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- I think people are fascinated by shark movies
for two reasons.
One, the shark is a natural monster.
But it's also the fact that it's in the water
and in the ocean.
And I think the ocean has great psychological effects.
- When you go in diving,
that moment into the ocean,
and then you put your head down
and you see the world underneath you,
and then you go down,
and that moment of a dive is this kind of
going into this whole crazy,
like, "what the fuck is down there" other world.
- The seafloor is 8,000 feet down.
And we're thousands of miles from anywhere.
And you get in the water.
And you look around you, and it's dark everywhere.
And your mind starts to make up things.
What's just out of sight over there?
And what's gonna get you?
♪
- That's the appeal of horror movies in the water.
That was the appeal of
"The Creature From the Black Lagoon,"
the famous scene where she's swimming,
and the creature's swimming under her,
and she doesn't know it.
And then it touches her leg,
and she doesn't know what it is.
- It's one of the great kind of fears and dramatic things,
is being in the water and something grabs you.
I mean, the beginning of "Jaws" just says it all.
[woman gasping]
[soft music]
♪
- I would define sharksploitation
as a genre of film
or frankly any kind of media portrayal
that's about this idea of the meta shark,
which is constructing a horrific, monstrous image
of the shark that is very loosely based
in actual reality.
It's that idea that we can sort of stretch the truth
and merge fact and fiction.
- The classic exploitation movies
are T&A movies or gore movies,
but there's many other kinds of exploitation.
Sharksploitation is a subgenre
that capitalizes on the popularity of shark mania.
- It's rare for the world to go,
"We like this.
We're interested in this."
And because of that, it's gotta be exploited.
- And I think what sharksploitation
is really exploiting is "Jaws."
And that's never died.
People are still doing that today,
no matter how crazy the premises get.
[gunshot]
- For these, like, sharksploitation movies,
whenever I see a title, then I'm like,
what the fuck is this gonna be?
[laughs]
You know you're gonna see
something you've never seen.
Like, "Sharktopus,"
I've gotta see what the sharktopus look like.
I've gotta see what its magical abilities are.
I've gotta see how it's gonna kill people.
- It is not a sharksploitation movie
unless someone screams, "Get out of the water."
- Get out of the water!
Everybody, get out of the water!
- Get out of the water right now!
- When I think of sharksploitation,
I think of sharks that defy the laws of physics.
And then the other thing sharksploitation is doing,
what it's exploiting, is people's fear
of being eaten by something that they can't see.
- I think there's just this in-built fascination for us
with, like, this is a highly-evolved,
deadly predator
that we probably can't beat in a fight.
We can't outswim it.
- We're frail.
We don't have fins.
We can't stay underwater very long.
We're fucked. [chuckles]
We're shit out of luck, man.
With all our stuff, we know that naked in the water
with that shark, man, we're in trouble.
So there's something about that that reminds us
of how frail we are, vulnerable we are.
And yet it ignites something in us
on the adrenaline level that makes us feel alive.
- Come on in the water!
- When I first saw "Jaws," it completely blew my mind
that, oh, my God, wait, that could be in the water?
- I was in that sweet spot age when it came out
where my parents wouldn't let me see it.
So one night with the cousins, we snuck and saw it.
And it terrified me.
And my parents were right.
- If I went into the bathtub
and I couldn't see below the bubbles,
there was likely a shark under there.
And I couldn't take a bath that night.
- I mean, in the theater, I felt like
the shark was gonna come under my theater seat
and get me.
I almost wanted to put my feet up on the seat.
That's how terrified I was.
- That shot from the bottom of the ocean
of her just floating there,
we immediately feel that
that camera is something watching her.
And the idea that it has all of this distance
between her and it,
that is pure thalassophobia.
- A lot of fear of any kind of oceanic monster
comes from this idea of thalassophobia,
which is a real phobia that exists
where people are threatened or scared
of large bodies of water.
So when you have something like the shark come in,
it contributes even more to this fear.
[woman screaming]
- It really did make people afraid to go in the water.
And that's, I think, another reason
"Jaws" became so big.
It's this elemental fear
that people have had for centuries, I guess.
And this was the first movie
to really make it the central theme of the movie
and really kind of exploit that fear.
Because everybody goes swimming at some point.
And it's taking an activity everyone does
and showing, you know, the potential dark side
and the horrible thing that can happen to you.
- Suddenly, society developed this massive fear of sharks.
And this idea that the psychology becomes infused
in an entire generation and is still persisting
that when we think about why we are scared
when we're standing in 3 feet of water at the shore,
it's because of "Jaws."
What are you scared of? Sharks.
And that's where we always go first and foremost.
And it did not exist to quite the degree
that we see it prior to "Jaws."
- This is the first year that I've come to the beach.
And people have really been upset.
And they're really concerned about the waters.
A lot of people, you talk to them.
You say, "Well, you been in the water?"
And they say, "No."
Just the water is beautiful, it looks nice.
But, you know, hey, there's sharks out there.
- I knew that as a child I had dreamed
about a maniac that would attack me
and cut off my head--
an unreasonable thing that you couldn't discuss with,
you couldn't argue with.
And I sort of thought that people might
react to sharks that way.
- In the shark craze which has gripped America,
which Peter Benchley began and others have added to,
the search for objectivity about sharks
is a pretty discouraging enterprise.
- When you compare it to, like, other subgenres of movies,
like killer dog, like "Cujo," for example,
that didn't stop people from buying dogs.
But "Jaws" stopped people from getting in boats,
going in the water, going in their pool,
going in the bathtub.
People who lived in Iowa didn't want
to get in the lake near their house.
It was just like this phenomenon.
- And it became the movies that changed the movies.
- We had been making low-budget
science-fiction pictures,
very often underwater pictures.
And when "Jaws" came out,
"The New York Times" wrote,
"What is 'Jaws'
but a big-budget Roger Corman film?"
He was right in half of what he said.
It was a big-budget Roger Corman film.
But it was also better.
It was bigger and better.
And I thought--and I talked to a few of my friends--
the major studios have caught on to what we've been doing,
and we are in trouble.
But I was not the only one.
There was a whole genre of these
underwater monster films.
But they were all low-budget films.
- Many of the adventure movies
of the 1920s and the 1930s
took place at sea.
A good example is "The Sea Bat" from 1930,
in which a giant manta ray attacks sponge fishers
near the West Indies.
But for some reason, sharks were considered less dangerous.
- Back in the days,
way, way back from the start of humanity,
people thought of sharks like a "mysterical" creature,
especially on the small island
and the Pacific Ocean.
- Anyone who lived in a coastal area
who saw these creatures in real life,
we'd tell stories about those things.
So in mythology and folklore in different places
in the Caribbean, in the Pacific,
and in Africa have stories of sharks.
And oftentimes, these sharks are neither
malevolent or benevolent.
They're somewhere in between.
There are cases where sharks actually
are seen as ancestral spirits
that might actually be helpful.
And there are some folklore stories where the sharks
themselves actually help people in the ocean
rather than attack them.
- In Greece, they actually worshipped sharks
and made it a shark god.
But then, most of the shark god wasn't an evil god.
They didn't punish people.
Very, very first shark movie,
"Tabu" from 1931,
the shark was godlike.
It was a shark
who protected an area in the water.
They actually made the first rubber shark.
But also, movies like "She Gods of the Shark Reef"
or "Omoo-Omoo, The Shark God"
actually portrayed the shark as a god.
- And their belief in the power of the shark god.
- You would see a statue of a shark.
You would see movies like "Tiger Shark"
where you'd see the everyday life of the fishermen.
You'd see how hard it was and how the shark was
a big part of their lives--
but not as a villain,
but as an animal they had to deal with.
And they actually respected the animal.
- Now, these are all movies with sharks in them,
but they're not "movies about sharks."
- It was mainly just some individual scenes with sharks.
- Cause you're looking at me like I'm--
- There are even more specific examples today,
or in the modern period.
- Shark head.
This mission is cursed.
- It's not cursed.
- Shark head.
- With DC and Suicide Squad,
this idea of the half-human, half-shark
is becoming more popular.
But it really has roots in a mythology
that is still very important to people.
There's this really, I think, profound
and deeply saddening scene for a CGI character
where he's standing in an aquarium
forlornly looking at these other ocean creatures.
And initially you're thinking, of course, obvious metaphor,
right, that he doesn't feel like part of the human world.
He misses part of the ocean world.
And then the tank breaks,
and some of those sea creatures
start attacking him.
It becomes this really quick, but really interesting
metaphor about not fitting in in either world.
- A king shark.
- Bullshit.
- What the fuck?
- Some people claim that Nanaue is a descendant
of an ancient shark god.
Whatever the case, he's strong and deadly.
- An interesting example of sharks in mythology
is the story of Nanaue,
which comes from the Hawaiian Islands.
So there there's a king of the sharks.
And the king is a shark who can shapeshift and sees
a beautiful woman and decides to shapeshift into a human man
to sort of pursue her.
They have an affair.
And they have a child, a boy who is a demigod.
And he's born with the mouth of a shark on his back.
And Nanaue is eventually killed because of the threat
that he poses to the other people.
But Nanaue is a very important figure
in Hawaiian indigenous lore
because of this association with the king of sharks.
And that seems like a really interesting story to me.
I think it's fascinating that when Europeans and even
cinematographers in the 20th and 21st century
started thinking of shark monsters,
instead of going into the folklore,
we looked at the real shark again.
And James Bond did contribute
to this idea of sharks as monstrous
by associating them with the villains
of James Bond films.
- Gently, my friend. Gently.
- I got interested in shark movies when I was a young kid.
It was actually "Jaws," but not "Jaws," the movie.
It was Jaws, the character from "The Spy Who Loved Me."
You know, the big guy with the steel teeth.
- And Jaws would kill people not with his gigantic body
and hands or a gun or a knife.
He would go up to you and bite you on the neck.
And then he bites the shark at the end.
- In stuff like "Live and Let Die"
and "Thunderball,"
we have James encountering, you know,
a shark in the ocean that goes directly after him,
and you know, he has to fight it off.
But more commonly, and I think more interestingly,
is sharks being used as a form of execution,
which to my knowledge is something
that never really occurred.
But you have these pits of sharks
and you have these villains who are cruelly
throwing people into these shark pits.
And they're instantly devoured.
And there's plumes of blood everywhere.
