The movie was filmed over a 14-week span in Queensland's Whitsunday Islands in the winter of 1987. George Miller directed some sequences himself, including one where Sam Neill's character is tormented in the boat by a shark. This scene ended up being dropped from the final film. The sequence in which John kills Hughie with a flare gun was filmed at the request of Warner Bros seven months after principal photography finished. As written, the film originally ended with Rae setting Hughie adrift on a life raft to ostensibly die at sea; the studio was unhappy with this ambiguity and wanted a definite fate for the film's antagonist.