By George & Josh Bate
In a year that has already seen shark movies in the form of Renny Harlin’s Deep Water and Tommy Wirkola’s Thrash, Chum swims into theaters and on VOD/Digital platforms to offer something a little different for the long-standing shark attack genre.
From director and co-writer Jonathan Zuck, Chum takes place on the picturesque island of Malta. A dream destination wedding for a couple turns upside down when the newlyweds (Alice Eve and Eric Michael Cole), sister-in-law (Elle Haymond), and friends (Lisa Yaro, Johnny Gaffney, and Sarah Siadat) are targeted by a bloodthirsty shark during an expedition in the open water. Things go from bad to worse when the wedding party encounters a mysterious fisherman (Jim Klock) and are unwillingly used as tools to aid his pursuit of revenge.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Chum director and co-writer Jonathan Zuck and producer Eamon O’Rourke about their new movie, what it was like to film on open water and in Malta, their favorite shark movies, and what sets their film apart from other shark movies.
After helming Jaws, inarguably the best shark movie of all time, Steven Spielberg famously said, “I will never film on open water again.” But Zuck and O’Rourke did exactly that with Chum. “Filming in open water certainly has a lot of challenges,” Zuck explained. “Every time I see the wide-brimmed hat, I get triggered about the 100-degree weather and the sun beating down in the open seas. But it really did give you a sense of that isolation. Once we got out past the breakwaters and things, we were really out in the ocean. And we did a lot of it sort of anchored so that we could film all right. We had to work with a skeleton crew. And what’s interesting about that is you gain a real familiarity and an intimacy with that crew. I mean, people are helping each other out, doing each other’s jobs when necessary…. Everybody had to be on all the time to make it work or it wouldn’t have worked. And they were. In that way, it was a really special experience being out on the open water.”
The open waters that Zuck filmed on were off the coast of Malta, the gorgeous island that the likes of Gladiator, Troy, Captain Phillips, Napoleon, and, most recently, Jurassic World Rebirth have filmed on. “Malta is this gorgeous place where seemingly nothing ever goes wrong, and it’s very colorful and beautiful,” O’Rourke remarked. “So to have that be the backdrop for screams and bloody dismemberment and stuff like that felt in line with a lot of the stuff we were trying to do.”
Chum, much like Jaws, thrives on the juxtaposition of its picturesque setting and the horrors that unfold. “How do we make the ocean a character?” O’Rourke explored. “How do we make it simultaneously feel endless and claustrophobic. There’s a lot of contradictions that I think visually and conceptually we were trying to match together.”
The creative team behind Chum had a problem, however. The vicious shark that terrorizes the characters in the film doesn’t actually live in the waters surrounding Malta. “One of the ironies, of course, is that Malta is not really known for that,” Zuck said. “So, part of what we built into the script was: Why is there a great white shark in Malta?”
To answer this question, the filmmakers arrived on a solution that both explained the shark’s presence in the movie and gave them something poignant to say to the audience. “We talk about the warming waters and things like that,” Zuck described. “It seemed reasonable when we were writing it, right? And then, while we were there, article after article was coming out about great whites showing up in Ireland, in Boston….. A little bit prescient in that way.”
Zuck elaborated, “It was really about getting sharks to Malta. That’s what drove [the climate change message] in a way. The sharks in Malta today are four feet long reef sharks, right? And then the idea that even the characters know there’s no sharks, there’s no dangerous sharks here. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“While we were doing some plot narrative solving, it was like, ‘Let’s use this opportunity to talk about something,’” O’Rourke continued. “And that was something that Alice [Eve] liked, and a lot of the people on the film were drawn to. But I think Jonathan did a fantastic job of figuring it [out].”
In addition to its message advocating for climate change awareness, Chum stands apart from other shark movies as the shark is not the only antagonist our heroes have to reckon with. “Sharks are terrifying, but they don’t have a ton of personality on screen,” said O’Rourke. “There’s a limit to how much you can visually represent that. And so they are the ultimate danger. But you want to have tension. You want to have back and forth. You want there to be emotion within your antagonist, your villain, in the first place.”
To find this personality and emotion in the antagonist, Zuck and O’Rourke incorporated a human antagonist, whose threat co-exists with and, at times, even surpasses the threat that the shark poses. “Anaconda is a great example of a creature feature where that’s elevated so much by Jon Voight’s character, who’s such a great part of that movie,” O’Rourke said. “I think it feels important to make sure that your actors have your good guy characters have something really good to bounce off of. And a shark, while being scary, can’t necessarily bring the extra level of subtlety and nuance to what you want out of a villain in the movie.”
Of course, Jaws sits at the pinnacle of the shark attack sub genre of horror, but the decades since have been filled with other shark movies. “I really do like 47 Meters Down,” Zuck said while thinking of other shark movies he enjoys. “I enjoyed The Reef, an Australian shark movie. And obviously the big movies like Meg are fun. It’s a very different kind of movie. We were trying to be more like Jaws and less like The Meg or even Snarkado or something like that, which is another branch of shark movies that are fun.”
O’Rourke, meanwhile, has affinity for a 1999 shark movie that is near and dear to many millennials. “Deep Blue Sea is a movie that raised me,” explained O’Rourke. “I remember seeing the trailer for that movie and my head was spinning around. I was so excited…. It’s a very different movie. That movie is almost more of an action movie. It’s obviously a much larger scale and a very different, different kind of movie [than Chum].”
When it hits theaters and Digital/VOD on June 5, Chum joins the ranks of Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, and 48 Meters Down as tense shark movies grounded by human characters to get behind. For Zuck and O’Rourke, their film promises to offer audiences a fun, suspenseful thriller that will make your next swim in open waters far more terrifying.
Watch the full interview with Chum director and co-writer Jonathan Zuck and producer Eamon O’Rourke below….