- The villain in "Thunderball" kept sharks in a pool
on his island compound...
- With sharks, no less.
- Both as a way to dispose of enemies
and as a security measure and just
a signifier of being evil.
In the first "Despicable Me" movie,
they had sharks in a pool too, sort of as an homage to that.
- Quiet down, fish.
- And you know, in "Austin Powers,"
Dr. Evil wants sharks that have
frickin' laser beams on their heads.
- Sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.
- The villain has sharks in "The Phantom."
- "Batman," the movie from the '60s,
there's a very famous scene where we see Batman
struggling with a shark.
He's hanging beneath a helicopter,
and a shark attacks him.
It's very obviously a rubber shark.
And the only reason it's moving
is because Batman is moving his leg.
And he's reaching up to the helicopter.
And Robin's sitting there
and he's asking for this shark repellent bat spray.
And he starts spraying the shark
and then it's releasing its rubber teeth.
And it's dropping down.
That's an awesome scene.
- An exploding shark was pulling my leg.
- The Joker!
- It all adds up to a sinister riddle.
Riddle-er.
Riddler?
- Oh, a thought strikes me.
- So sharks become associated with being kept as pets
by being controlled by humans, and more specifically
being controlled by villains.
So it's really doubling down on this idea
that sharks themselves are inherently bad
or evil because they're being used in an evil way
by humans, which, of course, begs the question
of who are the real monsters in that situation?
- Pre-"Jaws," there was no sharksploitation genre.
But there was a treasure-hunting genre.
And a lot of them involved a shark,
because the treasure was in a sunken ship or some sort
of underwater area that they needed to somehow
get down to retrieve the treasure.
- If you take one of the more interesting
treasure hunt movies, shark movies,
it was a movie called "Shark!"
with a big name actor, Burt Reynolds.
But the most interesting story about that movie
was actually the unfortunate death of one of the stuntmen,
because when they made the movie,
they made it with real sharks.
And unfortunately, one of the stuntmen
got too close to one of the sharks,
and he actually died.
- They had been shooting in an area that was netted off,
but the shark broke through the netting right into the shot
and killed the stuntman right on camera.
So that was bad enough.
But the producers actually included the footage
of Jose's death in the film.
They immediately started publicizing that a stuntman
was killed during the making of this film to garner publicity.
They sold the story to "Life Magazine."
They eventually changed the name of the movie
from "Caine" to "Shark!"
Then when "Jaws" came out, they re-released the movie
to capitalize on it again
and changed the title of it to "Man-Eater."
And so that is the dark side of the term exploitation.
- When you think about a movie like "Blue Water White Death,"
you can really villainize a lot of what they did.
But at the same time, I think of it more like
they were us, but at that time.
And there was a lot of real thought
that these were very, very dangerous, villainous animals.
- We're looking for the animal that I think is considered
to be the most dangerous predator
still living in the world,
the great white shark, which attacks the...
- "Blue Water, White Death," you know,
I missed that when it first came out.
But it became a--almost like
the Dead Sea Scroll or something.
Those of us that knew the ocean and knew sharks,
when we saw it, we went, wow.
That's really good.
- Before this film, there's only been one shot
of a great white underwater.
And that Ron Taylor had taken.
And that was all there was.
I was 24 years old and I was just totally enamored
of the idea of doing this.
And then I met Peter Gimbel, Stan Waterman.
Jim Lipscomb I knew well.
He was a great friend of ours.
And then Ron and Valerie Taylor.
And these guys had great delight in what
they were doing and yet were afraid in the sense
it was unknown.
Didn't know what was gonna happen.
Peter Gimbel invented the cages.
And that allowed them to film underwater.
And that was radical at that time.
And then they filmed at night underwater,
which was the scariest thing in the world.
It was a real, real danger there, you know.
And when they decided to swim with the sharks,
one of the things they decided was
they'd have these bang sticks.
And so one person was filming,
and then the other person would be behind
just looking for sharks and trying to--
but when you have goggles like this,
you've got no peripheral vision.
What's happening back there?
What's happening over there?
And the sharks would come up.
And what they would do a lot of times
is the ocean tip, white tips, would come up
and bang it like this, you know,
luckily, instead of biting, you know.
- In the filming of "Blue Water, White Death,"
the filmmakers themselves kill a shark in it
because they get scared of it
and they have their boom stick, and they use it.
And so I mention the movie
not to make light of some of those darker parts,
but just to show people all of these things
are like dominoes.
- The 18th century, we start to see
more negative illustrations and paintings
of sharks attacking people.
At first, this is usually sharks following
alongside slave ships.
And then in the 19th century, when we see an increase
in print culture, we start seeing more shark attack
encounters being reported as well,
one of which was a cabin boy fell off the side of a ship
in Cuba and his leg was bitten off by a shark,
which, of course, newspapers latched on to.
And that inspired an American painter
to make a very famous painting called "Watson and the Shark"
that depicts an exaggerated account of that.
And "Watson and the Shark," I do think,
started some of these negative depictions
that have continued throughout history.
- In the real world, there was two
major events which actually transformed
the public's view of sharks.
You had an event in 1916 in New Jersey
where actually some bull sharks swam up a river
and attacked a few who I guess was in the water swimming.
And at that time in 1916,
you didn't have very much television.
You have some radio and you have some of the newspapers,
so that story about the shark attack
traveled slowly but steadily through all of America.
And people was totally afraid of sharks.
You can see that the tourists was running away
from the beaches because of when they saw
the stories in the newspapers.
- So we start seeing front page newspapers
with photos of sharks and, like, "man-eater."
So we have man-eater associated with the shark
for the first time.
That's on one side of the world.
On the other side of the globe,
Australia was getting more into surfing.
So of course, people were also being attacked
or bitten by sharks in Australia.
So as that circulated through the globe,
this idea of the man-eater plus real shark attacks,
the demonization and the creation
of the monster shark really started becoming
more and more prevalent.
- And then throughout the Second World War,
you had the warship, the USS "Indianapolis."
The ship was carrying some part of the atomic bomb
that went down on Japan in the ending
of the Second World War.
And on the way back, a Japanese submarine
sank the big warship.
- Here you have Captain McVay bringing the secret cargo.
Intercepted by a Japanese sub, sunk.
So 1,200 men go into the water and 300 and something survive.
And many of them-- most of them, in fact--
die from shark attacks.
- Woody James was one of the survivors
of the "Indianapolis."
And I got to ask him.
I said, how did you feel the first time you saw "Jaws"?
Because that was the first time anybody
had ever heard about that.
And he one of the survivors.
And he said he was just stunned,
because these guys-- this was a generation
that didn't talk about these things.
No one, none of their families, none of the kids,
no one really knew what they went through.
They just kept quiet and buried that trauma.
- Peter had many ideas for novels.
But the one he liked the best
came from reading about an article
about a giant great white shark.
- In 1964, long before all of this drama had happened,
I read a story in the "New York Daily News"
about a fisherman who had caught
a 4,550-pound great white shark
off the beaches of Long Island.
And I thought, my God, what would happen
if one of those things came into a resort community
and wouldn't go away?
- Peter wrote "Jaws."
It was fiction based on fact, I remember he used to say.
So everything in it could have happened
or did happen, except this idea
that the shark had some idea to do it.
- At that time, when Peter was doing research for the book,
there was not a lot of research.
But there was a theory called the "rogue shark theory."
And that was that once a shark tasted human flesh,
it would then hang around and wanted more human flesh.
Peter did not believe in that theory.
- Now, this shark that swims alone.
- Rogue. - What's it called?
- Rogue, rogue. - Yeah.
Now, this guy, he keeps swimming around
in a place where the feeding is good
until the food supply is gone, right?
- It's called territoriality.
It's just a theory that I happen to agree with.
- The rogue shark theory is nonsense.
The idea that one shark develops
a taste for human blood and then becomes evil
and the only way to save the beach
is to track down that one specific individual shark
and kill it, that theory has inspired
a lot of what we call shark control measures
around the world, and it doesn't work,
because even if you could identify what specific
individual shark was responsible for a given bite,
which you almost certainly cannot,
you couldn't find it.
And in the efforts to find it,
you would kill a bunch of other sharks
that you're even saying were not the ones involved.
- Stephen really went with the rogue shark theory.
And it sure did make for a really powerful movie.
- The book's singular gimmick,
which was to give you the shark's point of view,
that was, you know, that was a first,
to have the monster, you know, as a character.
- This is the shark that was built for "Jaws 1."
And it was built by a guy named Joe Alves.
He was one of Universal's resident visual effect--
special effects guys.
Because there is a difference.
Special effects are practical,
visual effects are post.
"Jaws," we did not have visual effects to the scale
where they could have done this kind of shark things.
Computers didn't exist for doing CG.
So they built this shark.
Joe Alves and his crew physically built this shark.
And famously, it did not work very well.
So that is the reason "Jaws" is such a powerful film.
- It's actually those moments in the movie that really
separate it and make it as good as it is,
because it's such clever filmmaking.
- It's probably from where I grew up in the '70s, watching,
you know, movies where the limitations
from budget and maybe even mechanical issues
have limited the amount of times
you actually see the creature.
And to me, that's much scarier.
- Stephen King once said, once you see
the zipper down the monster's back,
the game's over.
So the more real you can make the situation,
I think the more-- the easier it is
for people to get invested in it.
- Our focus was creating this creature
as close as we could to a shark.
We weren't thinking about what
he was gonna do to the future.
- Summer wasn't for blockbusters back then.
It was just for escapist fare, you know,
drive-in movies, that kind of stuff.
That's the movie that made $100 million.
And everybody wanted some of that.
- When the movie came out, everything went crazy.
Everything totally changed-- not only for the shark movies,
but also for the cinema history.
- Movies didn't open in as many theaters
then as they open in now.
So I remember waiting in line for five hours
the first time we saw "Jaws," because we had to wait
for two showings to come and go before we got in.
- At that time in 1975,
the idea of running your trailer
as a TV commercial was relatively new.
And "Jaws" did it a lot.
And that meant that everybody was seeing it.
It wasn't just point-of-contact ads
at the movie theater, it was in your living room.
- I saw those ads all over the place.
And it really stoked my enthusiasm for it.
The book was in every bookstore you went into
and supermarket.
It was inescapable during that summer.
I think it was "TIME" magazine had it on the cover.
