Humanizing the Sharks: Sean Byrne on “Dangerous Animals” | Interviews

Bringing together serial killers and sharks—two of the horror genre’s apex predators—in a savage, deliciously executed spectacle, Sean Byrne’s “Dangerous Animals” (in theaters June 6, via IFC Films) boasts one of those high concepts so diabolically simple he couldn’t believe it hadn’t been done before. 

But what Byrne—the Australian filmmaker behind “The Loved Ones” and “The Devil’s Candy”—found most irresistible about the script by Nick Lepard was the way it avoided mischaracterizing sharks as serial man-eaters. “Dangerous Animals” takes a more scientifically sound approach to depicting its shark species and instead introduces another sort of oversized, bloodthirsty, and vengeful killer: Jai Courtney’s twisted Tucker. 

A rambunctious rogue whose boat-captain charisma conceals a sadistic streak, Tucker is an inspired creation, brought to life by the “Suicide Squad” actor with gregarious humor and more than a glint of madness. For Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an American surfer running from her past, he’s a living nightmare. Soon after Zephyr lets her guard down upon meeting a friendly local named Moses (Josh Heuston), she’s brutally abducted by Tucker and taken aboard his boat, where he plots to orchestrate a feeding frenzy by lowering his victim into shark-infested waters. Resourceful and strong-willed, Zephyr fights tooth and nail to avoid this unfathomable fate.

If Steven Spielberg’s seminal “Jaws” treated sharks as serial killers of the sea, stalking their victims and striking from the deep without provocation, Byrne’s film is a confidently grisly corrective, exploring instead what evil lurks in the heart of man. It’s also a work of delightfully canny craftsmanship. Byrne incorporated real 4K footage of sharks, seamlessly blending it together with precisely choreographed action shot with actors on location in Queensland’s Gold Coast. Working with cinematographer Shelley Farthing-Dawe to capture as much footage in camera as possible, Byrne then collaborated with teams of VFX artists to ensure sharks were realistically integrated.

The film marks a high-profile return to horror for Byrne, a decade on from “The Devil’s Candy,” and a significant moment for Australian cinema, given its recent premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, within the Directors’ Fortnight section. It was the first Australian feature to screen in the sidebar in over 10 years. 

Hours before that premiere, as the Mediterranean sun beat mercilessly down upon the private beach clubs of the Croisette, intrepid souls were seen swimming out past the golden-sand coastline and into the bay’s unknown depths. On the beachfront, Byrne sat for an interview with RogerEbert.com about the strange psychology of serial killers, the immersive atmosphere of “Dangerous Animals,” that time Mick Fanning punched a shark, and what his next serial-killer story has in common with “Longlegs.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

“Dangerous Animals” opens with Tucker taking a couple out on the ocean for one of his shark diving tours. You filmed on the Gold Coast, which offers plenty of cage diving and ocean diving experiences, so I’m curious if you ever took the plunge yourself.  

I didn’t. I wanted to, and it was a request of mine, but the film was greenlit so suddenly that it was like being shot out of a cannon. There just wasn’t time. I have gone scuba diving before, so I have experience with that. I rewatched “Jaws” because of its classical, minimalist suspense, and because I knew I wanted to focus on the foreshadowing of the fin, when it goes underwater and the audience waits for the moment of attack. That’s the most powerful form of horror, when it comes to shark films, because it engages the audience’s imagination. 

After that, I just watched shark documentaries on the Discovery Channel. There’ve been a lot of shark films recently where there are sharks in the water, they’re sleek, and they have human reactions. I wanted to get away from that and present sharks with scars, with imperfections that define their personalities. I knew from the outset what type of shark film I wanted to make, how I wanted them to be represented, and it’s something that I hadn’t seen on screen before: humanizing the sharks, in a different way. 

You must read so many horror scripts. When you first read “Dangerous Animals,” what excited you about the material?

