INTERVIEW: ‘The Reef: Stalked’ director on not competing with ‘Jaws’
Photo: The Reef: Stalked stars, from left, Ann Truong, Saskia Archer and Teressa Liane. Photo courtesy of RLJE Films and Shudder / Provided by KWPR with permission.
With 2010’s The Reef, writer-director Andrew Traucki created an intensely pulsating shark thriller, and audiences seemed to love every taut second of the Australia-set action film. Now, the filmmaker is back with a standalone sequel called The Reef: Stalked, in theaters, on demand and streaming on Shudder today, July 29.
This time around, there’s a whole new set of characters. Sisters Nic (Teressa Liane) and Annie (Saskia Archer) experience trauma in their lives when their third sister is attacked in a scary act of domestic violence. In an effort to heal, Nic and Annie take to the open ocean with friends Jodie (Ann Truong) and Lisa (Kate Lister) on a kayaking and diving adventure, according to press notes. It doesn’t take long for them to be stalked by a large shark, and it’s anyone’s guess who might survive the encounter.
“The first one was quite successful,” writer-director Traucki said in a recent Zoom interview. “It’s got quite a strong indie following of loyal followers, and from that, people always wanted me to make another shark film. But unfortunately the scripts that were getting written were all B-grade and sharkspolitation, and it wasn’t something that I necessarily wanted to dive into. It felt like a cop-out or sellout if I did one of those after The Reef. Then, about three or four years ago, I went and saw this play called Lethal Indifference, which is about domestic violence and the aftermath of that, and that really stuck with me. At the same time, because I’m a surfer, I know that surfers call sharks ‘a man in a gray suit.’ So I kind of put those ideas together and thought, oh, maybe I can do something which talks about domestic violence, and then the shark is the allegory of it all. That kind of got me excited to the point where I thought I wouldn’t mind trying to write this. So I then sat down, and over a year or so I wrote it.”
Traucki said the genre elements of a thriller movie are still present and accounted for this time around, but he has integrated more of a backstory in the sequel. The audience is meant to care for Nic, Annie, their friends and their hopeful healing from the tragedy in their lives. The shark, in many ways, is a catalyst for opening up their emotional wounds, he said.
As far as the cinematography, the original film is heralded for using live shark footage. This time, the director sticks to these real images once again, with a few necessary CGI shots when the shark and soon-to-be victim come face to face.
“The majority is still real sharks, and I’ve still gone for that because obviously I’m guided by the desire to make the film feel as real as possible because I think that’s sort of the attraction to these things,” he said. “There are a few shots where we couldn’t do that because they’re a protected species, and we can’t do things like that. … So, yeah, it’s always a little difficult to move away from the reality of it, but it’s almost as long as we did it and it felt strong and didn’t feel cheap, I was happy.”
When Traucki made the original Reef more than a decade ago, and also when he was making this standalone sequel, that other shark movie hovered in the background. Creators of modern-day shark thrillers can’t get away from the long shadow cast by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Traucki embraces this 1970s horror film, but he also wants to be distinct from it.
“I love Jaws,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite films, and it was the film that invented the blockbuster. It’s phenomenal. It’s more than a film. It’s a beacon in a sea of films, but for the first one very much I thought, whatever Jaws did, I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to keep it as real as possible. I’m going to do all that because I can’t possibly compete. There’s no point in trying to compete with that film, so yeah the guiding light with Jaws was trying not to be Jaws, trying to be real, trying to be as not-Jaws as possible. And in this one, I think I moved a little bit more toward a conventional film story.”
Traucki knows the subject matter of his films well. He’s a surfer living in Australia, and actually earlier this year he encountered his first shark in the water. One of his immediate thoughts when he was in the ocean off New South Wales was how the experience mirrored his filmography.
“I was out actually about almost a mile out off the beach on this reef with this one other person, and this small fin came through,” the director said. “It was kind of like, wow, that’s just like in my film, but yeah it was small. When you’re in the sea a lot, you know there’s a big difference between a small fin and a large fin, so I didn’t freak out too much.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Reef: Stalked, written and directed by Andrew Traucki, premieres today, July 29 in theaters, on demand and streaming on Shudder. Click here for more information.