The cool thing was, even if you couldn't see the movie,
there was tons and tons of merchandise.
You know, that was one of the first movies
that got seriously marketed with lots of tie-in stuff.
So I had the "Jaws" game.
- You're out.
"Jaws."
It's you against the great white shark
and each other.
From Ideal.
- Everybody wore "Jaws" T-shirts.
Everybody had "Jaws" posters and toys.
There was a parody song released
on top 40 radio called "Mr. Jaws."
And I just-- pardon the expression--
ate that stuff up.
To this day, the scene that still scares me
is when the fisherman's boat gets capsized
and there's that overhead shot.
And he's hanging on the boat and you kind of see
the shark come up underneath him and grab him.
- And the scene when you see the shark for the first time
in "Jaws," when he pop out of the water
and we see Sheriff Brody just floating, stalled.
That was one of the defining moments
for shark movies for me.
- Run down and chum some of this shit.
- That's another one that still gets me
every time I watch it.
It's those classic moments that just still work,
no matter how many times you've seen the film.
- I remember seeing "Jaws" and thinking how cool it was
and how phony the shark was. [laughing]
You know, after seeing the real things,
but how great the cast was and what a great film it was.
And then I got worried,
as a lot of people who know sharks went, uh-oh.
So if you make this the great villains,
then A, they're gonna kill them.
And B, people are gonna be scared of them, and so--
which is exactly what happened.
- We were absolutely thrilled with the success
of the book and the movie "Jaws."
But we were just horrified that people somehow
felt that this was a license to go out
and kill every shark they could.
There were more shark tournaments that were started
to go out and kill sharks.
- Around the time when the movie "Jaws" came out,
you can see that shark landings
really, really skyrocketed,
specifically around that time.
So specifically shark landings around the United States.
And that was because of this very effective idea
that people had, unfortunately, that sharks were so dangerous
that it was a safety issue and that they were
actually helping by removing large amounts
of sharks at one time.
- Some species still haven't recovered
from that summer's exploitation.
- One of the very first sharksploitation films
that we see out of the gates right after "Jaws" is
"Mako, Jaws of Death,"
which is a William Grefé feature.
It's an interesting film in that it does use real sharks.
And the actors in the film are actually
swimming with real sharks.
- I found out later that, I think,
some of the sharks had had their teeth removed,
which is kind of dubious.
And I don't know how I feel about that.
But it is a very entertaining movie.
I'm also amused by the fact that it's referred to
sometimes as "Mako, The Jaws of Death,"
though I've never seen a print of the movie
or an ad or a poster for it
saying, "Mako, The Jaws of Death."
And the sharks aren't makos.
There are no mako sharks anywhere in that film.
- Unfortunately, some of the tales coming out
of "Mako, Jaws of Death" is that the sharks
were not treated very well during the filming at all.
Some of them were killed, actually, for the filming.
But what's unusual about it
is one of the very few films
that come out post-"Jaws"
that is actually about showing compassion to sharks.
The movie itself is about this man
who is trying to preserve sharks
and is telepathically connected to them.
But at the same time, you find out
that some of the filming procedures
they were doing to get these shots
are really damn horrific.
- Another shark movie that is not afraid
of killing any real sharks
is "Sharks' Treasure" from 1975,
in which men go on an underwater treasure hunt
and they have to kill sharks in order to stay alive.
- And most of the trailer is sharks getting killed,
and really getting killed,
like getting hit with spears and bang sticks.
And even at the time, I'm like,
they're killing sharks on camera for this movie.
"Tintorera" was another one
that I caught up with later on.
That's like combining sharks and sexploitation.
You know, it's lots of naked people, you know,
and shark attacks.
And that's a great example
of exploitation at its finest.
[woman screaming]
[dramatic music]
- I remember "Shark Kill," which is a TV movie.
I think that was the first kind of "Jaws" knockoff
that made it to market.
- They played it up like it was "Jaws,"
but it's about these two guys that go out to hunt a shark.
As a kid, it made me wonder, is this what "Jaws" was?
But it clearly wasn't.
- And I remember all the other TV spin-offs.
Like Sheriff Lobo encountered the shark.
Like, all the Universal TV series
would have their characters
encounter the shark from "Jaws."
- "The Hardy Boys" had a shark episode.
"The Bionic Woman" had a shark episode.
There's a show called "Matt Houston"
that had a shark episode.
Sharks were everywhere.
- There was Jabberjaw, you know,
the Scooby-Doo rip-off of the talking shark.
There was Misterjaw
that was on "The Pink Panther."
And then I'll always remember, they had the episode where
the Six Million Dollar Man fights a killer shark.
- When he's holding the shark and shaking it,
it's the nurse shark,
which is not a dangerous shark.
But when they're showing the shark swimming away,
that's a sand tiger.
Now, a sand tiger, doing that too?
I think you'd be pretty stupid to grab it
and do the same thing as you do with a nurse shark.
- And then, of course, you know,
the most infamous example is the jump the shark episode
of "Happy Days."
It has coined the idiom jumping the shark,
which is a term which means that something has become
so successful that there's an inevitable point
where that success begins to sour.
That moment is the moment that it jumps the shark.
- There he goes!
- I mean, Fonzie jumping the shark
was the world going,
"Yeah, it's just infecting everything."
Even Land Shark on "SNL,"
you know, you hear the...
♪ Dun-dun, dun-dun
[woman screams]
[laughter]
It's like, already it's a bit.
It's a joke.
We know what's going on.
There was--every comedy
had a shark spoof
where they would do the...
♪ Bum-bum, bum-bum
♪
- "Caddyshack" with the Baby Ruth bar.
One of the "Police Academy" movies.
One of the "Clerks" movies.
- ♪ Dun-nun, dun-nun Salsa shark!
We're gonna need a bigger boat.
- And not only that, it rippled into, like,
movies like "Tremors" and so many others.
- It also changed and actually introduced,
like, a recipe for shark movies and for disaster animal movies,
animal attack movies.
- One of the kind of most unassuming
sharksploitation movies didn't even take place in the water.
And that is "Grizzly."
- Grizzly uses almost the exact same script of "Jaws."
- It uses a lot of the same filming style,
where it's POVs of it watching people from a distance.
It has a very similar tone to it.
And they actually used it in the marketing campaign
as well, where it was something like,
"Jaws" but on land.
Like, it literally states that it is taken from "Jaws."
- Another one that was kind of
a "Jaws" on land thing was "The Car."
You know, it's basically a predator of sorts,
you know, terrorizing a town, from Universal.
- And this car just starts riding around,
picking people off.
And somehow the car feels just like "Jaws."
- In "Jaws,"
"Jaws" kills a kid, the little Kintner boy.
In "Tentacles," they're gonna outdo "Jaws."
They kill a baby in a baby carriage.
The tentacle pulls the baby underwater, kills the baby.
- Billy!
- Two years after "Jaws" comes out, we get "Orca."
This is Dino De Laurentiis
making a ridiculously elegantly well-done
exploitation film.
- "Orca" was another one that was kind of omnipresent.
The poster, I think, was on the back
of every single Marvel comic book
that came out in the summer of '77.
So it's a big event film, you know,
even though it's obviously just ripping off "Jaws."
- So the way that "Orca" is set up,
it does this interesting thing
where it puts the audience on the side of the orca
from the very get-go,
because we start with the killer shark
kind of going through the water,
and we get the feeling that that killer shark
is about to eat somebody.
And we think, okay, it's like "Jaws."
We're gonna be looking at these killer sharks.
- You think sharks are scary?
What's bigger and faster?
A killer whale.
Orca shoots like a missile and hits the shark,
and the shark goes, wham, out of the air.
And Orca just kills the shark because it wants to.
- Jesus, what did that?
- I think, out of all the "Jaws" rip-offs,
it is probably the best crafted.
[suspenseful music]
- Roger Corman really had an eye for trends.
And he knew, in the '70s, that it was a good idea
to make "Jaws" rip-offs.
- "Piranha" was a reaction to "Jaws."
We felt, all right, they've gone up above us.
We've got to raise our level a little bit.
- How could you not be aware
you were making a "Jaws" rip-off?
I mean, it's a "Jaws" rip-off.
I mean, obviously nobody would be making this movie
if it wasn't for the fact that there had been
a big hit movie that took place
underwater with a monster.
And so it was--we were so alert to the fact that it was
a "Jaws" rip-off that the opening titles of the movie
have the heroine playing a "Jaws" video game,
as if to say, we get it.
Just forget it. We know it.
We know it's a rip-off. You know.
We know that you know.
So just forget about it and have a good time.
- We shot the "Piranha" in the USC swimming pool.
And we had some fake blood and one thing and another.
And it sort of spread throughout the swimming pool.
And SC was not happy with what we had done.
- Whatever it is that we did caused
a fungus to grow that ate away at the pool
and started to eat--
literally eat-- the paint off the pool.
And so no one could figure out what it was.
We had to fly scientists down from Sacramento
to figure out what this creature that we created was.
And they didn't know.
They just said, we have to just kill it
because we can't let it get out of the swimming pool.
I mean, it was almost a better story
than the movie we were making.
- They brought "Piranha" up to a level
where we did rather well.
We still couldn't and never will compete with "Jaws,"
but we got up a little bit.
- And that basically led to me--
as Roger often said, you know, if you make
two good pictures for me,
you'll never have to work for me again.
And it led to me being offered other aquatic adventures,
such as "Orca 2," "Barracuda."
I can't even remember all these aquatic movies that came out
in the wake of "Jaws," because there was
a tremendous need to imitate the big blockbuster.
- "Alligator" is definitely part of the sharksploitation
subgenre as well, because it's straight up like them saying,
well what else is in the water that can chase people?
Well, alligators.
Basically any time you had a resort owner, politician,
mayor claiming he could not close down the beaches
because it's spring break,
4th of July, Labor Day weekend,
it's a "Jaws" rip-off.
The idea of having the moment where we're all gonna stop
and talk to a scientist about all sharks do
is swim and eat and make baby sharks.
- And make baby sharks.
- Usually they always have the same setup,
where the shark begins hunting.
And then somebody is gonna be like,
"There's nothing out there."
And then one person will be like,
"Oh, no, there's totally something out there,"
until there's a whole bunch of deaths.
And then suddenly everyone has to pay attention to it.
- You have to close the beach.
- And then one very heroic male
is gonna go kill the shark.