The script first crossed my desk about two years ago, and I feel very fortunate that it did, because, even at that stage, when it was a bigger-budget film, the fusion of those two subgenres of horror—a shark film meets a serial-killer film—was there right from the outset. I thought, “What an incredible high-concept idea.” It’s the type of concept you could write on a napkin and still sell it, and I wondered why that hadn’t been done before. 

As I was reading it through, I loved that sharks weren’t presented as indiscriminate killers, that the real monster was man. I felt “the shark film” had been long overdue for an overhaul. As you know, “Jaws” is a masterpiece, and it’s one of my favorite films, but it did a great disservice to the sharks, in a way, because every shark film that followed is about sharks hunting humans. 

This script had a great shark-conservation throughline, without shirking on the shark action. But even when the sharks turn up, it’s at the manipulation of man. I just thought it was an incredibly fresh take on both of those subgenres. With character richness and the audience investing in those characters, it could be truly terrifying and satisfying, but still a fun, extreme rollercoaster.

You live in Tasmania. What particular symbolism does the shark hold in Australian culture, if any?

Sharks are a universal fear. If you look online at lists of most commonly held fears, they’re usually in the top three or top five. Australia is no different. There’s a great prevalence of sharks in Australia. If you see infrared footage from above, they’re always there if you’re a surfer, so there’s a great awareness of sharks in Australia. And they’re a part of the mythology of Australia: that you get off the plane, and something’s going to get you, whether it’s creepy crawlies, snakes, or sharks. I suppose we’re playing into that mythology here, to a certain extent. 

This is a fish-out-of-water story, with an American running away from her past and landing in Australia, so it’s fun to play that up, to a certain extent. But there’s been no sort of great symbolism, of what sharks mean to Australians, specifically. I remember living in America when Mick Fanning, the surfer, punched that shark on the nose, after it attacked him during the J-Bay Open finals, and it got major press because of this Australian kind of larrikinism: he punched a shark in the face! 

That ties into Tucker and his relationship with sharks, where he’s this weird alpha male that has bonded with the shark, or at least taken on that persona and developed shark skin in a symbolic sort of way. 

To your point of mythologies around Australia, there are distinct masculine archetypes we often see on screen, related to the tough, cheeky larrikin or the more violent alpha male. Tucker, as played by Jai Courtney, is sociopathic but also shrugs off the depravity he inflicts with a wink and a grin throughout the film. How did you two find your way into this larger-than-life villain? 

Jai is such a great actor, and he understands the difference between a movie line, winking at the audience, and saying, “Welcome aboard,” and creating a three-dimensional character. In Australian cinema, there’s a great history with the unpredictability of the Australian alpha male or larrikin. These characters can be very welcoming, but you don’t know whether it’s a joke or whether there’s menace underneath the humor. 

Jai has this naturally wild charisma that I thought really captured that to begin with, and he can bring great physical intimidation, but he’s also a nuanced enough character actor to capture the broken child inside the man. We don’t go deep into the exposition, but obviously, he was attacked as a child himself, and there appears to be a certain level of parental neglect, of warped socialization. There was a lot of meaty character stuff to draw on. 

Most serial killers, they’re never killing their victim; they’re killing their mother, their past, whoever’s the source of this pain they’ve never been able to get over. Most of my films involve serial killers in one way or another. I’m interested in the extreme nature of man, in man’s lack of empathy, and how that can be covered with a mask of personality. It’s how the spider catches the fly. 

Jai understood all of that, but he also understood the fact that antagonists can own the screen in a horror film, the way Kathy Bates does in “Misery,” Christian Bale in “American Psycho,” or Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” It’s such a wonderful opportunity to create something that audiences love to hate, to try to live in their nightmares, but also to make sure that it’s fun for them. The whole thing was a tightrope, and I just can’t imagine anyone who could have played it more perfectly than he does. On one hand, you want to have a beer with him, but at the next moment, you want to sprint away from him as fast as you can.

