40 years on from Jaws, sees new movie The Shallows

Blake Lively, star of new shark movie The Shallows, tells Film Critic Tony Earnshaw that fear runs deep.
On the beach: Blake Lively in The Shallows.On the beach: Blake Lively in The Shallows.
On the beach: Blake Lively in The Shallows.

February, 1974. Peter Benchley’s debut novel Jaws becomes an immediate hit, staying at the top of the bestseller list for 44 weeks. A paperback version sells millions of copies.

June, 1975. Steven Spielberg’s movie is released and ushers in the era of the summer blockbuster, recouping its production costs in two weeks and becoming the first film to earn $100 million at the US box office.

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More importantly, it terrified two generations of moviegoers and forever cast the great white shark as one of nature’s ultimate predators: a man-eating killing machine.

August, 2016. More than 40 years after Jaws the cinema still thrills to the notion of man versus shark. And in The Shallows it takes the concept further with Blake Lively cast as the solitary woman facing certain death as she is circled and stalked by a great white. A third generation is about to be scared silly.

On something of a journey of self-exploration after the death of her mother, Nancy (Gossip Girl star Blake Lively) travels to Australia and a cove of paradise where she channels the experiences of her mother and their shared love of surfing. Inadvertently swimming into the feeding area of a great white shark she is attacked but finds safety on a rocky outcrop.

How long it can remain safe, however, is open to question. She’s 200 yards from the beach. But it’s deserted, she’s alone and the shark is waiting in the shallows…

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“I’m not dying here,” mutters Nancy at one point. But the watching audience starts to doubt her as minutes tick by and options start to run out. For Lively, 28, part of the attraction in accepting the film was that director Jaume Collet-Serra and writer Anthony Jaswinski wanted to find their leading lady before inking in the character.

“It was a fully realised film in relation to the action and adventure but the character of Nancy was left very open-ended,” says Lively. “It was a really neat process to get to figure her out and create her backstory. In any movie like this the shark is the monster but it’s a metaphor for the other things in your life: your fears, what you’re afraid to conquer or what you’re running from.”

Modern cinema has enjoyed frequent brushes with the shark. Jaws and its increasingly dire sequels kept the mood of dread afloat into the 1980s. Open Water in 2004 took a simple but remarkably effective premise – two loved-up scuba divers are left behind on a diving trip and find themselves surrounded by sharks – and made us afraid of the water again. Newer offerings such as The Reef and Bait continued the theme. The Shallows takes the same approach.

“You feel when you’re playing near the shore that because you’re not out in the deep water [that] you’re fine, you’re safe,” says Lively. “But you’re really not. You’re out in the wilds – in the land of big, incredible, majestic, wild creatures.”

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From the attack on you can imagine what it must be like to be 200 yards from shore. That’s one of the scariest elements.

“You think of a shark attack happening in deep water where you don’t stand a chance. The fact is that she’s so close to shore and really does stand a chance. There’s only one thing separating her from survival and that’s a giant great white shark. It really is so primal. Either she’s gonna die trying to live or she’s gonna die by giving up.”

Lively had another reason for choosing to be in The Shallows. Like Peter Benchley before her, whose later career was wrapped up in shark conservation, she wants to explode the myth that sharks, and particularly the much-maligned great white, are just black-eyed monsters waiting to gobble up hapless humans.

Thus Benchley reacted to calls from marine scientists and conservationists that Jaws – both book and movie – was an acute case of scaremongering that did the cause of the great white no good whatsoever. Lively treads similar water.

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“I’ve always been afraid of sharks because of the movies,” she confesses. “In 2011 I went swimming with conservationists and got to see great white sharks in their habitat. In reality sharks aren’t monsters that are hunting human beings. I got to see that.

“The movie touches on it: because of global warming sharks are being pushed closer and closer towards the shallow water. So there’s a lot of truth in the story. Sharks are in shallow water. You could swim up on a feeding ground, and what would happen…?” She leaves the question dangling.

Nonetheless the chilling stand-off between primeval predator and solitary woman is what drives the drama and builds the tension. And always the question in the audience’s collective mind is “what if…?” Lively agrees, even if the stoking of deep-seated fears undermines the spirit of conservation.

“Look at how many humans kill sharks and how many sharks kill humans. It’s incredibly disproportionate. We always depict sharks as these villains but we kill way more sharks than sharks kill humans.

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“You watch this movie and you see that it’s a movie monster. It’s not documentary style; it’s a thrilling summer movie. But having been in the water with the sharks I thought it was important to show that this is fantasy.

“Nancy swims into its feeding grounds. So you have two apex predators – man and shark – both fighting to survive. The shark in the movie isn’t a monster. He just wants to stay alive as much as she does.”

Small screen hit to big screen star

Blake Lively’s earliest acting experience came in Sandman, a film directed by her father.

She followed up with a role in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Legend has it that she walked into her audition with a photograph of herself, placed it on a table and walked out. She got the part.

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Lively became a household name as New York socialite Serena in TV’s Gossip Girl. The six seasons episodes were littered with movie references.

Recent movie roles have included The Age of Adaline, Café Society, for Woody Allen, and All I See is You, co-starring with Jason Clarke.

The Shallows (15) is on nationwide release.

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