♪
- "Great White" or "The Last Shark,"
it was one of the most notorious rip-offs of "Jaws."
- If some of these sharksploitation films
had kind of been winking and nodding at "Jaws,"
this one gives it, like, an outright hug.
- The issue of "Variety" had a three-page spread
for "Great White."
And they had the poster and I'm like, well,
obviously this is a "Jaws" rip-off.
And it's from Italy.
And even then, I knew Italy was like
the province of movie rip-offs.
- Italians were really ripping off anything back then--
"Mad Max," "The Exorcist," "Rambo," "Dawn of the Dead,"
and, of course, "Jaws."
- Universal decided that "Great White"
was a copy of "Jaws" and "Jaws 2."
So there were so many similarities
that they felt they had a pretty good case,
so they took legal action.
And we got cease and desist.
And we couldn't do anything with it anymore.
And they--I think they even confiscated the prints.
So we were dead in the water.
- And I read about that and I'm like,
now I'm never gonna get to see this thing.
And little did I know, I wouldn't even
get to see it on video for years and years and years.
And then I finally got to see it.
And I was like, yeah, they have a case.
This movie is just ridiculously derivative.
It's like, how do they even get away
with this in the first place?
You have James Franciscus as Peter Benton.
And Vic Morrow is a guy, like, trying
to do a Robert Shaw accent.
I'm not sure what it is he's doing there.
- Especially once he's had his taste of human flesh.
- And just scene after scene ripped off
from both "Jaws" and "Jaws 2."
They went at it from every conceivable angle.
- Bruno Mattei was just like, "You know what?"
Let's just do this with "Cruel Jaws."
And he just blatantly rips entire scenes,
no fucks given.
- "Cruel Jaws" steals footage
from "Jaws 1," "Jaws 2,"
"Jaws 3-D," and "The Last Shark."
♪
And then we have "Aatank."
"Aatank" is the Bollywood version of "Jaws."
Actors are singing nearly all the time in the film,
even while they are being eaten by the shark.
When the shark finally does appear,
we only get to see its jaws--
its gigantic "Jaws."
And they are definitely not coming from a real shark.
♪
- If you've seen the movie "Back to the Future Part II,"
you see a scene in the future.
We see the main character, played by Michael J. Fox.
He's standing outside a cinema and you see an advertisement
for "Jaws" Part 19.
I even think it's called,
"This time it's really personal," I think.
It also has a stupid tagline.
- So many people have done sequels
to all types of movies.
But you want to make sure the audience knows
that a sequel is gonna be something different,
something more.
The sequel's gotta just step it up a bit.
Or else, why watch more of the same?
And sometimes it's the title that signals to the viewer,
this is gonna be different-- more, bigger, better.
- "Jaws 2" comes out and tries to make it
a little bit different, but not much.
Somewhere along the lines, it feels like
they got the studio note of, well, it's a sequel,
so we need more shark.
And it's not as effective as you would want it
to be in a lot of the shots.
- We didn't have the luxury, in the second film,
of hiding the shark.
Everybody knew what the shark looked like.
But we wanted him to be a fearsome creature.
And in the opening sequence where we see
the shark for the first time,
where he's chasing the water skier
and the panicky boater throws a can of gasoline,
it explodes, and the shark's face is burned,
that was kind of a calculated move to say,
yes, you think you've seen the shark.
But this is not just the shark, it's like Scarface shark.
You know, this time he's really angry.
- That, of course, sparked, you know,
"just when you thought it was safe to go
back in the water," which is probably
the most famous tagline.
And it's been, you know, parodied
and spun off on ever since.
But it's just become so associated
with the whole franchise.
And it may be one of the things people
most remember about that film.
- The second "Jaws" movie had come out right
around the time of "Piranha."
And for whatever reason, Universal
was very concerned and annoyed that Roger was putting out
his rip-off of "Jaws" the same year
that "Jaws 2" was coming out.
And so they apparently threatened an injunction.
And I discovered much later that Spielberg had stepped in
to Universal and apparently had seen "Piranha"
and said, no, you don't get it.
This is a spoof.
This isn't really a rip-off, although it is a rip-off.
And we basically got away with it, I guess is the phrase.
And because of that, I was offered "Jaws 3, People 0,"
which was a combination production
between The National Lampoon and Universal Pictures.
- I was over at Universal.
My next-door neighbors were Zanuck and Brown,
Dick Zanuck and David Brown.
And he, first thing he said to me, is Dick and I
would love to make a movie with you guys.
So out of the blue, I just started kidding around.
And I said, "Jaws 3, People Nothing."
I said, Peter Benchley walks out
of his house in a bathing suit,
jumps into his pool, and disappears.
And the next thing, we see a fin
floating around in the pool.
I said, I know it's ridiculous.
He's, "No, no, go on."
So I had no idea where I was going, but I went.
And he said, "I love it. I love it.
I'll call you tomorrow. We're gonna make this movie."
As soon as I got the call from David Brown telling me
that the studio is doing the movie, I left my office
and I walked into the editorial office.
I knew who I was looking for.
And I walked over to the two of them.
I said, Tod, you, and I turned to the other,
the first--the guy I was really looking for,
John Hughes.
I said, John, you and Tod are writing this script.
And I handed him the short story.
And then I hired Joe Dante to direct the picture.
- The National Lampoon people wanted to make an R-rated
comedy like "Animal House."
And the more conservative Zanuck and Brown team
wanted to make it PG and have it be a wide release,
family picture.
- First of all, Bo Derek was nude
from the waist up through much of--
a good deal of the picture.
And secondly, that's what we made, was R-rated movies.
The National Lampoon did not make PG movies.
- I guess wiser heads prevailed.
And I think it was, you know, Sid Sheinberg
and maybe Lew Wasserman and certainly Spielberg.
They said, why do you want to take, you know,
a great franchise and mock it?
- I think the project died because they just
couldn't agree on what movie they were making.
And you can't go into a movie with two entities
as powerful as The Lampoon was at that time
and Zanuck and Brown
and have them fighting constantly
through the entire movie.
It's just a bad idea.
And I think they just pulled the plug.
- So they had to choose between me and Spielberg.
And I suspect they made the right choice.
- They were gonna do "Jaws 3, People 0."
So Verna said, "Go talk to Landsburg."
They came back.
I got the directing job.
And they got all excited about doing this 3D "Jaws" movie.
And so that was it.
Then, that's-- my problem started.
- Because it was 3D, there was an awful--
an awful lot of complicated technical requirements
for the filming.
There wasn't much I could do
to write new props or new scenery
or new action, because it had all
been storyboarded very carefully for 3D,
which has its own requirements.
- Let me tell you something about 3D.
Here's our screen proportion.
We're taking 35 millimeter.
So this is your screen proportion.
Now, if it was a snake, you could slide that out
right out into the audience.
But they have a thing called the dorsal fin.
And as soon as the dorsal fin hits the pickup,
it stops.
So that damn dorsal fin kills you on 3D.
I could get the head out a little bit,
but I couldn't get it into the audience.
Oh, I had kids.
There were things in the park.
I had an octopus thing goes out and other things go out.
And of course, the studio, they just throw stuff out.
Wasn't my concept.
My concept for 3D was the depth.
But no, no, no, you gotta throw stuff out.
- I remember from the beginning, like,
you expect it's a 3D "Jaws,"
they're gonna open with something really great.
And the first big 3D effect
is a fish head floating into your face.
- For me, "Jaws 3" is where
"Jaws" becomes an exploitation movie.
It's where "Jaws" literally jumps the shark.
Because it really is trying to do something different
to set itself apart from itself.
- I saw "Jaws 3" too late.
Like I was--you know, "Independence Day"
had been made and all these great VFX movies.
And I think I just saw through all of, like,
the weird shark floating towards the glass,
like, then the glass, like,
mysteriously breaks towards the screen.
And I mean, fuck, it's good, actually,
the more you think about it.
- The shark is moving with the speed
and ferocity of the Goodyear blimp.
And it's the climax of the movie.
It's supposed to go bang, crash,
boom, collapse, broken glass,
water flooding in, everything.
But the shark's approach just takes forever.
You go, "One, one thousand, two, one thousand..."
He's gonna hit the screen any minute.
And it's 3D, so he's--he's--
the shark is coming at the screen.
So the climactic shot of the movie is dog shit.
- When people talk to me about 1, 2, or 3 for various scenes.
But nobody ever mentions 4.
- I mean, the problem with "Jaws, The Revenge"
was it was a joke before it even opened.
Because that tagline, "This time it's personal,"
I don't know who came up with that one.
But again, it made the film kind of a punchline
before it even opened.
- "Jaws, The Revenge" comes out in 1987.
And though I'm sure adults and critics at the time
fucking hated that movie, I loved "Jaws, The Revenge."
Like, it knows what it's doing.
It is the shark that has telepathically
chased the family.
So it functions as a straight-up slasher,
because it is specifically targeting
members of this family and trying
to find ways to get them.
Now, at that point, logic might say,
like, well, just don't go in the water.
Like, if Jason can only kill you in the water,
you just don't go in the water.
- And I remember at a certain point
I was reading the script.
And there was a part where Lorraine Gary
realizes that it's personal,
the shark is coming after her children.
And she's so infuriated that she gets in the ship
and she goes out after the shark.
Now, I said, that's some white people stuff.
Now, I said, what is the plan?
Now, we've seen this big-ass shark
the size of a school bus,
you know, kill up a whole lot of people.
Why is she going in this... [laughing]
What is she doing?
What's the plan? She's gonna poke it?
She's gonna hit it with her--
she's gonna punch it out like Rocky?
What is--does she have a bazooka?
Does she have an army?
What does she got?
- It's a very strange, strange sequel.
I think the TV version, where of course,
I had to pause it where there's this very fake-looking
shark with, like, a toy boat stuck through it
that explodes, that is insanely ridiculous.
I remember the shark roaring like a Godzilla monster a lot.
[shark roaring]
- Everyone blames the end of "Jaws, The Revenge"
for the introduction of the shark roar.
But it happens in "Jaws 3."
There's a scene where the shark is starting to surface.
Its giant jaws--its lips curl back and its mouth opens.
It just belches out this deep, guttural roar.
And it's like, wait, what?
Why is it roaring?
- If you're gonna have a shark, you know,
coming to bite somebody's head clean off
as they're flying through the air,
there has to be a growl.
