Open Water - "home movie" makes good.

Swimming With Sharks. Really.
By DEBORAH SONTAG

Published: August 1, 2004


LAST fall, Chris Kentis sat down at the computer in his Brooklyn Heights apartment and anxiously downloaded what his wife and creative partner, Laura Lau, jokingly called their "home movie," to take it to a film festival in the Hamptons.

"Open Water," a deep-sea thriller featuring unknown actors, was an intimate creative affair, conceived, written, directed, shot (on digital video), crewed, edited and financed by the couple themselves. To release such an obsessive labor of love into the world after three long years of filmmaking on vacations and weekends — well, Mr. Kentis, who earns his living cutting movie trailers, just hoped that he wouldn't be booed.

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At the Hamptons festival, the filmmakers met with an entertainment lawyer, a talent agent and an acquisitions specialist, designated "mentors" who hadn't bothered to see "Open Water" because they were too busy catching commercial films like "Elf" that were opening in theaters the next week. Mr. Kentis and Ms. Lau, both 40, were depressed by these industry smiles, which were sympathetic or condescending or both.

That depression faded quickly. Variety heralded the film's raw power, declaring it a "tour de force thriller that deftly transforms its low-budget limitations into spectacular assets." That led to the Sundance Film Festival in January, where, as per the now stock indie filmmaker's fantasy, a smoky, back-room bidding war ensued. And on the first night of the festival, Lions Gate bought the $130,000 "home movie" for $2.5 million.

Inspired by the true story of a couple accidentally abandoned at sea by a recreational dive boat off the coast of Australia, "Open Water" is not a traditional gray-fin horror movie. Shot from the couple's perspective, it is far more unsettling than it is scary in a made-you-shriek kind of way (although the shrieks are plentiful). The audience agonizingly bobs in the water alongside the abandoned divers as squeamishness and discomfort slowly deepen into full, existential, no-exit dread.

Transferred from video to film and with a new audio mix, "Open Water" arrives Friday in 12 cities and Aug. 20 on 2,000 screens. Mr. Kentis, who is babyfaced and slightly rumpled, called this "a little scary, almost absurd and really, really nuts," given that when he began shooting, using an Office Depot storage box as underwater housing for his camera, his fantasy goal was "maybe a couple of nights at the Angelika," the art house theater in Greenwich Village.

Mr. Kentis, the film's writer, director and editor, and Ms. Lau, its producer, spoke over lunch in a favorite haunt, a cavernous restaurant under the Manhattan Bridge where conversation is sporadically overpowered by the rattle of subway cars overhead. They needed little prompting, bursting forth, first one, then the other, then both at once, as if playing four-handed piano.

Before their 6-year-old daughter, Sabrina, was born, Mr. Kentis and Ms. Lau collaborated on "Grind" (1997), featuring Billy Crudup and Amanda Peet before they were known. It was, they say, a learning experience during which Ms. Lau studied filmmaking manuals to figure out what to do next. They were "scared to death" of the experienced crew, Ms. Lau said, which led the filmmakers to posture on the set and try too hard to make "something that looked like a real movie."

They wanted their next experience to be more authentic and private. Mr. Kentis was eager to shoot in digital video, largely so that he could dispense with a filmmaking crew, keep costs down and control the creative process more fully.

For more than a decade, he and his wife had been diving on vacations, shooting underwater and making little movies of their trips. Mr. Kentis's thoughts turned naturally to the ocean. He had long been mesmerized by the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, but a film depicting that World War II tragedy would be a major production. The story of the couple abandoned at sea near the Great Barrier Reef, which Mr. Kentis read in a dive magazine, offered a chance to explore a lost-at-sea theme in miniature.

In late 2000, Mr. Kentis, who is "the water person" while Ms. Lau is "the Dramamine person," banged out a bare-bones script in about six days. He fictionalized the real-life incident and moved it to an ambiguous tropical location. (The film was shot in the Bahamas, the Grenadines, the Virgin Islands and Mexico and incorporates indigenous music from Fiji in the soundtrack).

The movie rides on the couple, but Mr. Kentis put off any elaboration of their relationship until he found the actors for those roles.

The filmmakers say that they could probably have lured recognized actors just as they could have gotten backing for their venture. But in the interest — financial and aesthetic — of creative control and realism, they chose to go with unknowns, hoping that viewers would project themselves more easily into the characters' experience, into their very wetsuits.

Mr. Kentis and Ms. Lau cautioned casting agents that some nudity would be required for the pre-dive scenes and that, once in the water, actors would have to get super-close to some very big sharks — no mechanical or computer-generated jaws in this movie.

