Interview with Rob Stewart, Director of Sharkwater (Part 1)

Part 1  |  Part 2



Tell us about the first time you saw a shark.
I was a kid. I was free diving with just a mask and a snorkel. I had wanted to see a shark my whole life. I had read about them in books. I’d watched them on television and I thought they were the coolest animals on earth. As I swam around the corner of a reef, I saw a shark. I was just amazed because it was so cool to see something so big and so powerful and so perfect.

Why save sharks? What makes them so important?
Species evolving in the oceans over the last 400 million years have been shaped by their predators—the sharks—a process that has given rise to schooling behavior, camouflage, speed, size, and communication. [Sharks] have survived five major extinctions and now they are being fished out. Many countries have no sharks left because they are being illegally harvested for their fins; and poachers are now fishing sharks from other countries, countries that depend on sharks for food. But no one wants to save sharks, people are afraid of them.



Do specials proclaiming the “summer of the shark” because of attacks, and the Jaws perception upset you?
It really pisses me off. You understand where they’re coming from, because a dangerous shark makes money and sells papers. If they tell you a shark is beautiful and perfect and wonderful and won’t attack you, that’s only going to make news once. But if they tell you “Shark attack, shark attack,” that’s news every time. It’s ridiculous, but you know they are doing it just to play off people’s fears. The reality is totally different. Half the time it is a small shark that accidentally bites someone’s foot. You could have gotten the same injury from stepping on a piece of glass. It’s crazy how the media approaches it, and they’ve given sharks such a bad rap. It’s ludicrous because so few people get bitten.

When did you begin thinking about making a documentary?
I was working as a wildlife photographer and I had done a bunch of different articles in some really big magazines on what was happening to sharks around the world, after I discovered illegal shark fishing in the Galapagos. We set up a little fund where people reading the articles could donate money towards a patrol boat in the Galapagos islands. We received virtually no money. I realized there’s got to be a better way to reach people. Print clearly wasn’t the most powerful medium I could be using. And then I figured, “Okay, what if I make a movie about it?” I had never used a video camera before. I just sort of decided I was going to make a movie. I found some people that would loan me some money to rent some cameras and I got started.



Tell us about shooting the film.
The movie’s gone in every different direction imaginable. When we started, I knew nothing about movies or how to shoot them. So I started just thinking about making a beautiful underwater movie about sharks. And then when I was on this trip with the Sea Shepherd organization and world-renowned conservationist Paul Watson, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. We collided with a shark-fishing boat in Guatemala that was chasing us out of Costa Rica. I never got into the water the first month there. So my underwater documentary dreams were vastly diminished. Then I sort of decided this was a really cool story, and decided to film everything that was going on.



Tell us about shark finning.
Sharks are caught for their fins. Poachers cut off the fins and dump the bodies overboard. The fins are sold for shark-fin soup; and though many countries have banned shark finning, millions of sharks are illegally harvested each year. When we arrived in Costa Rica, the crew of the Sea Shepherd was arrested for attempted murder because of the crash, despite the fact that the president of the country had invited us there. Everyone else involved was wondering why the whole judicial system was attacking us. While onshore, we had a chance to find out more about the shark finning operations.

Shark finning is illegal in Costa Rica, but shark fins were showing up all over Asia that had come from Costa Rica. We figured there had to be some deeper meaning to all of this. We met someone who believed there was a connection between the Taiwanese mafia and all the shark fins turning up in Asia. We started checking it out and this guy had a few places where he knew we would find fins. We started investigating and there were fins everywhere. There were miles of fin operations with thousands of fins drying on rooftops, people bringing in fins. We quickly figured out there was an enormous amount of money coming into the country and there was this whole underground multi-billion-dollar industry.

Part 1  |  Part 2

All photos courtesy of Sharkwater Productions

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• Learn more about Sharkwater and watch the movie trailer

• Video: The Making of Sharkwater

• Learn more about the people in Sharkwater

• Read more about Shark Finning