There has to be.
[shark growling]
- I always put shark roars
in the movies
whenever the shark's out of the water,
because I feel like it adds a lot.
It feels--watching it without any shark sounds
feels really wrong, I think.
[laughs] But I know--
I know sharks don't roar.
But maybe they do. I don't know.
You know, who knows?
- Yeah, sharks growl in movies a lot.
Sharks can't make noises,
so that's not happening in real life.
Sharks can hear pretty well, but they hear
sort of low frequency sounds.
They can hear something splashing over here
or something's thrashing over here.
But sharks do not communicate audibly.
So there's a--Hollywood has a rich tradition
of substituting one animal noise for another.
- When we get to about the mid-'90s,
shark movies weren't in big supply.
- I think once "Jaws, The Revenge" tanked
at the box office, it sort of killed
the sharksploitation genre for a while.
- People was not interested in shark.
They didn't want nature movie.
They want big blockbuster movie.
They wanted sci-fi movies.
If they wanted an animal on screen,
it had to be a dinosaur.
They wanted big, bigger, biggest.
- And then "Deep Blue Sea" came in,
and things just exploded.
- When Renny Harlin made "Deep Blue Sea,"
he had only one aim in mind:
to make the shark movie fun again.
- That was a return to true shark form.
- I believe that came out a little bit after "Anaconda."
So there is this cool thing
of animals from the actual Earth
scary again.
And then the other thing that I liked about it is,
like, it started with this idea of science.
- And it was a cool plot, because it was
legitimizing it.
It was suddenly back what "Jaws" did,
where it was feeding you science and using it
to make the movie seem legit.
"Wait, sharks can't get Alzheimer's?
"Sharks don't get cancer?
"Well, that's kind of crazy.
Cool premise for a movie."
- Sharks never get cancer or go blind
or show any loss of brain activity as they age,
unlike some people I know.
- Sharks absolutely get cancer.
The first documented case of shark cancer
was in the 1860s,
so it's not a new thing.
Sharks are the subject of some actual biomedical research.
Their healing abilities, in particular,
are really remarkable,
and the Department of Defense is interested in that
to help wounded soldiers.
And there are some diseases that shark physiology
or immune systems are more resistant to,
but sharks absolutely do get cancer.
- These killer sharks were man-made.
So there is this whole point that this is not
how actual sharks would act.
These were like super killer sharks.
- They recognize that gun.
- It's impossible.
Sharks do not swim backwards. They can't.
- So it also made the storyline a lot more digestible.
It kind of put the blame back on humans, which I liked.
- It was funny, because it seemed
like a very B-movie idea.
You know, genetically enhanced sharks attacking people.
And at the time, not many major studio movies
were being made on these kind of B-horror subjects.
They do properly the scene that "Jaws 3-D" did not,
the shattering of the undersea viewing window.
Because there's a scene where the shark throws
Stellan Skarsgard against the glass,
and it cracks.
And while I was watching that, I'm like,
someone on here must have decided,
you know, "We wanted to see
"that scene in 'Jaws 3-D' done right,
so let's do it here."
- The practical effects
in "Deep Blue Sea" are phenomenal.
And the CG effects-- I love it.
I think in the commentary, Renny is like,
"I challenge you to tell the difference."
I'm like, "Renny, that one, that one,
that one, that one, that one."
The CG is absolute bullshit in that.
You know, sorry, Renny.
- I don't know if anybody had
big expectation for the movies,
but when the movie came out, it totally exploded again.
And actually, the movie was quite fun also.
Because the ending of the movie
was quite different from normal American movie,
because we have the Black guy surviving,
we have the white girl dying.
So it was quite different from the normal recipe
from Hollywood.
And in the movie, you had a big name.
You had Samuel L. Jackson.
And he was seen as one of the big parts,
and making this very inspirational speech,
the big speech, talking about how
they've got to get together and save the day.
And in the middle of the scene--spoiler alert--
a shark jumps up and just eat him
right in front of the camera.
And everybody who watched the movie for the first time
was just, "What? What's happening?"
- So shocking and so surprising.
And I think that also kicked off a competition
among the makers of sharksploitation movies
to have the most outlandish deaths.
It wasn't just about timing.
It was about, how stupid and crazy can these deaths be?
[man yelling]
[crunching]
I mean, really, you could almost trace it
all the way back to "Jaws 3."
Because it was in 3D, I think they felt compelled
to amplify the deaths and make them even crazier
than we've seen before.
- There's a scene which haunts me, you know,
where there's a shark hunter.
And he goes toe--
goes one on one with the shark and gets eaten.
But they cut to inside of the shark
with him getting eaten.
You know, the jaws are opening and closing,
and he's, like, fighting for his life.
And just the sound effects and the way
he's fighting for his life, trying to get out,
is really disturbing.
- There's another great death
in a movie called "Atomic Shark"
where this kid is on the beach,
buried up to his neck in sand.
And this shark just comes riding up on the beach.
And the kid just explodes, because the shark is atomic.
You see a lot of deaths like this
in the Nu Image movies.
They made "Shark Zone,"
"Raging Sharks," "Sharks in Venice."
And let's not forget "Shark Attack 3: Megalodon."
- Nothing could have prepared me for this movie,
because this was truly the triumph
of just how fucking bonkers you can get.
- "Shark Attack 3" just goes completely for broke.
I think at that point, it was that point
in a franchise where it's like,
"We know we have a built-in audience.
Let's just go crazy."
- But what "Shark Attack 3: Megalodon"
has become known for is the greatest line
in all of cinema.
Because in "Shark Attack 3: Megalodon,"
we still have the same setup of the guy
who thinks there may be something
out there, killing people,
but in this time, we have
the sexy scientist who is there.
And she's trying to, you know, give him the whole primer
on sharks and what could and couldn't be.
And they've had
a very professional relationship
up to this point.
- So we're at the end of a long shooting day.
And we have the camera on a crane
and we've done this shot.
And it's--and everything's happened.
And we're getting ready to wrap.
And John comes up to me and says,
"Can we do another one?
I'd like to say something funny to Jenny."
I said, "Sure. Everybody back to one."
So we have a big crane shot overlooking the harbor.
And we come down on them and the two shot.
And the other guy drives off.
"See you tomorrow morning."
- I'm exhausted.
- Yeah, me too.
But you know, I'm really wired.
What do you say I take you home and eat your pussy?
- I fell out of my directing chair.
I couldn't stop laughing.
I could not stop laughing.
And nobody didn't break character.
Just said it.
And she was before.
And she was like so.
And then we cut.
It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.
And I made the editor put it in the film
because every time I saw it in the film,
I fell off the chair laughing.
I just thought it was fantastic.
And I said to myself,
"I'm going to leave this in the film
until a producer tells me to take it out."
- I came on to Syfy pretty much
right after the channel launched.
I was originally the head of acquisitions.
Syfy was new,
and we didn't have a whole lot of originals,
almost no originals.
And my job was to fill the schedule.
And I realized that, well, I can't fill
the schedule 52 weeks a year every Saturday night.
I would love to have one of these,
but there's just not enough good ones to buy
and not enough available.
So I said, "Well, if we can't buy them,
maybe we should make them."
We started with one as an experiment.
And it worked.
So after that, we said, "Oh, let's try a few more."
Management liked the ratings.
They liked what we were doing.
"Oh, try another four."
And after that, "Try a few more."
All of a sudden, we were doing 24 movies a year.
A few years later, we were actually doing 36 a year.
We were doing three a month, which was incredible.
It was crazy.
When we first started doing these movies,
we didn't go for the big, over-the-top titles.
But then we slowly started getting into titles
that were a little bit more over the top.
And you know, we have these titles
that grabbed people's attention.
And then the press started talking about these movies.
And then the audience realized,
"Oh, these guys are having a blast.
These guys are just having fun."
- These movies are made off titles.
The network just, like, looks at the movies,
and they're like, "Okay, we like Sharkacaine
and we like Mega Shark."
And let's see some rough outlines.
And then it's like a paragraph.
And they read it. They're like, "Mm,
let's do sort of something like this instead."
And then they, like, see a treatment.
And then they're like, "We like the treatment,
but how about instead of this, we do this?"
- I've done pictures for them before, yeah.
And their process is basically, you know,
"Bring us ten ideas and just throw them around."
And they may do none of the ten,
but they may do, like, the space aliens
from the first movie you did
and then this giant crustacean
from the second movie you had an idea.
And we'll put those together
so it's giant crustaceans from space.
- And then they approve the script.
So it's this really backwards process
from what filmmaking normally is,
where there's, like, a script,
and you have this script, and that's the story,
and then you get that, like, financed,
and it goes through all the, you know, rigmarole
that a movie normally does.
These are literally just a name.
[laughs] And that's the-- that's the selling point.
Like that's the--that's what the movie is at its core.
- And when you mix genres, you actually come up
with movies that really work.
You don't have to stick to the exact same genre.
You want to take something people love, sharks,
and then expand it.
- And the Asylum really rode that whole trend.
- We started off in arthouse movies.
And then from there, we did horror films.
We were known for-- as a B-horror film,
you know, slasher movie place.
And then we were known to a big segment
as mockbusters.
- We've sort of got a reputation for making
what the "New York Post" dubbed mockbusters,
where we make movies that are similar in theme and concept
to big studio releases.
- It's our own genre.
We took over that, you know, monocle, and we--
it's something that we embraced.
And we've been enjoying it ever since.
We were a young company that had its own genre.
- Mtv.com--I don't know if they're still around anymore,
but they had contacted me and said,
"Hey, can you give us an exclusive on a trailer?"
And we said yes.
And it went crazy:
millions, millions of hits.
And that was our first taste of a viral success
of one of the films.
We were just trying to make a Godzilla.
You know, it was giant creatures.
And that was one of the things that the Japanese,
not surprisingly, you know, really insisted upon.
It's gotta be giant.
And you know, you really have to be creative in terms
of, you know, what are you gonna do with a giant shark?
Well, of course, you're gonna take down a jetliner.
- Holy shit.
[dramatic music]
[woman screaming]
- The fact that a shark would jump
all the way up and take out a jet,
to me, just was ridiculous.
And I fought to not even have that shot in the movie
and not even do it.
And it turned out to be, I guess,
one of the most iconic parts of "Mega Shark."
- That launched some more orders
for more shark or shark hybrid movies.
