shark tale
the stath and co are up against a giant prehistoric shark… and TF’s talked to the lot of them (well, except for the shark).
Jason Statham takes on a 70ft shark in The Meg, an outrageous, outlandish, OTT blockbuster that’s not taking itself too seriously. Total Film dons its wetsuit and takes a deep dive into the ‘Jurassic Shark’ monster movie that promises to be the most fun you’ll have all summer…
The first thing you need to know about director Jon Turteltaub is that he has a champion sense of humour. On a sunny LA day in June, he greets Total Film with an infectious chuckle and says, “Are you sure you want to use the shark image on the cover of the magazine and not just my face?” So we suggest, “Maybe both? If your face is on it too, it will give perspective to the shark…” He mockgrimaces, before saying, “That won’t work. I have a 75-foot face.”
This glimpse into Turteltaub’s GSOH will give you a good idea of what to expect from The Meg, the giant-shark picture that’s looking to take a chomp out of the summer box office. Yes, it’s a monster movie and yes, it preys on primal fears to deliver suspenseful set-pieces, but it’s not trying to be Jaws.
“Jon’s sense of humour comes through on this,” confirms leading man Jason Statham, who, with this movie, goes up against a foe whose every tooth is the size of Dwayne Johnson’s head. “It’s no good him doing something that’s been done in the past. He has to find his own flavour. This smells of Jon because he’s a wisecrack kinda guy, always looking for a funny moment.”
But the film is no joke. Anyone expecting a gleefully silly mockbuster in the vein of the movies pumped out by The Asylum, the indie studio behind 2-Headed Shark Attack, Mega Piranha and the Sharknado movies, will be left all at sea. With a $150m budget, that would be an expensive stunt.
“No, this is a much more legit, Hollywood, holy-crap-that’s-a-big-shark movie,” explains Turteltaub. “It’s based on really good science and really good filmmaking. We’re not making fun of shark movies, we’re celebrating them.” He ponders, then explains, “It is first and foremost a big, scary, monster movie. But I kept saying, ‘Instead of running from the clichés, let’s lean into them.’ That helps the humour. These characters will have seen Jaws. They’re real people so they’ve seen movies. But that’s not the same as making a movie campy or satirical. It’s not a joke on monster movies by any means.”
“Yeah,” adds Statham, offering a grin that can only be described as shark-like. “It’s Jurassic Park meets Jaws. Everyone likes to say, ‘Jurassic Shark.’ If you look at the poster, look at the creature, you know what you’re going to spend your money on.
This is a film where people can sit down and get the popcorn out.”
REELING IT IN
Hollywood loves a high concept and this one – a 70ft megalodon (basically a stocky great white shark), thought to have been extinct for 2.6 million years, emerges from the Mariana Trench and heads for the beach to snack on human hors d’oeuvres – sparked a feeding frenzy. But here’s the fin… that was way back in 1997, when Disney snapped up the rights to Steve Alten’s book Meg: A Novel Of Deep Terror before it even hit stores. Then Renny Harlin’s shark-lark Deep Blue Sea tested the waters and didn’t cause quite the splash expected, meaning Disney held back.
The production history since has resembled a tangled fishing line, and for many years The Meg looked like it would be the one that got away. In 2004, the producers behind Hellboy optioned it for Guillermo del Toro. In 2007, Speed director Jan de Bont was netted. Then it was a case of still waters until 2015, when Chinese investment came on board and Eli Roth was hooked. Only the Hostel helmer wanted to make an R-rated movie, meaning it was yet another case of man overboard. Finally, in early 2016, with Warner Bros chumming the waters, Turteltaub was landed – the director of Cool Runnings, While You Were Sleeping and the National Treasure movies took the bait because he’d never made anything like The Meg.
“They already had a pretty good script, a lot of designs, they had settled on filming in New Zealand, and had started the casting process,” Turteltaub smiles. “And then I came in and fucked all that up. I did what every director does: ‘Great work; now let me change everything.’ I did a lot of work on the script, got deeply involved in casting. But I kept a lot of the designs.
“I thought I’d better figure out what it’s like to go face-to-face with a shark before we did this film, so I went scuba diving. We took a trip to Fiji. They handfeed these bull sharks with tuna heads and then the sharks circle around, and you line up behind this coral wall. You’re within two feet of these three-metre sharks. It was a great experience.”
Jason statham
'I WANTED A REAL ACTION HERO WHO COULD ALSO BRING A LOT OF COMEDY'
JON TURTELTAUB
Some really great work had been done – the look of the sets and submarines, and things like that. So I did a remodel rather than a rebuild.”