You shot “Dangerous Animals” over many weeks on the Gold Coast, at night, in wintertime, often hanging actors on a crane off a boat on the water. Logistically, what were the challenges of getting that type of footage and ensuring sharks could circle under the actors, especially making it as real as you could and keeping CGI to a minimum? 

To begin with, it’s always about what we can actually achieve with the actors. For the most part, we could do everything with the actors; we had an incredible stunt team that was very safety-conscious, and things had been rehearsed over and over again with stunt doubles. We had great stunt doubles, as well, so there’s a real blending there. We actually put the actors up on the crane, and we swung them out over the water. 

Obviously, there were no sharks in the water; anything that you see above water, such as above-water fins, was achieved with CGI, which was a necessity for the blocking to be so specific. The film is very precise and measured. You can’t do a John Cassavetes sort of shark film. [laughs] “The Reef” was shot like that, where you’re just grabbing real shark footage, then trying to rework the script to match it. 

With this, it was extremely precise. Everything had been storyboarded, along with photos of exactly what I wanted, which were inevitably taken from Shark Week, nature documentaries, or books. We hired a shark historian; we watched hundreds of hours of material, then we whittled it down to what worked for the shots. If it was a point-of-view shot from one of the characters, we were using 4K footage of real sharks, then changing the look of the water the actors are swimming in, in the [color] grade, to match. 

Other times, when we needed to see sharks underwater with the actors—while they were shark cage diving, for example—we would roto[scope] out the real sharks then put them into water we’d shot with the actors. The brief, right from the beginning, was that these sharks had to be real, and that they had to have real scars and move like real sharks—not be like bullet trains, other than the mako, which actually can swim up to 70 miles an hour. 

At one point, we had a tiger-shark fin in a shot, but the tiger-shark fin is spotted; when I’d watch the footage back on the run, I’d realize it was taking us out of the story, because it was a fin the audience would not be used to seeing, so we’d swap it out for a fin more like you’re accustomed to seeing from “Jaws.” You need film language, the same way a punch on screen doesn’t sound like a punch in real life. You need to see a fin that looks like a real fin; with sharks, the tail fin often stands out of the water as well, but that can be confusing, because it would look like two fins on screen. [laughs] Sometimes, we followed movie rules; for the most part, we followed documentary rules. In the moment, it’s about when you feel what works and what doesn’t.

Given how extensively you storyboarded this, what kind of space did you leave yourself to rework or reconceptualize shots on set? Sharks aside, this is such a consistently strong film in terms of shot composition, blocking, and framing. Even that small shot of Zephyr, handcuffed to a bed, looking across at the ominous open handcuffs on the bed where her cellmate had been kept, is so haunting.

I’d say 85% of it is conceptualized in advance, because I have to know the characters and what’s happening in a scene. With that particular example, it’s the relationship between Zephyr and [fellow captive] Heather; they’re cellmates, and Heather is like a young sister. She’s not as worldly as Zephyr. Once she’s gone, that symbolism makes sense. It’s icing on the cake for the character work that’s already been done. At the same time, I don’t want to restrict the actors. That meet-cute between Zephyr and [love interest] Moses is very different from how I’d imagined it. But there’s a magnetic charge between actors, and if they’re naturally drawn to play something in a certain way, I want to see that play out.

When it is more dialogue- and character-driven, you’ve got to be flexible. But there are moments, like that one that you talked about, that can be so specific. Hopefully, there are enough of those that they build up, and it becomes cinematic in the sense that you find motifs. I’m a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and the Coen brothers; all their frames are so incredibly precise, psychologically, and there’s such thought about what goes into the dressing. I love all types of films, but to me, that’s when filmmaking is the most rewarding, because you’re going into it asking, “What do we have at our disposal, and how can we get it into the frame to maximize emotion?” That only comes from knowing exactly what’s going to happen in the scene.