- And you see a lot of integration.
It's not a shark movie anymore.
You take the shark as an animal and then take something else.
And then you combine it to make an even more crazy movie.
Some of the most well-known is where
you take, of course, a shark and combine it with a man.
So you have a Sharkman.
But you also see when you combine two animals.
The most well-known is perhaps the movie called "Sharktopus."
- I said to Roger, "Roger, I've got a movie
I want you to make for us called 'Sharktopus.'"
And Roger Corman is on the other end of the line.
I hear him pause.
He takes a breath. And he goes,
"Tom, I have this theory
"that you can take the audience to a point,
"but you can't take them beyond that point.
"You can only take the audience so far,
and I think that 'Sharktopus' goes too far."
I said, "That's okay, Roger.
"We'll find another film with you.
"I love working with you.
"I want to work with you on something else.
I'll just call the Asylum."
And I knew by saying that,
that was gonna kind of get him.
I hear him take a deep breath on the other side.
He's like, "Well, let's not be too hasty.
I think I can find a way to make 'Sharktopus' work."
- And not only you're combining two animals,
you're also taking the shark
out of its normal environment, the sea,
and taking it somewhere else.
- You could be standing on a street corner
and the shark can come out and get you.
Because that's-- that's the concept now.
I mean, the logic is, there's no logic.
- We have movies like "Ghost Shark."
- That movie was so special.
That was like a haunted shark
that would come after you in bodies of water.
And then the best part was that,
towards the end of the movie,
the bodies of water got more and more, like, nuanced.
[laughing] Like-- like, I think it came out
of, like, sink water,
steam from a bath.
- Or you know, if it's raining,
God forbid, the shark can swim through the air.
There's, like, a bikini car wash,
and a girl gets, like, pulled into a bucket.
- Drinking water might be dangerous.
A pool could be dangerous.
A Slip 'N Slide can be dangerous.
I usually had a rule in most of the movies
that, you know, adults and teens,
but not kids, would become victims.
But in this one, the director really fought
for that gag, which he just felt
was gonna be a great gag.
I was like, "Okay, let's try it and see if it works."
And people love that scene.
- So that's quite fun
to see how they're taking the shark
away from its normal environment
and then put it in somewhere else.
You also have movies like "Nightmare Shark,"
where the shark is quite like
"Nightmare on Elm Street."
We take the shark into people's dreams.
- For the shark TV movies for the Syfy Channel,
there's a very specific shark formula.
So they are movies that play out in eight acts
with seven commercial breaks.
And you're required to have, in each act,
a major gag and a minor gag.
So a major gag is one where you have to show the shark.
And then a minor gag would be like, you know,
a shark POV looking at someone out of the water
and then they go, "Aah!"
And then, like, blood splashes.
[laughs] Just kind of implying it.
- One of the things for the shark movies,
certainly for the low-budget ones,
what you try to do is keep it, you know,
we're either underwater
or they're doing something crazy
flying through space.
So we did shark swimming through the sand.
It's like, well, what else can we do?
The sand shark was brown.
And if I just negatived all the textures,
it became blue and looked icy.
And we're like...[gasps] A shark in the snow!
- The sort of secret to these--
like, the, like, climax moments,
the action moments that try to show the shark,
like, in three different ways.
And so, like, underwater it jumps out.
Over water, slow-mo.
And then, like, right-- looking from
where you see it, like, coming right at her.
And then, like, cut to a wide,
and it's, like, this giant, crazy shark.
And she just shoots it right in the mouth
and it flies into the air and just explodes
in, like, gore and fireworks.
And then the whole town claps.
♪
- The scene where the shark comes out of the water--
that was in the original script.
That was always there.
That was a part, you know, of the six-headed shark.
Like, what can we do with the shark,
you know, that's different,
that hasn't been done in the other shark movies?
Originally, I wanted it to walk.
Like, I did an animation, almost like fingers.
And I think they thought that was too funny.
You know, it's like a hand.
And so it's--now it's flat
and it's kind of, like, pushing itself.
It's still hilarious.
I'm like, what's the difference, you know?
- The visual effects of the sharks came in,
and they're adorable.
And they're still in there as the most adorable things
you've ever seen.
I was like, "Okay, well, it's not gonna be
the scariest of all the shark attacks."
- The way it works is, we don't pitch our buyers,
really, what we're doing.
I mean, they tell us what they want.
So they're much more in tune with what the audience wants
and what they need.
And so we're just there,
as any good drug dealer would be,
to supply them with the drugs,
in this case, sharks.
- And we had pitched a movie
that we were calling "Shark Storm."
- And they said,
"Well, interesting that you sent us that.
"We actually have a pitch called 'Sharknado.'
"And if you can sort of mix what you're doing,
"which is sharks in a tornado, with that,
let's make the movie together."
But finding a director, it was pass, pass, pass.
- Look, if I'm gonna make a movie
and it's gonna destroy my career,
it has to be "Sharknado."
Because I'm just gonna go down with the flaming sharks
and make the most insane movie we can.
- We put together all these pieces
and "Sharknado" starts coming together.
And it starts being developed.
- Once we got the tone right, it's
how do you do the things
that are asked of this movie?
I mean, even on--
it was a little bit bigger budget than we normally have,
but it's still a film called "Sharknado."
And it's a film that floods, you know, a house.
And there are a lot of production challenges
to the film.
- Because of the limitations,
there's an energy of desperation in making it
where you're using your limitations
and what you don't have
or what didn't show up or the problems.
And you're just going, "Okay, let's do this
and let's do that."
And so instead of being so precise
and, you know, animatic-ed out to death
and, you know, everything is so precise,
it just has this energy of the moment.
- It's, you know, cut to this stock shot,
then an actual shot from the movie,
and then the visual effect.
And really was massaged over time to somehow be coherent.
- The whole movie is just, you know,
messed up and crazy and wild.
And it just doesn't stop, from the beginning to end.
- "Sharknado" really checks all the boxes,
I think, not just for the network requirements
and for, like, the genre, but, like, for the audience.
You know, it's just always delivering on what you--
on what you expect
out of something called "Sharknado."
- I remember watching the film for the first time,
like all together, before anybody else
was gonna see it, just to see if it was working.
And after it was over, it was like,
we were laughing and making fun of it and all that stuff.
And at the end, I go, "This is the most insane movie,
I think, that's ever gonna air on Syfy."
- We had no expectations
because, quite frankly,
we'd made "Sharknado" a dozen times before this.
- We were doing, you know,
two or three of these movies a month.
So you never know which ones are going to take off
and which ones aren't.
And the whole Twitter thing was kind of new at the time.
It wasn't brand new, but it was kind of new.
And I remember I was at home, watching the movie
with my wife and kids.
And all of a sudden, I get a text
from someone at work saying, "Go to Twitter right now.
Go to Twitter."
- I did look at Twitter, you know,
the night that it premiered.
And it just goes on and on.
And it just keeps refreshing.
And the feed just-- I can't keep up with it.
- A couple of celebrities and comedians
did the first couple of tweets about it.
And they had a lot of followers.
And then the snowball just started rolling.
- And I remember going to bed that night,
probably about two hours later, thinking our lives
have changed.
- And then this juggernaut of "Sharknado"
just like plowed through everything.
- "Sharknado."
- It's called "Sharknado."
- There's a Sharknado warning.
- At its peak, more than 5,000 #Sharknado.
- "Sharknado" caught kind of a wave
on the Internet
of people who were praising it
and also people who were laughing at it.
And it's the old statement, any publicity is good,
whether they praise your picture or not.
- We could have done this a thousand different ways,
and the outcome would have been
a thousand different, you know, outcomes.
The fact that, as I've said, no plane crashes happened
on that day when it was released
made us a little bit more newsworthy.
But why we were newsworthy the next day,
and the next day, and the next day?
I mean, literally, it was a news story
for a week on local press and national press.
It defied logic and expectation, certainly,
the success and how it was received and how it was loved.
- It was a great feeling that we did
this little, tiny film that the fans discovered
and it became what it was.
- For Sharknado, tons of, like, sharky nerd people
like me that are also actually scientists,
they low-key did data on "Sharknado"
and then they're, like, putting up
on different social media platforms
you know, like Twitter, Facebook,
of, like, a graph that they did from "Sharknado."
It got people like me who just love bad movies
like, a little bit further down the rabbit hole
of the actual science.
Because that's--you know,
like, social media is where both of these people
find each other.
- I think that's the beauty of it.
We got to make something.
They trusted me,
even though I was absolutely insane,
making an insane little film.
And they gave me a lot of rope to hang myself with.
And we ended up with a movie
that somehow spawned six films.
And it's its own little unique universe.
- After "Sharknado," nobody looked back.
You see the shark movies just popping out
with more and more stupid movies,
more and more lousy CGI--
quick made movies, but fun movies.
- The sharksploitation genre, budget-wise,
really breaks down into three tiers.
You have the studio-level sharksploitation movies.
Then you have the second tier,
which are like the Syfy Channel Original movies.
But then, below that, you have the micro-budget tier,
which consists of movies like "Sharkula"
or "Sharkenstein."
Oh, and let's not forget "Ouija Shark."
- Mystic shield.
- You're taking the shark sort of milieu,
and you're adding a lot of extravagant things to it,
idea-wise--sharks that fly, sharks that can be on land.
You really can throw any genre or trapping at it
and kind of expand upon just the shark being in the water.
- I can watch a bad shark movie with a joy.
If I can feel the heartbeat behind the director,
then it doesn't matter that the effects are poor
or that the extras can't act, or that light is not right,
and the CGI is crappy.
But if you take heart into it, I actually like it.
- Some of the shark movies that I've directed
would be "Sharkenstein,"
"Land Shark," "Amityville Island,"
"Shark Encounters of the Third Kind,"
"Virus Shark," "Noah's Shark,"
"Jurassic Shark 2" and "3,"
"Sharkula," and "Doll Shark," just to name a few.
- We had had a great mix of everything.
We had had the Jawsploitation.
We'd had the sci-fi films.
We'd had everything in between.
And then you have the more realistic,
if you were actually scuba diving and left
or you're a swimmer who's stranded for whatever reason.
- There's one called "The Reef,"
which was done by a filmmaker
named Andrew Traucki,
who had done "Black Water," where he had composited.
Instead of doing digitally created crocodiles,
he shot the real thing and just digitally composited
them in with the actors.
