Dear Rob,

I hope you’re doing fine and everything is great in L.A.

I have some questions from a journalists of ivy online magazine www.ivyworld.de (their motto: “for a better world”). Can you please answer them (or some of them) and send it back to me?

1. How long did it take to produce Sharkwater?
- 5 years and 15 countries.

2. First you wanted to shoot a film just about sharks. That changed why?

When I started out making Sharkwater, it was supposed to be a beautiful underwater movie about sharks, giving people the reality: the anti-jaws that brings people closer to sharks than ever before.
I figured if I could make a film that gave people a new view of sharks, counter to Jaws, then perhaps they’d want to fight for their protection as they would for pandas, elephants and bears.
As you see in the film, everything changed dramatically when we started filming ourselves to keep ourselves out of prison, and the movie evolved into a much larger movie full of corruption, espionage, attempted murder, hospitalizations, mafia and machine guns…
The film grew greatly into a new breed of film, blending a true-life action with a shark film about the survival of humans as a species.

3. Describe the ups and downs of making the film.

The creation of Sharkwater was a series of worst case scenarios. The lowest low was when I was hospitalized for flesh eating disease. The doctors were talking about removing my leg, and we were 3 weeks into shooting a shark film and had no shark footage. Everyone told me I should return home for proper medical care. My girlfriend and parents were upset, my crew was freaking… I had to turn into captain positive to keep people from flying me home… If I went home, the film would have never been finished because it was such a colossal failure that it would have been shelved. The expensive cameras would have been returned to the rental houses, and once freed from the hospital, I wouldn’t have been able to return to South America to film because of the huge financial hole that I was in. This was my one shot at making a difference and my first foray into filmmaking. I couldn’t accept that my effort to make a difference and to get into filmmaking was a failure.
The film also had a huge potential to do good…. To change the way people view sharks so they would fight for their protection, ultimately saving the oceans and humanity from destroying the ecosystems upon which they depend. Knowing this, there was no way I could give up.

Another hugely difficult part of the 5 years and 15 countries that it took to create Sharkwater was convincing people to believe in me, and the project. I started Sharkwater when I was 22 years old. I had no film experience, I’d never shot a video camera, and I had no film allies. I was a total long shot. When I came back from the initial shoot where I tried to make a beautiful underwater shark film, I had no underwater footage, but I had corruption, espionage, mafia chases, machine guns, and hospitalizations. I was also $300,000 in debt. I went to every relevant film festival to pitch the film and gain support to finish Sharkwater. I also had Dengue Fever, West Nile Virus, and Tuberculosis. After a year of this painful process, I was turned down by every broadcaster and distributor. I actually gave up on Sharkwater, and went to shoot a starfish movie for a friend of mine in Australia. Only after I’d been shooting in Australia for a year, having time to heal, reflect and shoot more footage did I realize that I had the missing pieces to Sharkwater. These supposed failures turned Sharkwater into something much greater than it would have been if I succeeded in getting the film on TV a year earlier.

4. Have your life been in danger while shooting the film? Why?

A half dozen times. We were shot at, chased by the mafia, I almost lost my leg to flesh eating disease, I had dengue fever, west Nile virus, and tuberculosis all at the same time. I was also lost, floating in the Pacific ocean for half a day when I surfaced from a dive 2 kilometers from my boat.

Everything going catastrophically wrong during shooting turned out to be a beautiful thing, as all the events became part of the movie. They gave Sharkwater what documentaries so often lack – a story, and a personal narrative. Doc’s often feel like taking medicine… you know you’re in for an ordeal that’s not necessarily pleasant… Its easier for people to come onto the crazy journey of the long shot – the 22 year old kid who’s trying to make a shark film – and come out the other side armed with the info necessary for the world to change.

5. Describe your relationship with Paul Watson.

Paul has become a close friend and ally. There aren’t many people working for the preservation of the oceans, particularly ones that put their life on the line for it. Paul is a hero, and I’m sure we’ll continue to work together.

6. What kind of person is he?

Paul is an eco hero. He’s the most outspoken and radical warrior in the most important battle humans have ever faced. He moves forward unshakably, and will be thought of as a revolutionary for centuries.

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

Every time you see a shark cage on TV, there is someone outside of the cage filming the cage. Shark documentaries mostly misrepresent sharks, making audiences think that they attack every camera, boat and cage in the water. People drag large pieces of fish or bait through the water, just in front of the shark, getting the shark to bite at the bait, eventually bringing the shark close to the camera to get dramatic footage. This is the standard for shark documentaries, and it’s atrocious. We spent 200 days a year outside of cages filming Sharkwater without a problem.

8. How hopeful are you that people will stop killing sharks for their fins?

More than 75% of the people surveyed on the ground in China don’t know that shark fin soup has shark in it because the translation literally means fish wing soup. I believe enough in the compassion of people towards species and future generations of people that awareness will create a huge change.
People can’t see what happens in the oceans, so what is out of sight is out of mind. We waste 54 billion pounds of fish each year while 8 million people die of starvation. 90% of all large predators in the ocean are gone and every fishery will have entirely collapsed by 2048. If the public knew that we depend on the oceans for survival, yet we’re destroying them every day in unprecedented ways, they would take a stand, just as they spoke out for whales and for holes in the ozone layer.

8. Are the sharks still alive when they got cut? And even when they were thrown back into water?

Some sharks are still alive when they are finned. These finned sharks can take days to die when thrown back into the ocean. Finning is a horrible practice that wastes 95% of the animal. It’s like killing an elephant for ivory or a rhino for its horns.

10. If there wouldnt’t be any sharks no more. What kind of consequences would that bring for the oceans?

Sharks sit atop oceanic food chains, controlling the populations of animals below them as they have for over 400 million years. Life on earth depends on life in the sea, which sits below sharks in the food chain. Phytoplankton (tiny plants) are the greatest consumer of carbon dioxide (global warming gas) on earth, turning it into oxygen, providing us with 70% of the oxygen we breathe. Removing sharks is cutting off the head of the most important ecosystem for our own survival. The biggest issue in any global warming debate is life in the oceans that allows life on land to exist, yet it’s never spoken of… all we hear about is industry and carbon footprints.
We know relatively little about the removal of large predators from ecosystems as we’ve traditionally eaten animals at lower levels - the herbivores.
One example is the sea otter, which was hunted virtually to extinction off the west coast of North America for the fur trade. The otter’s food population, sea urchins, exploded in numbers. Those urchins ate all the Pacific kelp (huge seaweed that form an underwater forest). Without the kelp, the Pacific herring (sardine like fish) had no breeding grounds, and without the herring, there were no sharks, sea lions, salmon, tuna, dolphins or whales. The ecosystems collapsed all from removing the sea otter, which as a species has only been shaping ecosystems for 7 million years.
What we’re doing with sharks is removing an animal that has been sitting atop of oceanic ecosystems for over 400 million years, and the ecosystems that will be affected include our own – the very air that we breathe.
So, the worst-case scenario – we cause catastrophic consequences through ecosystems that result in a great number of species’ extinction, including our own.

Best regards,
Rob

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:09 pm and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.