What can you say about collaborating with your cinematographer, Shelley Farthing-Dawe, in terms of moving from storyboards to figuring out how much you could capture in camera and with your actors on set?

It feels very similar to working with an actor. The best cinematographers are storytellers, and they need to know what’s going on emotionally. When you’re watching “Dangerous Animals” to begin with, it feels like the quintessential summer film; it’s sleek, and the blues are vivid, and it feels like you’ve stepped into a postcard. And then the shock of the sudden turn hits even harder, because the audience has been set up for this idyllic, tourist-toned world. 

As the story deepens and darkens, the characters are metaphorically going into hell, and you can start to use those reds. It’s the same with sound design, which can become more expressionistic, whereas more natural sounds make sense to begin with, for a more controlled world. If you’ve suffered extreme blood loss and sleep loss, suddenly the world’s not going to sound like it normally does. It might sound more like a David Lynch film. [laughs]

That’s the fun of genre: being able to ride those stylistic waves, but in a way that is very true to character, true to the moment. Shelley and I talked about this almost being a Bruckheimer film—we referenced “Top Gun Maverick,” how slick and inviting it was—but it has this dark, independent, character-driven heart to it. The combination made it interesting.

Michael Yezerski, your composer, let it rip with the score for “Dangerous Animals.” It’s hazardous waters he’s swimming in, given the legendary score John Williams did for “Jaws,” but there’s such emotion and intensity to his work here. After collaborating on the score for “The Devil’s Candy,” what was it like to reunite?

He’s a superb composer. We actually went to film school together, but had never worked together there. On “The Devil’s Candy,” it was a situation where the score wasn’t working, and we weren’t going to make it in time for our Toronto premiere, then Michael’s name came up. That felt weirdly circular, given that I’d been to school with him; we were both living in LA at the time. He did the score for “The Devil’s Candy” in seven sleepless days, which was almost impossible, but he managed to whittle it down to be mainly guitar-based, to sound Satanic. He was able to do it because he created a relatively simple framework. That score’s complex, but instrumentally, he’s not using too many instruments.

“Dangerous Animals,” though, is probably the most complex score Michael’s ever done, and it’s certainly the most complex of my films. There are various character themes. Tucker’s theme is madness, like a tidal wave slamming onto the screen; Zephyr’s theme, which morphs into a love theme for her and Moses, is criss-crossing with that throughout the film, deepening and darkening and becoming discordant after starting off quite clean. 

It was a difficult score to compose, but I really love it. We thought about films like “Speed,” from ’90s action cinema, where the score was iconic and heartfelt. It had to be memorable. We wanted the audience to leave the theater humming these themes. There seems to be a trend of a certain nihilism right now, an industrial quality of sound design and score blending so that you can’t tell the difference, but with this score, we wanted it to be extremely rigorous and character-driven. There’s an important scene in the film where Zephyr does something extreme for love, let’s say; most films would treat that as a moment of horror, but we saw it as a moment of inspiration. 

You’ve made three feature films to date, but “Dangerous Animals” is your first to premiere in 10 years. What can you tell me about this past decade in your filmmaking career? 

It’s certainly not deliberate. I worked relentlessly between “The Loved Ones” and “The Devil’s Candy,” and I worked relentlessly between “The Devil’s Candy” and “Dangerous Animals.” I wrote scripts and optioned all of them, but the unfortunate reality is that, if you’re making a non-franchise film—an original R-rated film, even, about humans hunting other humans—those are very difficult to get off the ground in Hollywood, which is naturally and understandably risk-averse. 

I kept optioning my material, but getting the money proved to be extremely difficult—just for those reasons, because they had an edge to them. When “Dangerous Animals” crossed my desk, I saw it as an immediate commercial opportunity because shark films are so popular. Combining it with the serial-killer subgenre, I could see how it could naturally expand the demographics. I see myself as a very commercial filmmaker. My rhythms are commercial. I’m as influenced by Jerry Bruckheimer as I am by David Lynch. 