And it was really effective.
So the obvious next step was to do that
with the great white shark.
And it's a really solid little film.
- In both "The Reef" and "The Reef: Stalked,"
I've used, as much as possible, real sharks.
I think it really pays off in spades
in terms of your belief in the situation.
So that's my approach. It's all about suspense.
And, you know, a lot of that in a shark film is,
where is that fin?
Like, you know, you show that fin and then it's gone.
And that, to me, is a lot scarier
than constantly seeing the shark and CGI sharks
and all that sort of stuff.
- I just liked what he did with such little.
The way that he played the tension of the shark
and then not really seeing the shark,
I just really bought it.
You know, 'cause I bought the shark
and I bought the tension.
And so that one really kind of affected me.
- "The Reef" was based on a true story.
It happened in Australia in the '80s,
about a boat that went down.
And in my version, it's about four friends
who--they're gonna deliver a boat to Indonesia
and, unfortunately, hit a piece of reef,
and the boat sinks.
And then they're left with this terrible dilemma
as to whether they're gonna stay on the sinking boat
or swim for land.
And some of them decide to swim,
and one of them decides to stay on the boat.
And yeah, so unfortunately, those that decided to swim,
a big shark starts to come after them
and picks them off one by one.
When you're writing something,
you're always looking at references
and drawing off things to get inspiration.
I think a great inspiration for this, both my--
really in my entire style of working,
has been "Open Water," in the sense
that it's very real but it also was low-budget
and could be done.
- "Open Water" is probably the best shark movie
to come out, you know, maybe since "Jaws."
You know, and it took a whole different approach.
We were kind of into the whole
"Blair Witch" era of sort of--
I hate to use this term, but kind of handmade horror films,
which sounds negative.
But it's like people just going out
with, like, a camera and a few actors
and taking advantage
of, you know, the new opportunities
that digital filmmaking allowed
and not having a big crew
and just going out there and making a little movie
in kind of a hostile environment.
Instead of the woods for "Blair Witch,"
you take these characters out into the open ocean.
- I'd been a diver for a long time.
I love diving with sharks and all these things.
And I got newsletters from dive magazines.
And a story had come out about a couple that were left at sea
in Australia off the Great Barrier Reef,
that they had gone off on one of these
what we call cattle boats,
because there's, like, 100 people.
And they take them out in the reef,
and everyone goes in,
and they do the head count.
And these people--they missed them on the head count.
And the boat left them in the middle of the ocean.
To me, was the most horrifying thing that could happen.
What hit me emotionally was, it could happen to me.
Like, what was that like?
Like, oh, my-- it just taunted me.
Like, it could keep me up.
And like, oh, my God, how could that happen?
Just when you go on vacation,
you just assume you're gonna be okay,
especially in a situation like that.
This is not extreme-- some kind of extreme sport.
It's the most tourist level of diving there is.
So aesthetically, we wanted it to look
just like how people film their vacations.
Because the secret to the film was--working, in my mind,
was all about point of view.
It was all about putting the audience right there
and knowing what that experience was
and limiting what they can see and do
to what the two lead characters
could see and do.
- The realism of that movie is what is so terrifying.
Because you don't start the movie
being scared of sharks.
I mean, these people have been
scuba diving in this at this point.
You know that there are sharks there,
but that they're not doing anything.
And it's not until these people
have been just bobbing
in the water for hours that the sharks
start getting curious, where they're bumping them.
And then you just see them swimming by.
And it's a more real-to-life progression
of how a shark would actually explore
to decide if you are food or not.
- And of course, the fact that the sharks are real--
that just adds to the whole terror of the experience
of watching that film.
- In every movie, you see sharks underwater.
And they're not--
I never found them scary underwater.
And actually diving with them, they're not.
You know, it's amazing.
Of course, I'm a person who chooses to do that.
But after the dive, on the surface,
what's disconcerting is the tail flapping by or a fin.
And so I wanted to capture that,
which is something I'd never seen before,
which is actually how you'd experience it
if you were in the middle of the ocean
and sharks decided to gather and check you out.
So it was all these factors that came together.
And we said this feels like a good--
this feels like a good combination of things
to do something we think could be kind of different.
[suspenseful music]
♪
- "Open Water" is still small, but it feels
like a bigger film because we see shark movies rise
back up into mainstream movies.
And eventually, we work our way into things
like "47 Meters Down" and "The Shallows"
and even films like "Crawl,"
where suddenly nature attack films
are kind of shifted back into theaters.
And we see sharks existing both in A-market
and in B-market simultaneously.
- I was sharing an apartment with the producer.
And I told him I wanted to do a shark movie.
And I was like, "I have not seen
a good shark movie for ages."
You know, forever, apart from "Jaws."
You know, the pitch was so sharp.
It was like, you know-- it was actually, at the time,
the pitch was four people at the bottom
of the ocean trying to get up.
And people were like, this is great.
And I'm just like, this is, you know, the easiest thing
I'm ever gonna write.
I wrote it, and it just felt like--
you know, it felt like sort of
"I Know What You Did Last Summer,"
but at the bottom of the ocean.
It just felt like, "Oh, God, this is just awful."
And then I was sitting
with my script writing partner, Ernest.
And we watched "Touching the Void."
And I was just like, "Holy shit,
that's what this movie needs to be."
You know, there's that moment in "Touching the Void"
where the guy is down the crevasse
and he can see above and he can't get to it.
So his decision-making process was, "I can't get up to it,
so what I'll do is, I'll go further down into this abyss."
And I was like, what kind of fucking mentality
is happening?
I mean, that saved his life, but I could not imagine
any moment in my life that I would leave the light
to go further into a-- into, like, a crevasse.
And I was just obsessed
with these two crazy characters.
And so that was where "47" then sprung from.
- It was very, like, uncharted territory.
And it was this motley crew in this very small,
quite affordable underwater stage in England--
not one of the big ones.
And it was like pirates making a movie.
We were just learning as we went.
And Johannes did a great job, but I know it's like,
every day, there'd be a new, like,
"Oh, you can only be underwater for four hours"
and all this stuff that you just didn't expect
or didn't know about.
- You know, I'm a diver, and I wanted it to look
real, rather than the tank.
So we--I think we did what nobody else has done before.
We had trucks of broccoli coming in every day.
And the interns would be mincing up the broccoli,
and we'd have special divers putting out the broccoli
before we were filming
so the light catches the broccoli.
And even in a small tank, you have a current.
And you see the sediment sort of flow
backwards and forwards.
And it gives it a completely different look,
that unique look.
And then we put milk in the tank
so it really felt like when I go diving.
It really felt like that.
But the problem was,
it was the hottest summer
we had ever had in England.
It was like a super hot summer.
- And the sun was just beaming down on us
inside this tank,
because it was like a canvas tank
as opposed to, like, a brick or cement tank.
And so we're just getting cooked.
- You've got broccoli.
You've got milk.
You've got--when you shoot in the tank,
nobody goes to the loo.
So you've got urine, you've got broccoli,
you've got milk all rotting under this incredible heat.
I remember it clear as a day,
standing there on the side of the tank.
And I just remember thinking, "I don't know
how to make this cage drop."
Everything moves fucking slowly under water.
Not just to get stuff to happen, but when it does.
Like the cage was--you know, I wanted it to do that.
And it's like, like that.
And basically, we just had it go
as fast as it could one way,
the girls go the other,
and then the camera go another.
And it just looks tumbling.
I think we're now in a world--
like, I love the sharks in "47."
Like, that shot where it comes out at the end
and grabs her foot--I remember when they delivered that.
I was like, "Holy fuck. This is--this is really"--
there's, like, two or three shots in there
where I'm like, "Wow, that's--that's like--
I can touch that."
That's pretty impressive.
- And then you had "The Shallows,"
which was a similar kind of thing done on a bigger budget.
But again, it's like a survival thing.
You know, one young woman stuck in the sea.
It's a great premise. She's stuck on a rock,
and the beach is right over there,
but there's a big shark kind of circling around
that's gonna make that impossible.
And that was another really fun one.
- There's something really terrifying
about the idea of being trapped on a buoy with nowhere to go.
And the tide comes in, and you know
there's a 30-foot shark
lurking around underneath you,
ready to just tear you to pieces.
- When you watch that film, it's a great movie.
But the concept--you gotta give credit to the filmmakers
and the actress.
Because once that film starts,
it literally is just her.
And that's--I mean, for her to carry that whole movie,
hold that tension for that long,
was pretty impressive.
- "47 Meters Down" and "The Shallows"
were really successful studio-level pictures.
But they were studio-level pictures
made on a pretty modest budget.
So the natural progression of that,
because they were so successful,
it just made sense to make things even bigger.
And along comes "The Meg."
- A type of shark stronger inside the shark movies
is the way you see the shark not as a normal shark,
but as a prehistoric shark.
A big shark, like a megalodon.
- The megalodon was the largest shark
that ever existed.
It feared nothing.
- The most well-known, of course,
is the movie called "The Meg"
with Jason Statham in the lead role,
where you see a submarine going through
the bottom of the sea and releasing a big shark.
It's coming back to the human
and actually eating everything on its way.
- It goes back to this idea
that we want to believe in the supernatural
and the mysterious.
I think that, especially as technology
and science advances,
we lose a little bit of the mystery,
or we think that we lose some of the mystery
that exists in our world.
And the idea that someone is out there
who could discover this thousands-of-year-old
giant megalodon or prehistoric creature
is really attractive, not only because it allows us
to stake our claim over part of the environment
we might not understand, but because it allows us
to keep that imagination alive.
- I knew that there was such a thing as the megalodon.
I looked it up online.
And I saw families of people standing inside these jaws.
These were huge fucking real sharks
from back in the day.
- What were they saying, six fully-grown men
could be swallowed by the megalodon?
I mean, that's a pretty giant mouth.
[laughs]
- Is that megalodon out there in the sea?
You know, 80% of the sea hasn't been explored.
And every day, you see new creatures popping up.
So perhaps someday, the megalodon
is coming back to us.
- Megalodons went extinct 370 million years ago.
And, in my opinion, I can't imagine
any way whatsoever that there's still any in existence today.
- In the 70s, "Jaws" is what, like, irked everybody,
because it was confusing people
on what sharks were really like.
And I think nowadays, it's that megalodon mockumentary
that really irks scientists.
