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 1 of 3

Open Water Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for language and some nudity) Theater release: August 06, 2004 by Lions Gate Directed by: Chris Kentis Runtime: 1 hour 19 minutes Cast: Blanchard Ryan (Susan), Daniel Travis (Daniel), Saul Stein (Seth) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

If Van Helsing plays like a Stephen King novel, Open Water plays like a Jack London short story: The Call of the Wild, only with sharks. The sky and the ocean become characters. Their unpredictable moods shape the characters' responses. Forgoing computer generated digital tricks, director Chris Kentis drops us into the open sea, swimming with wild, live sharks—in their territory. No mechanical man-eaters or smoothly gliding fins here. The sharks' movements are quick, frantic, and disorienting. Kentis filmed the underwater scenes himself, while his collaborator and wife, Laura Lau, handled the shots filmed from the dive boat.

The scariest part, though, is that the film is based on the true story of a couple who were accidentally left behind on a diving excursion on Australia's Great Barrier Reef—left behind to fend for themselves against the elements, including sharks, in the open water.

"We liked the simple premise of the story," Kentis said at a Seattle International Film Festival interview. "We liked the challenge of telling a story without resorting to rubber sharks and digital effects."

That's no mechanical shark. That's the real deal

Open Water is not a shark movie. It's a very real situation, filmed in an intimate, compelling style. In the movie, a professional couple, Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis) heads to the Bahamas for a dive vacation. The dive captain makes an inaccurate head count, leaving Susan and Daniel floating in the endless sea.

"We were aware of the situation where a dive couple was left behind on the Great Barrier Reef," said Lau, "but we didn't feel driven to re-create the details of their ordeal." Kentis added, "We're divers ourselves, and we wanted to tell the story in as real a way as possible. We worked hard to avoid the usual clichés in this kind of a movie, opting for something original."

Thus, the plot and action are not what we expect. Open Water delivers an almost documentary-style immediacy. The decision to use relatively unknown actors allows us to see them as people in danger, rather than as movie stars bobbing around in a tank.

It's terror on the seas for Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis

Kentis and Lau were influenced by the Dogme 95 movement, in which independent filmmakers vowed to shed the elaborate tricks of computer animation and monster budgets. Kentis: "We didn't feel that we needed to be bound by the Dogme Vow of Chastity, but we liked the idea of hand-held cameras, location shooting and available light whenever possible." Open Water is shot on High Definition Video, which is dramatically less expensive than 35-millimeter film. (The video is transferred to 35-millimeter for the projection print, however.) One advantage of shooting on video: when the weather changed, or sharks and jellyfish appeared, they could start shooting right away. "With film stock," said Lau, "you have to load the camera and you're out of film in twenty minutes. You can't be spontaneous."

The dive boat captain served as an actor, but he was also something of a director as well. He knew the ocean intimately. He could spot a storm and tell Kentis and Lau exactly how much time they had before the wind or rain would change the whole set. They could decide to run for cover or use it in the film. Following Kentis and Lau's desire to keep it real, the divers were regular people whose "salary" was a free dive. "We did use shark wranglers," Lau explained. "They knew and had worked with these particular sharks. So these were sharks that lived and hunted on our locations. They were wild, not trained."

Kentis and Lau's lean format gives Open Water a sense of intimate realism that gets lost in over-produced Hollywood films. It allows the filmmakers to create something that is truly theirs. The swollen budgets of big movies require that endless committees of executives rewrite the script and dictate additions and deletions. This explains why so many films seem the same, and why they are becoming even more fantasy driven. Plot and character take a backseat to dazzle and glitter, and the endings are comfortably familiar.

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