One of the key decisions that Turteltaub made was to cast Statham as Jonas Taylor, a Navy Seal and diving expert who has history with the Meg, though his tale has long been met with snickering cynicism. Until, that is, a submersible is attacked and Taylor is brought in to try to retrieve the crew. No prizes for guessing the cause of all this disruption. Yep, what follows is like a pulp riff on Captain Ahab versus Moby Dick, with Taylor determined to slay the beast and serve up enough shark steaks to feed an army of pescetarians (we’re gonna need a bigger barbecue…).
“They were down the road with a couple of people but I wanted to go a different way,” explains Turteltaub. “I wanted a real action hero who could also bring a lot of comedy and then play against his own type when necessary.”
Statham is also perfect for a movie set primarily on and under the water, having represented England at diving in the 1990 Commonwealth Games and having been a recreational scuba diver for almost 20 years.
“I’ve been around swimming pools my whole life, and I learned to scuba dive when I made the first Transporter with Luc Besson,” Statham says. “I had an unorthodox lesson with a military free diver – someone who worked with Luc when he was making The Big Blue. I really got hooked. So I thought, ‘If
I can get paid to do this and make a good story…’” His laugh sounds like a snarl.
“There’s always a fascination with what’s at the bottom of the ocean. Two-thirds of the planet is the ocean, and it’s the most unmonitored part of the planet. Jon said, ‘There are more pictures of the Moon than of the bottom of the ocean.’ This is a creature that did exist, so I think it’s got everyone’s curiosity from the get-go.”
As for the rest of the cast, it’s an eclectic mix, with Turteltaub saying, “The first guide comes from the script, where you have this international ocean base. So aside from one very muscular bald man from the UK, I have big men from Iceland and tiny women from Australia, actors from Tanzania, New Zealand, China and Japan.”
The female lead is Chinese actress, pop singer, model, TV producer and all-round megastar Li Bingbing, perhaps best known in the West as Blink in X-Men: Days Of Future Past. She plays marine biologist Suyin, and took the role because of the challenge it presented, requiring her to go stunt-for-stunt with The Stath. Today, though, she talks not of facing off against the megalodon with its five rows of teeth but of another set of gnashers that impressed her.
“Jason is very different from the characters he plays,” she says. “When he smiled, I thought, ‘Oh, he has the nicest teeth!’ I had never seen Jason smile in his films. Later, I told him that I am not a native English speaker, so I needed to rehearse many times before we filmed our scenes. He was so supportive, saying there was no way he could have done this film in Chinese.”
Another marine biologist on the team is Ruby Rose’s Jaxx Herd, whose
engineering skills mean she also designs a lot of the underwater tech, including the subs or ‘gliders’. The Orange Is The New Black star liked the idea of staring at screens and jabbering jargon as a flipside to the physical roles she played in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, xXx: Return Of Xander Cage and John Wick: Chapter 2. But then Turteltaub spotted her love of the ocean and ensured that her character is plunged into the action.
“He decided he could have some fun with me,” she laughs. “I’m Australian and a Pisces and I’ve been surfing my whole life, so he put me in the water. I had a lot of training, swimming in heavy jackets, because when I’m in the water, I’m not planning on it!
It was exhausting. Hours every day.
I also got stung by a jellyfish. Just a little one. It was like, ‘You little bastard, I can’t even see you and I’m hurting.’”
Heroes star Masi Oki, meanwhile, is Toshi, co-pilot of the sub that opens the movie by creeping past a layer of ice and into the deeps of previously uncharted ocean. “We find something that is not expected,” he chuckles. And while that something was obviously absent during shooting (more on which later), the sub was very real. “They built the whole thing,” he says. “But they did not put it in the ocean. We were surrounded by greenscreen.”
Last but not least of the principal cast is Rainn Wilson, as billionaire businessman Jack Morris. It is Morris who funds the oceanic research station called Mana One and who, unwittingly, unleashes the Meg. Part villain and part comic relief, it was a fun part for The Office star to play, even if he grimaces at the thought of the gruelling training it required – swimming races and climbing ropes and ladders in the water. Not that he was ever going to baulk at the chance to play opposite a megalodon…
“A few years ago, my mom bought my son a megalodon tooth,” he explains. “He’s always loved dinosaurs, and megalodons were once at the top of the food chain of our entire planet. They could literally take out any other living creature, even a Tyrannosaurus rex.” Pause. “I know I just sounded a lot like [The Office’s] Dwight Schrute when I said that, but it’s all true!”
