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“You Think You’re Scared of These Creatures, Well, Look Into Our Own Dark Hearts”: Sean Byrne on His Cannes-Premiering Shark Attack Horror Film, Dangerous Animals
Dangerous Animals For most viewers, sharks and horror cinema were permanently conjoined with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws, one of the first wide release summer blockbusters, and one with shocks far more intense than its PG rating would indicate. Today, shark horror has migrated to the small (and vertical) screen, with TikTok’s algorithm serving many of us — me, somewhat inexplicably, included — a never ending gallery of shark attacks, menacing underwater shark approaches and the occasional gliding shark beauty shot.
Australian director Sean Byrne’s Cannes-premiering Dangerous Animals confidently mines these lingering fears and fascinations as it mashes up the shark horror film with the serial killer thriller. Jai Courtney (Suicide Squad) plays Tucker, the one-man proprietor of a tourist-focused shark cave diving business. The victim of a childhood shark attack, he compulsively restages his primal scene by drugging his victims and then, upon their waking, lowering them into shark-infested waters and filming their as their limbs thrash and finally detach from their bodies. Initially, Zephyr (Yellowstone‘s Hassie Harrison) is the sort of traveler he prefers — a single woman living somewhat off the grid and without a network of family and family checking in on her. Of course, there’s more to her and her situation, and the ferocity and intelligence of Zephyr’s resistance is one of the film’s high points. Another is the skillful way that Byrne (The Devil’s Candy) has incorporated acquired 4K footage of real sharks into his action sequences, which are, yes, scary but also — a point he emphasizes in our interview below — quite beautiful, leaning hard into the authoritative visual splendor of these underwater creatures.
After its premiere in Directors Fortnight, Dangerous Animals will be released June 6 from IFC Films.
Filmmaker: Let’s start with the obvious question, which is how did Dangerous Animals become your next film, a decade after The Devil’s Candy?
Byrne: Well, I’d been writing ever since The Devil’s Candy and had options on my scripts. But, as you know, the difficulties of horror, Hollywood and risk aversion — if you’re dealing with original material, and humans hunting other humans, it can be difficult to get [these films] off the ground. So, I was reading at the same time, and, luckily, Dangerous Animals crossed my desk. It’s written by Nick Lepard, who’s a fresh voice, a new screenwriter. As soon as I read it, I thought it was a great merging of the serial killer and shark film sub genres. It’s the first shark film I’ve read that doesn’t actually vilify the sharks. The sharks aren’t just indiscriminate killers. When they turn up, there’s a reason for it, and man is kind of the real monster. Jaws, in a way, and as incredible as it is, had done such as incredible disservice to the sharks. This felt like a way of trying to correct that misconception but still have fun with the sharks at the same time. And there are a couple of scenes in the movie where we go from fear of the shark to showing the majesty of these creatures. What beautiful creatures! It’s like, you think you’re scared of these creatures, well, look into our own dark hearts.
Filmmaker: What has been your own background with or interest in sharks? Have you ever done a cage dive like we see in your movie?
Byrne: No, I haven’t. I wanted to, before we started shooting, but then, of course, with pre-production there wasn’t enough time for it. But, you know, sharks are still on the universal list of fears, I think in the top three. My brother-in-law is obsessed with sharks. We made sure we’ve got real sharks in this movie with a lot of our 4K footage. But I really thought there was an opportunity because, with a couple of exceptions, since Jaws there hasn’t been a lot of great shark films. I thought, well, if we can learn the lessons of Jaws and do something that is character based and and relies on the kind of pure suspense of Jaws — you know, the shark fin is the very definition of suspense. You see it circling above water, which is foreshadowing, and then it dips under the surface, and then you’re waiting for the attack. That’s incredibly strong in in a kind of a horror sense. I did feel like shark films, to a certain extent, had lost their way. [Films] would go underwater, and there would be lots and lots of sharks, and they’d be animated, almost with angry human expressions. So, I wanted to get back to what Jaws did well, and it excited me that, pardon the pun, shark films had become a bit of a sea of mediocrity [while remaining] an incredibly popular sub-genre.
Filmmaker: Tell me a bit more about the lessons you took from Jaws, which was made before the era of CGI. I believe that, famously, they used a real shark and a short actor in a real cage for some of the scenes. But there must be CGI in your film.