Because it's the idea of being--of people being
tricked into thinking that there's something out there
that's not really there and that
it could encourage current negative behavior.
It did what "Jaws" did by accident.
"Jaws" accidentally convinced people something was real.
And "The Meg" mockumentary was trying
to get people to think
that something that wasn't real could be.
- They aired this show,
"Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives,"
that claimed that megalodon is not extinct
and it's still out there and it's an active threat
to you and your family,
and scientists know that,
and the government knows that,
and they're lying to you.
Don't trust scientists and the government.
I have spoken to thousands of people all over the world,
giving these public talks
about sharks and shark conservation.
I can't remember the last time someone
didn't ask me about megalodon.
This is--Shark Week just absolutely broke
public trust with this.
- I think that a lot of shark scientists
and deep-sea scientists get really angry with something
like "The Meg" is because of all this intrigue and people
getting passionate and maybe wanting
to do something with that.
And people like that are really important,
especially for ocean conservation,
so it's like you're seeing this person
that you need on your team for real ocean stuff,
and you're like, "No, don't go chase mermaids.
"We need you to help with like, the manatees
"that are actually stuck right now
in some sort of climate change thing in Florida."
Or like, "No, we need you for the vaquita.
The vaquita is, like, a real animal."
And instead it's like, "No, we need to get a mission
to, like, find the meg that's in the deep sea,"
which, it's not. It's just gone.
It's extinct. It's super extinct.
Even if something's extinct,
we want to believe it's still around.
That's the appeal of "Jurassic Park,"
right, is that there's this mysterious element
or thing in the world that we might be able
to control or discover.
And we like to discover things.
It's part of humanity.
I think that sharks become monstrous
because they do seem so alien.
Unlike a lot of other predator creatures
that we have in our world, sharks are largely unseen.
Anything that you've seen in a movie
is the tip of the iceberg.
And what's real about sharks in the ocean
almost always is so much cooler.
What exactly steered me into marine biology
was a very specific incident with a great white shark.
And so that was on a fishing boat.
I was about to win the jackpot of the boat,
which is, like, a really big deal.
The jackpot on a fishing boat is the biggest fish.
And it was five days with me and a bunch of dudes.
And so, like, I thought I was gonna have this, like--
like, independent lady moment.
But then they yelled shark.
So a shark came over.
It was a great white.
It took my super large tuna.
It came by just like--I would compare it to, like, Pac-Man.
It didn't look like it had looked in a movie,
where it's like just all "Jaws" and, you know,
moving around a bunch.
Long story short: bring up the fishing line.
And what I have is just a tuna head.
What had just happened to the tuna
was the shark had bitten it so efficiently
that its neurons were still operating.
And so what I was looking at was a head
that was still gasping for air.
And I thought it was the coolest fucking thing
I'd ever see.
Because here this shark had done the thing
that sharks do on TV or movie,
which is they kind of, like, scare you and impress you
at the same time.
And here, the shark had done exactly that,
but without doing all the action
you see in a scary movie.
- The first time I saw a great white,
you know, in the wild for real,
for me, it was as if I had just met Marlon Brando.
That's the way I felt like.
Because, you know, your whole life,
you read about great whites.
You read about sharks.
You watch shark movies.
You watch shark documentaries.
You see "Jaws."
So, like, this creature is built up so much in your mind.
And so to actually see it was like, to me, like, you know,
meeting a Hollywood celebrity.
It was amazing.
- When I spent four days filming sharks
down in South Australia, I was surrounded
by great whites for four days.
And you know, everything I saw of their behavior
was just insanely wonderful.
I love and really do respect sharks.
You know, I live by the sea and I'm a surfer.
And I'm in the sea every second day.
So for me, sharks, it's their domain.
We're just visitors.
They've got every right to do what they do there.
It's not like they're being malicious or horrible.
That's just what a shark does.
If he--you know, occasionally, there's a shark attack,
it's because it thought it could eat you and stay alive.
- We just don't look like anything
that they would want to eat.
If you looked at a table, and you had a hamburger on it,
an onion, a salt shaker, a bowl of flowers,
and a pitcher of water, what are you gonna go for?
You go for the hamburger.
And we're the pitcher of water.
You know, we're just not something
they're gonna eat.
But if we aren't paying attention to what we're doing
and we reach down on the table and we grab the onion,
we might think it's an apple.
And we'd pick it up and take a bite and go, oh.
Spit it out and go, that's the wrong thing.
That's what I think happens most of the time
when people are bitten by sharks.
- Whenever we tend to demonize something--
if that's a human, or an inanimate object,
or an animal--
it's from a lack of understanding.
- Peter Benchley used to say we love our demons.
[chuckles] And sharks represent iconically, I think,
a kind of a demon-y thing.
Sharks are not demons, but they are dangerous.
And when you go into their wild environment--
when you go into any animal's wild environment--
you've gotta respect the rules of that environment.
- We absolutely must have sharks in the ocean.
We need our apex predators,
'cause they keep the balance in the ocean.
And if you don't have them,
the balance gets all out of whack.
It's like having the Serengeti in Africa
without lions.
You've got to have the lions
to keep populations intact
and keep that ecosystem healthy and thriving.
So apex predators, sharks, are absolutely essential.
And there are 500 species.
Don't forget there are others besides great white sharks.
- I call, like, great white sharks,
like, a gateway drug,
but like, they're a gateway shark,
because, for the people that are really interested
in that stuff, it, like, sucks them
into the whole world of it.
There's, like, all these ridiculous shark movies,
and they come up with all these ridiculous ways
to make the sharks scary,
and here's these real sharks
that already do things
that are a great plot for a scary movie.
The ninja lanternshark is jet black--
just very, very, very, very dark black.
And all the lanternsharks are glowing
as an invisibility cloak.
They're glowing just enough to hide their shadows.
So basically, this shark just wants to hide
before it gets you.
When it came to the end of the project,
okay, we know this is a real animal.
We know that we can get this published.
Now we need to give it a name.
At the time of the publication, it was gonna be
the 40th anniversary of "Jaws."
And we thought it'd be really cool to use
this whole concept of the "Jaws" effect
and this obsession with "Jaws."
And then the other cool thing was to name it
after Peter Benchley.
So the common name of the shark
is ninja lanternshark.
And then the scientific name isEtmopterus benchleyi.
The genus isEtmopterus.
And then specifically, it's named after Peter Benchley.
And so the way taxonomic names go is,
if it's named after a male, you add an "I."
So that's why the name is Etmopterus benchleyi.
People would probably think, like,
"Oh, it's the anniversary,
and oh, it's because, you know, 'Jaws' is so cool."
But in my feeling, it was to recognize
all this wonderful work that the Benchley family
has done for ocean work that no one would think about.
- Right after "Jaws" and the huge success,
Peter was asked to do
many National Geographic expeditions,
ABC sportsman expeditions.
And we very quickly began to see
the destruction of the ocean.
We began to see sharks being finned.
So as this happened,
Peter was being interviewed more and more
and said, from his heart,
"There is no way I could write 'Jaws' now,
"because I know too much about the ocean
and about great white sharks and sharks in general."
So we started to work hard at trying
to spread the correct information,
that sharks need to be preserved.
And please, please, please don't think that because "Jaws"
was a novel and the movie is fiction,
that this is somehow real life.
- Peter noticed that I was getting
into conservation work.
And he said, "I want to do something meaningful."
So we made--
I don't know, it's about a dozen films.
We called them the "World of Water Film Series."
And he and I did that for the last part of his life.
And then I got a phone call from Wendy.
And she told me he passed.
And she was crying, I was crying, you know,
and she said, "And you know, Greg, Peter always felt
"the work that he did with you
was the most important work of his life, you know."
And it wasn't, by any means, financially the most important,
nor was it the most popular.
It was just the most meaningful.
- I think Peter would be thrilled to know nowadays
how much interest there is in sharks,
how much research has been done,
that the world understands now
how important sharks are.
And there are many, many environmental groups
working on this issue.
So we've come a long way in almost 50 years
since he wrote "Jaws."
And I hope that within the next ten years,
we really make more progress on protecting sharks,
on marine-protected areas,
and on not overfishing the ocean.
And you know, what happens is, if you protect the ocean,
it has amazing ability to just come back again.
And Peter worked really hard on this all of his life.
And he always said, "I'm gonna use 'Jaws'
"for all it's worth to bring attention to the ocean
and to the issues of conservation."
And so I've continued with that thought in mind.
♪
- After we watched a shark movie,
we also have a responsibility to think
about how sharks are portrayed
and how you are talking about sharks.
Yeah, it's a fun movie.
But the shark is actually not a dangerous animal.
And we have a responsibility to tell that story also.
- I know that in my research--
and I'm sure you've talked to people
whose careers were inspired by seeing "Jurassic Park"
or watching "Jaws."
- I saw Matt Hooper.
They could have put him in a white lab coat
with a pencil holder and notebook,
but instead, he had jeans,
he had a beard, he liked to drink wine,
he told good jokes.
- Arguing with a man who's lining up to be a hot lunch.
- That's why I think a lot of oceanographers
look a bit like me.
That was the effect "Jaws" had on me.
It was--it didn't scare me out of the ocean.
It made me want to be Matt Hooper.
- Over the years, that shark became a character...
- Well, hi.
- That people loved.
- Name's Bruce.
- And people still keep showing "Jaws."
I mean, I saw "Jaws" a couple months ago at the Orpheum.
They had over 1,400 people there
to pay $20 to see this movie
that's been around for 40-some years.
- I think sharksploitation will never die.
I think they will continue to exploit every possible sub,
sub, sub-basement, sublevel genre
of this particular realm of films.
- What I'm seeing now is almost like a renaissance
where there's, like, this really cool potential
to entertain people with science and facts
but make it totally ridiculous at the same time.
- We've made sharks less scary.
Again, you know, it's--
I don't know if we should be respected for that or reviled.
- Just give me that great white,
let me eat my popcorn,
let me see it doing some great white stuff.
- I'm a fan of this exaggerated, campy,
kind of horror sci-fi where it's very implausible,
but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy it.
And I think that's the important thing
with looking at any kind of horror film
or any kind of film that paints a real person or real animal,
like a shark, as being a monster
or being evil in some capacity,
is if we approach it as fun, as an exaggeration,
and not as reality,
I think that we can still appreciate it.
♪
[shark roaring]