“It’s not the shark’s fault.” With that one line in Dangerous Animals, cage-diving boat operator and stealthy serial killer Tucker deflates the underlying sickness about sharksploitation flicks. “We just wanted to correct this falsehood that sharks are indiscriminate killers, and point the finger at the real killer, which is man.”
In the film, opening this weekend from the Independent Film Company, Hassie Harrison plays Zephyr, a directionless American surfer beach-bumming along Australia’s Gold Coast until she meets Tucker (Jai Courtney), who runs a shark-diving experience. However, on his boat, you may never get out of the water again. Yet when he finally sets his sights on Zephyr, his days feeding women to sharks may be over. “This is two apex predators, and he’s met his perfect match,” said Harrison.
There definitely weren’t any sharks in the water last weekend when Byrne and Harrison were attending a very unique Texas premiere for their tension-drenched aquatic horror: on a boat at Austin’s Volente Beach Resort & Waterpark as the audience floated on inner tubes, with scuba divers sporting shark fins prowling the waters as the film played out on an inflatable screen, courtesy of the Alamo Drafthouse’s revived Rolling Roadshow.
It was the latest unexpected stop for Byrne in promoting the film, which was the first ever shark movie ever officially selected for the Cannes Film Festival, “and then it’s the LA premiere at the Egyptian Theatre, which is this beautiful theatre, and this was completely different.” The first produced script from Nick Lepard (currently teeing up a new script for The Monkey, <i.Longlegs director Osgood Perkins), it’s his first foray into popcorn filmmaking, but it’s gourmet popcorn. His first film, inverted prom horror The Loved Ones and Satanic Panic supernatural shocker The Devil’s Candy, have an arthouse edge to them. By comparison, Dangerous Animals “it’s meant to be a thrill ride,” said Byrne, “and what better way to watch it from the water, and not only are you getting jump scares from the scene, you’re getting your leg yanked on by divers.”
It’s a long way from the Texas Hill Country to the Coral and Tasman seas, but if filming in the tropical seas off Queensland sounds like a delightful dip in antipodean waters, think again. Harrison recalled that hottest set she ever experienced was while filming in a cotton field for the Texas-made The Iron Orchard. “It must have been 114 that day,” she said. Dangerous Animals was the literal polar opposite, shot in the middle of the sea during the Australian winter. It may look sunny, but her lips were blue when she got out to dry off, and there are scenes where her breath is clearly visible. “I just had to dig deep and show how tough I was. Texas strong!” she laughed.
For Byrne, the challenge was in learning to make a movie on the waves, but this wasn’t some macho filmmaking fantasy. He said, “I’d love to say that it was, ‘This is a right of passage, we’re going to do make a film out on the water, we’re going to do it for real.’” Instead, the reason for filming in the open water was a simple budgetary one. “We found out that the tugboat didn’t fit in a tank, and it was going to be $80,000 a day. We had to a conversation about, well, let’s do it for real, and that became incredibly detailed planning about the longitude and latitude points of where the boat was going to go to survive the currents. It became a real mathematical exercise.”
Yet all the planning in the world can’t overcome the constant motion of the ocean. Byrne half-joked that he was too busy to get seasick, but that changed when filming was done. “When you’re not on the boat, you’re on the pontoon holding the boat, and that’s swaying the whole time, and then I’d get in the shower going ‘Woah.’”
The only sequences that were shot in a tank were the underwater scenes, which Byrne originally planned to film in the sea. However, after a Bull Shark gave the production a bit of a fright, they moved those scenes to a pool, eventually matching that material with the surface material they’d shot, and the 4K wildlife footage from their shark researchers. That one near-miss was the closest that Byrne knowingly came to the real animal, and that’s a bit disappointing to him. “I did want to swim with the sharks beforehand, but this got greenlit so quickly that I didn’t get a chance.”
“You probably don’t know how close you’ve ever come to a shark,” Harrison said. “You could have had one right next to you and never know.”
Yet the sharks of Dangerous Animals are not the real menace, and how they were presented was part of what attracted Byrne to the script. Peter Benchley, the author of the original Jaws, so regretted painting the ocean’s sleekest predator as a vindictive and insatiable hunter that he spent his later years as a conservation activist, and Byrne was determined not to demonize the often-libeled fish. There’s a moment in the film’s opening scene in which editor Kasra Rassoulzadegan takes the astounding underwater cinematography of Shelley Farthing-Dawe and, in a second, transforms the circling Chondrichthyes from razor-mouthed killing machines into beautiful, shimmering creatures of wonder, elegant and somehow soulful. Byrne said, “We wanted to show their scars, and how majestic they actually are. There’s shark carnage in this film, but it’s because they’re manipulated by man.”
The real predator here is Tucker, a shark-attack survivor turned sociopathic mass murderer, and it’s undeniably a career-best performance from Courtney (Suicide Squad and the unfinished Divergent series). The first time Byrne met him, he literally could not get his arms around the actor. “It’s like hugging Mike Tyson,” the director added “Jai’s got that maximum charisma, which is how the spider catches the flies, but he’s also got those great character actor chops and that physical intimidation, so it’s a great combination.”
“He’s a unit,” Harrison added. “He has such life force and presence, and that’s what makes our little cat-and-mouse game effective.”
Dangerous Animals is in theatres now from the Independent Film Company. Find showtimes here.
This article appears in June 6 • 2025.