Byrne: Yeah, but not much. The only CGI is the [above-water] fins, which are based on real sharks. But every other shark you see in the film, whenever we go under the water, that is 4K footage of real sharks. There’s makos, bull sharks, tiger sharks, and I think a ragged tooth. We would either roto[scope] out the real shark and put it into water that we had shot, or else, for the most part, we would just use the sharks actually in their element, and then through the grade, we would match the water that the characters were in. So, it’s 90% real sharks, and they have imperfections — if you watch closely you’ll see sharks that have gum disease. They have scars from mating and also from humans hunting them. Imperfections are what make us humans, and so I was trying to do with the sharks is show genuine personality, rather than these kind of sleek, slick CGI sharks that we have gotten used to. So, we took those lessons from Jaws – rely on the film and use real sharks as much as possible. But, also, we shot out on the water. The actors, they were protected by a marine life barrier, but they’re really in the water, and they’re really up on that crane and being lowered into the water. The cast and crew dealt with sea sickness – there were no tanks.
Filmmaker: I was going to ask if you used water tanks and some kind of compositing.
Byrne: No, we did it for real. Tanks can be great, but they’re very expensive, and there’s also something quite sterile about them, They can feel like a giant bathtub that has been filled up. And all of those elements you have to fabricate, like the movement of the waves — trying to recreate the elements is hard. I know it was hard on the actors, but I think it really helped performance, and they really enjoyed that challenge. When Jai is out there on the dinghy and the wind and the salt is really whipping through his hair and hitting him in the eye, that sort of stuff is just hard to replicate if you don’t do it for real.
Filmmaker: Did you acquire the 4K shark footage before you shot based on your storyboards or after?
Byrne: It was after, but I storyboarded the whole film, like I always do, so we knew what we were looking for. There are some films that will just go out and shoot sharks for real and then work the narrative around that. But you’ve seen the film, it’s very measured in terms of the camera work. It’s highly designed. We had to find pre-existing 4K shark footage that we knew was going to work with the storyboards. There was always 4K shark footage coming in. It was actually quite tricky, because, I think, the Discovery Channel owns 80% of shark footage that’s out there. The great thing about being prepared is that if you get something that is different than your wish list, but it ends up being better, you can embrace that as well.
Filmmaker: Did you work with a shark researcher or behavioral consultant?
Byrne: We had a shark researcher that that provided all the [4K shark] footage that we used based on storyboards and breakdowns of how we wanted to feature [the sharks] visually. And then there was guidance on, for example, how quickly [sharks move]. The first shark you see is a mako, and they move 70 miles an hour, so [the scene in the film] is very accurate. We didn’t have to fabricate anything [for the underwater footage]. But there were moments – for example, we had [4K footage] of a real tiger shark, and then a [fabricated] tiger fin above the water. It was an exact replica, but it didn’t look real. A tiger shark fin is pretty much perfectly triangular, and it’s a little bit spotted. An audience member sees that and goes, “What’s that?” We have an inbuilt expectation of what a shark fin looks like, and sometimes we had to move away from the reality to do the more generic, or traditional, shark fin. So, there had to be this marriage of movie logic and real-world research. We tried to balance these two things because we never want the official reality to take the audience out of the film.
Filmmaker: How about matching all the shooting days across so much time spent shooting on the water? Were you doing sky replacements or just making it work in the grade?
Byrne: Sometimes it was sky replacements, but just for the same reasons as there are in any other film when you’re dealing with the elements. You want each shot to match, and if it was overcast we sould just try to sure there was blue sky in there so it feels, feels like the summer movie that that it is.
Filmmaker: And what parts of the boat were a build on a stage?
Byrne: The cell, main cabin and galley were builds. The bridge and engine room were for real. Boats are small spaces, and it would have been impossible to get the camera in the main cabin for the big fight sequences. But also with the realities of shooting the exteriors on the water, [you] have to make up time when you’re doing the interiors. [To match] the tugboat that we used, the production designers did a great job of getting the right level of distress when creating the interiors. They feel very much part of the same world.