Daniel Travis, who got the male lead, said in an interview that he was anxious about carrying his first feature film but not about anything else. Blanchard Ryan, who plays his live-in lover, did have a serious concern, however, one that she concealed. She wasn't bothered by the nudity, because she assumed that nobody would ever see the movie. But, she said, "I don't go in the ocean over my knees, because I'm afraid of sharks and who isn't?"

In the summer of 2001, the actors, thrust into a family filmmaking affair, flew down to the Bahamas with the filmmakers, their daughter, their parents and Ms. Lau's sister Estelle, a lawyer who did everything from acting herself to casting extras (including a last-minute boatload of certified divers after the first boatload didn't show up because of excessive partying the previous evening.)

They started with the shark scenes. The filmmakers hired dive experts and shark wranglers, outfitted the actors with protective chain mail under their wetsuits, then motored 10 miles offshore in an old lobster boat. Mr. Kentis, who declined to wear the metal mesh because it restricted his movement, jumped in the water with his camera while Ms. Lau positioned herself to shoot from a platform. And then the wranglers tossed chunks of bloody tuna into the sea.

"There were 40, 50 sharks, gray fins as far as the eye can see," Ms. Ryan said. "And Chris said, `O.K., get in.' And we basically had to climb in the water right on top of the sharks, because they don't exactly get out of your way. I knew if I chickened out it would have ruined the movie. And Chris and Laura were spending their own money on the production."

So she took the plunge. "We had no idea she was afraid of sharks," Mr. Kentis said, "until that first time she got in the water and started crying." He imitated her: "Guys! Guys!"

From then on, Mr. Travis would dive in first, "to prove we weren't going to be lunchmeat," and Ms. Lau would instruct the wranglers to wait until Ms. Ryan glanced away to throw more bait into the water.

During two days of "shark shoots" — as well as during the other ocean scenes — the actors were tethered to the boat with fishing line, because the current was so strong. They were instructed to hold as still as possible and let the sharks, and Mr. Kentis, swim around them. But they couldn't hold too still, because the tethers were pulling them into tilted positions, and they needed to remain upright.

"I knew we were safe, that it wasn't a snuff movie, that I wasn't going to die, which is, I guess, where I draw the line," Ms. Ryan said. "I was terrified, and I did get bitten by a barracuda. But looking back, it was the most magical working environment — two actors, two filmmakers, no hair and makeup, no wardrobe and lighting, no crew wanting meal breaks. Just get in the water and do the work."

During one shooting trip, Mr. Kentis was directing the actors in an underwater conversation using divers' hand signals. When the scene was finished, he was eager to surface, because he was running out of air. But every time he tried to motion the actors upward, they mimicked his hand signals instead of following them, not realizing the scene was over. Eventually, he burst to the surface and they followed.

"Chris was really mad," Ms Lau said. "But we all thought it was really funny."

To flesh out the fictional couple's relationship, the filmmakers spent many evenings at a Starbucks in Manhattan with Ms. Ryan and Mr. Travis, who have been friends with each other for years. The filmmakers didn't want to generate too much back story, since they weren't going to be cutting away from the water to reveal an affair, say, or a pregnancy. But they wanted the actors to know more than the audience would about their characters — whom Mr. Kentis called "a typical, overworked career couple who lay down their hard-earned cash to have a good time and who take their safety for granted."

The filmmakers tried to take their time with the film, so they wouldn't become the typical harried couple themselves. Also, Mr. Kentis was determined not to lose a single day of pay from his job at a production company in Greenwich Village, and the actors wanted to fit in some paying work, too (which "Open Water" was not).

They hadn't intended for the production, which included just six weeks of shooting, to stretch over three years. But Mr. Travis unintentionally imposed a nearly yearlong hiatus by blowing out his knee during a volleyball game.

"The most harrowing part of the film for me was making that call to Chris saying, `I'm sorry, I'm about to go into surgery, I can't go,' " Mr. Travis said.

Later in the conversation, Mr. Travis retracted that. "The scariest part really wasn't the phone call," he said. "It was when we were far out at sea and this tanker passed us by. I just had this moment of really feeling insignificant in the universe."

That is a feeling that the filmmakers, without being preachy about it, would like to instill in their audience. They were trying to portray the ocean as an ecosystem where, as Ms. Lau put it, "sharks are in their natural environment and man is not." And indeed, it is the ocean, by turns turquoise, cobalt, gray and blood red, that is the true protagonist of their film.

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