BEAST MODE
Filmed on Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf and at the city’s Kumeu Film Studios, The Meg flits between the real ocean, a gigantic water tank and greenscreen. “If you see a person underwater, it’s either the ocean or a tank,” says Turteltaub. “If you see a shark underwater, it’s CG. There’s no such thing as a trained movie shark. It would have eaten my stars. So you know, ‘OK, the shark’s gonna be CG,’ but I always hate CG people in movies – you can tell – so we used real people [more than 2,000 extras in one epic scene off Hainan Island in China]. The goal for us was to do all of it and make it as seamless as possible.”
As for the 70ft megalodon, the biggest challenge for visual effects houses Double Negative, Image Engine Design, Instinctual VFX, Scanline VFX, Soho VFX and Sony Pictures Imageworks was to bring the requisite sense of scale and heft.
“A dinosaur walks past a tree and you know how big it is,” says Turteltaub. “But a shark swims in the ocean and it could be 70ft or 2ft. You can’t tell unless
it’s against something smaller, and smaller things tend to go away when a 70ft sharks show up. We needed to make sure you feel the size of the shark.”
Statham, ahem, dives in. “I come face-to-face with this thing, and the physical moments of me with the shark have to be seen to be believed. If I just blew this thing up with a harpoon, some kind of RPG [rocket-propelled grenade launcher], it’s gonna be uneventful, so we had to figure out how man versus shark could be captured on film to give a human element.”
“Anytime anyone has to physically interact with a megalodon, there’s something there for them to physically interact with,” explains the director. “We didn’t have anything as awesome as Stan Winston would have built [on Jurassic Park], because animatronics, as Steven Spielberg will tell you, don’t work so well underwater [the mechanical shark on Jaws was a washout]. It was often a stick with a picture of a shark on it. It could be a tuna. A tennis ball or a ladder. We did build a metal frame of a shark to use.”
Rose shudders. “We had an animatronic head of a shark. And a fin. The shark’s head was actually terrifying. I’ve never been scared of sharks but this has made me think I should be more careful when I swim. But when you’re out in the ocean, you only have to look out all around you and of course you can imagine a giant shark…”
And if you can’t, you bloody well can once the crew have finished preparing the shot. “One or two scenes called for us to jump in and swim in water filled with the aftermath of a visit from the Meg, including red dye that simulated blood, as well as prosthetics of various human limbs,” says Wilson, half-grinning, half-grimacing. “That was… unforgettable.”
There’s one thing niggling at Total Film, though: Statham will no doubt exhibit wonderful form when diving off a boat and he sure knows his way around an oxygen tank, but how do you get the best out of him when he’s underwater? It’s his fight movies and gruff delivery we like so much, and he can’t very well punch a 70ft shark after giving it some choice verbal.
“Attitude,” states Turteltaub. “He has a working-class man’s dignity; a sense of right and wrong and a sense of self-sacrifice. I think that’s what we love about him. But yeah, it’s hard to see a guy’s abs when he’s wearing a wetsuit. Still, don’t worry – we figured out a way around that.”
TASTE TEST
Turteltaub and his cast seem certain they’ve landed this one, confident that The Meg offers spectacle, scares and snorts of laughter. It is, unapologetically, a summer event movie, stuffed to the gills with unadulterated entertainment.
“I went to secondary school, I went to university; I know you’re supposed to read every script and novel for what it is really about and not what the story is about,” smirks Turteltaub when asked if the movie has any subtext. “But I did everything I could to make sure I wasn’t forcing the audience to start analysing and stop enjoying. It’s kinda like that book you read in the summer that isn’t trying to get you miserable and drinking absinthe. It’s there for fun.”
“This is a film for the family,” nods Statham. “A kid’s imagination runs wild. I remember watching King Kong, Godzilla, Moby Dick, anything with a dinosaur in it, or a creature that was big. It’s so memorable. Well, this is a monster.”
But can The Meg go up against summer franchise movies like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and Ant-Man And The Wasp? Warner Bros will certainly be hoping so – the advantage of the movie’s tangled production history is that Alten has used the time to write six more Meg books.
Turteltaub shrugs. “Audiences have shown they don’t want new,” he says. “If they wanted new, they would have stopped going to Avengers movies and gone to see Rampage or something. That said, The Meg is kinda new but old-fashioned at the same time. I don’t think we can beat but I think we can compete. I would never expect this film to out-gross Infinity War or Black Panther. But it can still do well enough for me to be able to afford a beach house…”
The Meg opens on 10 August.
'THIS HAS MADE ME THINK I SHOULD BE MORE CAREFUL WHEN I SWIM' RUBY ROSE