Filmmaker: Let’s talk a bit about the characters, and particularly your decisions around backstory and motivation. In horror, there’s always that decision about how much or how little to reveal. Hassie Harrison has a few lines of dialogue that sketch the motivations for her to be this loner travelogue. And then Jai’s character, I found it interesting that he’s a horror fan. Initially I imagined he was shooting these videos for some sort of rich collector but, no, he’s shooting them for himself.
Byrne: I think if you’re watching a film and it stops for exposition, it’s literally like an anchor, or dead weight, for the storytelling. Obviously, the screenwriter, director and cast need to know their backstories so then, hopefully, the performances are three dimensional. But I think also, if you tell the audience everything and you close the book on it, it’s like tucking them safely into bed at night, and the terror doesn’t live on. Jai knows exactly what led him to the point of the film where we start watching it — the connection between him being attacked as a child and lack of parental supervision. Rather than killing victims, he’s really killing something from his past over and over again, which is what serial killers traditionally kind of do. He’s reliving that moment of his greatest fear through others. Hassie, it’s mentioned that she bounced from foster home to foster home, and you see in her physicality how much anger [she has]. Also, there are certain realities for someone who looks like Hassie. If you are in the system, bad things can happen to you if you end up with the wrong parents. I always do very detailed back stories and character breakdowns. I do a really long bible that covers the characters, as well as makeup and all the design elements and locations. And then, when pre-production starts, we can kind of hit the ground running rather than trying to sort of find the film.
Filmmaker: Was there an inspiration for Hassie’s character?
Byrne: The world champion surfer, Lisa Anderson, had a troubled home life, and as a teenager, she would run to the beach, towards the water, and it was an escape. She would actually steal the boards that were there on the sand. They would see that she stole the board, but she wouldn’t actually come in, because you just keep surfing. When she became a great surfer, on the women’s tour they all had to wear bikinies, which was so sexist. She was the first to say, “I can’t stand this, this is not how I should be surfing, I need to be in board shorts.” So she would wear men’s board shorts, and that [started] a whole line of women’s board shorts. All of this from a woman who was a rebel and said, “Fuck this, I’m not meant to compete in a bikini.” Sharing that with Hassie, I was just trying to find these parallels that make the character feel lived in.
Filmmaker: And then after reading your character breakdowns, were there things that the actors brought to the characters that took things in a surprising direction?
Byrne: It was just about making [the characters] three-dimensional. It was interesting working with Jai. Some actors want to sit down and talk about objectives — what [their characters] want from a scene. We just talked roughly about the character, and he’d seen the breakdown, but then he didn’t want that anymore. He just wanted to go to the boat and the sets that we built, and he would just pace around, and we would just kind of talk. And then the character would come to life as he would just kind of stalk the space. I think Cassie is more sort of intellectual based, but like any actor who has gotten to her level, a lot of it is her, her own life, extrapolating based on her own experiences.
Filmmaker: What are your thoughts on the horror that’s being made today and the challenges of making non-IP-based horror?
Byrne: I think it’s a great time for horror. A24 has provided an invaluable service to horror fans, where what had been considered arthouse has worked its way into the mainstream. It reminds me of the great era of ’70s horror, with The Exorcist, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby, which are genuinely character driven and have room for nuance and taking bold creative. But at the same time, and I don’t know whether it’s political or just the state of the post-COVID world, and people not having a lot of money, life being scary, groceries costing a lot, but when you go to a horror movie, if you’re not genuinely scared, you might come out going, “My life is actually scarier than what I’ve just seen to go and escape.” I think somehow that this has been a part of the success of the Terrifier films, which are a great reinvention, almost, of the ’80s video nasties — kind of demented and violent, and almost gleefully so. And then there’s Barbarian, Smile and Smile 2, which is a relentlessly attacking studio film that, in terms of the filmmaking craft, I found quite amazing. It has this almost action pacing, and I genuinely didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. So I think it is a great year for horror. The hard-ass slasher film is coming back, but you’ve also got these more cerebral kind of horror films as well. Jordan Peele you can feel has picked up the baton from Spielberg, where there’s still a sense of wonder. And Ari Aster and Robert Eggers — it feels like it’s a great era at the moment.
Filmmaker: Do you know what your next film is?
Byrne: I’m making a film in northern Ontario that is going into hard pre-production in August. It’s a small town serial killer film about a disorganized serial killer, which you don’t often see depicted on screen.
