MOVIES Tribute to a shark’s best friend
AJanet Smith
sk the friends who dived with late filmmaker and eco-activist Rob Stewart what most scares them in the water, and the last thing on their minds will be sharks. What’s more telling is what actually does scare them— many of those moments caught in intense scenes on-screen.
For Brock Cahill, a close friend of Stewart’s, his most harrowing dive came during a secret nighttime shoot of a massive drift net. They dived along it into the depths, their lights illuminating the giant predators tangled dead in its lines. In Sharkwater Extinction, Stewart and crew travel from Costa Rica to Cape Verde to track an underground fishing industry that’s killing an estimated millions of sharks per year. But they found this nightmare right off the California coast.
“You see this humongous wall of death. It feels like a ghost that’s in the water, like a living entity,” Cahill remembers, as he talks to the Straight from his home in L.A. “It was one of the most nerve-racking dives we’ve done in our lives.”
When they resurface, an altercation with a fishing boat makes things even more tense. “In our own back yard, there were warning shots fired at us,” Cahill recalls.
Exposing the damage done by drift nets has had an effect even before Sharkwater Extinction opens wide on Friday (October 19), with California recently passing a law to phase them out.
Bringing about change was something Stewart, who died in a diving accident while filming Sharkwater Extinction, had a gift for. He turned his lifelong love of both sharks and the water into his cause, shooting 2006’s Sharkwater in his 20s and raising his voice finning around the globe.
Veteran ocean and wildlife photographer Andy Casagrande says Stewart wanted to make the follow-up Sharkwater Extinction as beautiful as possible, despite its moments of ugliness. (Think freezer tankers piled high with frozen blue-shark carcasses.)
“He knew that images speak louder than words, and if kids see beautiful images of sharks it will have a bigger impact,” he tells the Straight from his home in Florida.
Over his career, Casagrande too has learned to love sharks, which he has shot on every continent. “I can’t go into a pride of lions feeding, but I can go into a bunch of sharks feeding.”
Casagrande was on hand for one of the film’s ugliest moments. He accompanied Stewart on the boat of Mark the Shark, a fishing tour guide who openly hauls in hammerheads. “I really just wanted to throw him overboard and feed him to the sharks, but Rob said, ‘Let’s learn about this guy and get into his head,’” Casagrande relates.
Both colleagues recall Stewart’s positive attitude even in the face of carnage. And both miss him terribly, making the task of doing publicity for the film difficult. After Stewart’s last dive off the coast of Florida, on January 31, 2017, when his rebreather went awry and he died of drowning due to hypoxia, the footage shot that day was confiscated for the ensuing investigation. Casagrande remembers getting the equipment back, with the memory card still in it, turning it on, and seeing the first clip: his late friend smiling straight into the lens and waving.
“He’s literally connecting with us from the beyond,” the cameraman says. “Anyone who knew Rob knows he had an uncanny way of connecting with people.”
Cahill gets through by remembering the amazing moments he and Stewart had on this shoot—including one near the Bahamas’ remote Cat Island, where both men were free-diving for the first time with oceanic whitetips. “They were some of the coolest creatures I’ve ever seen,” he recalls. “They’re a little cheeky and smart.… And all of a sudden the light changes, the sun starts to go down, and there’s this pink-golden light and the seabirds start coming down to feed on the surface,” he continues. “We got this incredible shot of this oceanic whitetip drifting by and the seabirds at the surface. That’s one of those memories that are just burned into my skull. That and Rob’s massive, huge smile.”