Loved your work in Jaws

By Richard Jinman
October 9, 2004

Dead calm ... Open Water's director, Chris Kentis, and star, Blanchard Ryan, who was surrounded by more than 40 sharks during filming.
Photo: Steven Siewert SWS


Performing a scene with a school of hungry sharks as your co-stars requires skills they don't teach at drama school.

"You have to be very still, very calm," said Blanchard Ryan, star of the hit low-budget movie Open Water.

"You can make facial expressions, but you can't splash, yell or scream."

If there was an Oscar for Actor in a Life-Threatening Situation, Ryan would be a shoo-in.

She spent two days in the open ocean with more than 40 bull and grey nurse sharks.

Ryan wore chain mail under her wetsuit, but still felt terrified as the sharks lunged for chunks of tuna being thrown into the water by the filmmakers.

"They banged into me a lot," she said in Sydney yesterday. "You feel a tug on your leg and your heart jumps into your throat."

Open Water is based on the case of the American couple Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who disappeared after their dive boat mistakenly left them on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998.

Shot on digital video, the movie cost just $US120,000 ($164,850), but sparked a bidding war when it screened at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Described as a mixture of Jaws and The Blair Witch Project, the film is set in the Caribbean and tells the story of a fictional couple called Susan (Blanchard) and Daniel (Daniel Travis).

Chris Kentis, writer and director of Open Water, said that he had deliberately distanced his film from real people and events.

"The personal lives of the Lonergans are none of our business and we didn't want to hurt anyone's tourist trade," he said.

"The location was deliberately ambiguous and the characters purposely fictionalised."

Kentis and his producer wife, Laura Lau, shot the film over three years at weekends and on holidays.

He is a fan of Jaws, but insists Open Water is not a shark movie.

"We see it as a relationship movie," he said.

"It's a film about abandonment, being forgotten and put in a place where you have no control."

Kentis is also proud his film portrays shark behaviour accurately.

"We wanted to show them as animals that are part of an ecosystem," he said.


Advertisement Advertisement