said. The actors wore protective chain mail under their wetsuits to prevent shark teeth from penetrating. Of course, they had no protection over their heads.

Kentis, who shot many of the scenes in the water himself and has an infectious gung-ho enthusiasm about him, had taken off his chain mail because it became too hard to hold the camera. Lau, more matter of fact and seemingly more cautious, nevertheless filmed other shots from the side of the boat with her feet dipping in and out of the shark-filled ocean. To get the sharks to dart past the actors, she and the shark wrangler would throw bloody chunks of tuna into the water.

"Because Blanchard was really scared of the sharks, a lot of times I would wait for her to look away before I would put a piece of bait in the water because it would really freak her out," Lau said.

What better way to show how a shark's fin flaps and splashes on the surface of the water like a rat's tail -- rather than the smooth glide in for the kill as depicted in so many Hollywood movies? Apparently sharks aren't like that at all. "They are like snakes in a way. They go over each other. They swarm," Ryan said. "Or like kittens," she added, a little incongruously, "twisting up against each other all the time."

The actors have been told by publicists to talk up the dangers they endured as they make the rounds promoting the film. But, "there's a balance between letting people know we were in a dangerous situation and also not making the filmmakers look completely irresponsible and making ourselves look totally stupid," Ryan said.

By all accounts, Travis wasn't scared and dove in eagerly with Kentis. "I had so many other things to be afraid of," he said with the same sunken-eyed expression his character has when realizing the couple is stranded in the water. "The anxiety produced by being one of [only] two actors on a film was far greater than the prospects of getting nibbled by a shark."

With a background on stage, he is an unknown. So is Ryan, who has had a few roles in little-known films. They have what every New York actor has on their résumés, bit parts in Sex and the City, and both have known each other for years after working on All My Children. They happened to learn they were both going after Open Water during call-back auditions.

Sharks, being sharks, have a tendency to steal the show. But the film really isn't a shark movie. It's more about being abandoned to the elements, with the ocean being just as life-threatening as any predator. The camera lingers often on the water, effectively capturing with the crystalline quality of video the varied light off the ocean.

The shark scenes actually only took a day and a half to shoot, during three years of off-again, on-again production, as the two filmmakers and two lead actors flew to tropical waters on weekends and holidays to shoot another batch of scenes. Despite having to depend on the weather, and the occasional accident, such as a tanker drifting far away, provoking an improvised scene or two, the film followed a tight script. A number of other scenes were shot by Kentis and Lau in the Grenadines, the Virgin Islands and off Mexico to prevent one locale becoming too recognizable and hence getting pegged by the film as shark territory.

"We did not set out to make a horror film," Kentis said. "We did not set out to make a shark film. If we were going to tell this true story accurately, then there would be some horrific elements -- sharks would become an element. But it's interesting to see how it's being marketed and perceived."

Kentis said he can see the rationale behind the emphasis of the movie's distributor, Lions Gate Films, on sharks in ads and trailer, since the actors are unknowns. "All they have to sell from a commercial standpoint are the sharks. But it's a concern that it sets up expectations in an audience's mind. I just hope audiences will go with an open mind."