Jaws - for real
In the new thriller “Open Water,” a couple scuba-diving far off the Bahamas surface after being submerged for 40 minutes to find themselves abandoned by their dive boat. The real panic sets in when sharks start circling.
And the sharks are real.
At the film’s Los Angeles premiere producer Laura Lau said: “Working with real sharks and not working with computer-generated effects or animatronics was really important to us because we were shooting digital video. We knew that it would impart a sense of realism.”
The cinema-verite style of “Open Water,” which opens in the US on August 20, makes it a kind of “The Blair Witch Project” on water.
Careful measures were taken for the actors’ safety. Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan wore protective chain mail under their wet suits, and bloody chunks of tuna were tossed into the water to manipulate the sharks’ movements.
“We hired a shark wrangler who really understood how the sharks would behave,” said Lau. The sharks, mostly gray reef sharks averaging seven-ft to 11-ft in length, numbered between 45 and 50.
Travis and Ryan spent over 120 hours in the water 20 miles offshore. On the first day of shooting, Travis was bitten by a barracuda. However, the sharks never bit the actors during the making of the film.
