Posted on: Wednesday, June 2, 2004

Taking a chomp out of 'Jaws' turf

By Erin Ailworth
Los Angeles Times

HOLLYWOOD — However scary the Jaws were that spooked beachgoers out of the water in summer 1975, that big, hungry great white was mostly mechanical. The sharks menacing a couple in this summer's low-tech thriller "Open Water" are real.

Writer and director Chris Kentis ("Grind," 1997) hired shark handlers to chuck chum — chopped up fish guts — into the ocean. Jaws' cousins arrived with blood-stained maws and pointy teeth, and then the actors dived in.

The "questionary tale" about a vacationing couple unintentionally left behind way out in the ocean during a scuba diving excursion was shot in the Bahamas with a digital video camera for about $300,000. Kentis edited the movie with Final Cut Pro on a Mac G4, surrounded by drawings of barracudas and sharks done by his 6-year-old daughter, Sabrina. There are no mechanical monsters or computer-generated images.

So if those fins and murky shapes seem a little close, they are. The movie is scheduled to hit theaters nationwide in August.

"The swimming with the sharks ... there's a part of me that didn't know if I could do that," said actress Blanchard Ryan, who played Susan, the female lead. "It came down to me not breaking my word rather than being brave."

"The bottom line is, I was really, really scared," said Ryan. But co-star Daniel Travis couldn't wait to shimmy into his wetsuit. "In the fine tradition of adrenaline junkies, it was a great and exciting adventure for me," Travis said. "First day, get in the water with sharks."

Both actors said that because of their vantage point in the water they never really knew when the sharks were close. "She'd yell at me to stop kicking her, and I wasn't," Travis laughed. But he went along with Ryan's assumptions so she would stay in the water.

During filming, the sharks "were in a feeding frenzy, covered with blood — and they had no interest in us," Ryan said.

Both actors spent hours in the swelling waves at least 20 miles from shore. The challenge, they said, was staying close to the boat without getting hit by it, as well as being positioned at the correct angle to the camera. Dramamine was in full supply.

"In the later scenes, when it looks like we did some fantastic makeup work, that's just the effect of marinating in the ocean," Kentis said.

The movie is based on accounts he and his wife, Laura Lau — the film's producer — have read in dive magazines. They have been recreational divers for 11 years.

But for a flash of fins, the camera pretty much stays on the surface of the water, to reflect reality. "What you can't see is more scary," said Lau, 40. "You really can't see into the water when you are on the surface."

Kentis spent a better portion of his days hanging over the side of a boat, his camera encased in a plastic shield he built, so that he was at eye level with his sea-level actors.

"He took every risk we did," Ryan said. "He was crazy with the sharks. They were biting his camera cases, and he would bang ... (them) on the nose and wrench it out of their mouths."

The film's crew said they are stunned by the frenzy over "our little home movie," which got snapped up by a film distributor after its first showing, at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.