Interview with Rob Stewart, Director of Sharkwater (Part 2)

Part 1  |  Part 2

Were you nervous?
Absolutely. We ran at some point. The operators came at us with guns. And we had to run. I wish we could have stayed. I wish I had the balls to stay, to keep filming. We had to hop in cars and leave. Our guide later told us the shark fin “mafia” was on the lookout for us and it would not be a good idea to walk around town.



You also caught the flesh-eating disease.
Exactly how I got that I’m not sure. I had cuts all over my feet and something must have gotten in and infected my lymphatic system. The only way I knew I had it was my lymph glands were swollen. I went to hospital a few times in the Galapagos and they just gave me anti-inflammatories. A few days later, I went to a doctor who spoke a tiny bit of English, and he looked at my leg. He took blood tests and said, you’re staying here. You may lose your leg.

Was there any point during the filming you thought about throwing in the towel?
This was close. This was the ultimate low. Everything had gone wrong. We’d been kicked out of virtually all the countries we had been to. I would have been arrested if I had gone back to Costa Rica; and at the end of all this, I had not shot anything underwater. I had come to shoot an underwater documentary and instead shot all this human drama. And now I was possibly going to lose my leg. The situation sucked, and I had a girlfriend in Toronto going crazy, and my parents were wondering what was going on, and I couldn’t tell everybody what exactly was happening, because it would make it worse for me. The only thing I could do in the situation was laugh about it. I also made the decision that I hadn’t made the movie I wanted to make yet, or gotten back underwater with sharks. So much remained to be done. It would have been crazy to give up at that point. So I stayed there [in the hospital] for a week, and eventually the infection cleared up and off I went again.



What are you ultimately hoping people will take away from your film?
There are a few things. The simplest one is that people view sharks differently. They’re not dangerous. They’re not mindless killers. They don’t eat people; and, I think, as long as people view them as dangerous predators, people aren’t going to care about them. They’re not going to want them to survive on the planet. They want to get rid of something they’re afraid of. I hope that it helps to start reversing the way the media has portrayed sharks, and gives people information and the tools they need to make better decisions, to be able to say, “Okay, I’m not going to be afraid of that,” or,“I’m not going to listen to this headline.” In order for humans to survive on this planet, to have such an irrational fear of sharks is not a good thing.

The other thing is that we’ve been in this few-thousand-year trend of destruction. It hasn’t been cool to conserve, to promote sustainable use of the environment, of the oceans. But I think people are going to start realizing that if we’re going to survive on this planet as a species, we need to conserve it and protect it.



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