Great White hope

Q: How long did it take to produce Sharkwater?

A: Five years, 15 different countries — way longer than I thought.

A: I feel like I’ve grown so much, making this film; I was just a child when I started. It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, it’s been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. It cost me relationships, it cost me all the money that I had, and I had illnesses – I had Dengue fever, West Nile virus and tuberculosis, all at the same time, in addition to the hospitalization [for flesh-eating disease] you saw in the movie. It took everything out of me, but at the same time, it was the most amazing life lesson, and I had to learn. Even now, even running around doing interviews and doing talks at universities, I’m on the steepest learning curve I’ve ever been on. I’m having to learn so much, which is making me grow as a person, immensely.

We had super-lows – the hospital [stay] was a super-low because everybody was saying, “OK, it’s done, you don’t have any of the movie you thought you’d have, you’re in the hospital, everything’s gone wrong.” I was in a relationship that was falling apart, because I wasn’t around. We thought we were done for, because we thought [the hospitalization] was the last straw sort of thing. One of the funny things is that editing that scene in the movie was really difficult, because we had to cut out all the shots of me smiling and laughing, because it was such a surreal, oh-my-God-are-you-kidding-
me-after-all-that-now-this? One of the things the movie has made me do is become Captain Positive.

Q: What sort of budget were you working with?

A: The budget ended up being really big in the end. But it was really a guerrilla campaign. I’d never made a movie before, so I was a bit of a wild card. So any investment that I did get was me telling my photo editors that I would shoot my next photo assignment digitally, and then shooting it with a video camera instead. With very little funding in the beginning, we got money from Universal Studios and Warner Brothers and Canadian Heritage Fund and stuff like that.

Q: What drew investors in — that your film was an eco-documentary, or that it was about sharks?

A: Five years ago, nobody cared about conservation. One thing I realized, going to a bunch of film festivals, is that people didn’t want [a film about] conservation at all – all the networks, all the broadcasters, everybody was saying, “If it’s about conservation, we don’t want it. People don’t want to feel bad.” These companies all want to make money, so they don’t want people to get turned off. So it ended up being about the sharks. When I started making the film, it was supposed to be about fish; there weren’t supposed to be people in it. Only when things went catastrophically wrong, and we had to start filming ourselves so we’d have a record in case we got stuck in prison, that the movie changed.

Q: Do you think that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has helped the potential exposure of yours?

A: Yeah, the timing for this movie is absolutely perfect. We’ve had Winged Migration and March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth — all these movies that are coming out are perfectly aligned with Sharkwater.

Q: You are the cinematographer, the scriptwriter and director of this film. Was that always the plan?

A: I tried to get somebody to do every single role; I was just going to be the cinematographer. We came back, and I had all this crazy footage, we were pitching it to all these different companies and trying to get distributors on board, and nobody would bite. Eventually, I went on so many different pathways, big-deal stages with companies, and everything would just sort of fall apart. And so I gave up on the movie a couple of times. I moved out to Australia and was shooting these other things in Australia, because I managed to take good footage, so people wanted to hire me to shoot their movie for them. But after a year or a bit shooting these other films — the footage of which I was allowed to keep — I sort of realized that everything that I was doing for these other films was just the missing elements of Sharkwater.

I came back to Canada to try and put it all together and I tried to hire writers. And I went through two different writers, and the things I got back were Super Size Me about sharks. I knew there was a more powerful way of telling the story, I knew there was a better way of getting the message across. So, I ended up having to hire and fire, hire and fire. I started going to story-writing seminars. I went to Robert McKee’s seminars — he’s a story-writing coach — sat in the front row, and just studied, read every book there was on script-writing. And I realized that exactly what happened to me, during the process of making a film about sharks, was textbook story structure.

Q: Your main message is that sharks are shy, reserved creatures. How is it that other documentaries capture such savage footage of them?

A: What most people don’t realize is that every time you see a [photographer shooting a shark from inside a steel cage], there’s somebody outside the cage filming the guys in the cage. Cages are mostly for television. Sharks aren’t really dangerous, as everybody tells you. You saw the movie: we’re petting sharks, we’re feeding them. You can hold a fish in front of the camera and get the shark to bite the fish and look like it’s biting the camera. All these dial operators are trained to work with [the] Discovery [Channel]. All the dial operators know that scary sharks and teeth sell.

Q: How hopeful are you that people will stop killing sharks for their fins?

A: We’ve turned around the fate for the whales; we’ve saved many of those species. People don’t sit down to eat tiger; they don’t sit down to eat elephant. But they did once. They were eating bear parts, and that would be totally taboo today. I think one of the things that’s going to happen is that as soon as the awareness is out there, everything’s going to change. I don’t think the general public, or the Chinese communities in any country, would stand for sharks being wiped out for the sake of a delicacy. Most people surveyed on the ground in China don’t know that shark-fin soup comes from sharks. So they definitely don’t know that their consumption of it is wiping out one of the oldest, longest-lived, most important predators in the ocean.