In a way, I’d say it’s a misnomer that I make dark films. It’s just that, on the page, I feel like I need dark content to confront the audience, because the brief is to scare them. If you don’t scare them, what’s the point? At the same time, I want them to have fun, and I feel like I’m quite an attacking commercial filmmaker. That’s why this represented such a great opportunity. It was overtly more commercial, and I could remind people what I could do, in a way that seemed like a more obvious wide-release film.

You’ve spoken about a few of those original, unproduced scripts in the past: one a contained action movie, one a small-town slasher, and another a serial-killer thriller about the dangers of the modern dating scene. Do you feel you were able to smuggle bits and pieces of those scripts into “Dangerous Animals,” or was this project completely separate?

It’s mostly separate, but because I’ve done so much research on serial killers, it felt like a head start. But I certainly don’t want to repeat myself; in my films, they’re all extremely different types of killers. In “The Loved Ones,” Princess has never grown up from that Disney mindset of “someday, my prince will come,” and she’s incredibly hormonal, and her father is a sociopath, but he’s never had the courage to be a serial killer. Then, Ray in “The Devil’s Candy” is a child that’s never grown up, and it’s about what happens to a child when his parents leave him. Tucker in “Dangerous Animals” is the ultimate, charismatic tour guide that everybody’s met at some point; you’ve been on holiday, you’ve stepped on that boat, and you want someone to fill the void and say, “This is going to be fun.” 

Having an understanding of Ted Bundy, it is also evident that his charm applies to Tucker. To me, serial killers are the most interesting focal point of horror because it feels real; that, in itself, makes it more confrontational. Whereas with the supernatural, I always feel like there’s a safety net. It’s not real: vampire and zombie films can be incredible allegories, but I know it’s make-believe at the end of the day. With serial killer films, Henry from “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” could be behind me in the supermarket, and I find that terrifying. From a writing and directing perspective, I find the challenge of laying out the psychological building blocks of these characters tantalizing. 

It strikes me that horror allows us to stare into the darkness of serial killers, whereas true-crime documentaries are more fixated on trying to solve their behavior. You give us just enough with Tucker, in terms of building blocks. There’s an explanation, but it’s still insane.

In a way, Tucker’s philosophy is that he’s doing on land what the shark does underwater. Even though it’s such a skewed philosophy, I think he’s wrapped it around his own sociopathic bloodlust that comes from his own messed-up socialization.

It’s been a decade since “The Devil’s Candy” premiered in Toronto. What do you think, looking back on the experience of making that film? What does it mean to you now?

“The Devil’s Candy” is a very precious film for me. It’s probably the most personal film that I’ve made. I think the key line is, “Nothing of true worth comes without some sacrifice.” At that moment. I’d had kids, and there is something about this industry and vocation that’s very selfish, that takes you away from your family, and you feel like they’re exposed. It’s a mirror of the tug-of-war that I’ve personally experienced between family and work, because making a film is so immersive that it basically overtakes your life. It’s hard to keep your eye on the prize. That film is deeply personal. 

Do you know what film you’ll make next, and will serial killers factor in?

I’ve been working on a small-town serial killer film that I hope will be next. Again, you know, serial killers are my pet subjects, but this is about a disorganized serial killer, which I haven’t seen before. You’ve got people randomly going missing in this small town, and they’re all different ages, and you have absolutely no idea why—until it all comes together. It shares a mood in common with “Longlegs,” but with a real-world twist, rather than a supernatural one. 

It’s something I got the money together for at the same time as “Dangerous Animals,” but I thought I should make the more overtly commercial summer film first. This one’s with [horror producer] Steven Schneider and Kristian Moliere, who produced “The Babadook.” I’d written this a few years ago, and I am continuing to work on it at the moment, but we’re trying to finalize financing at the moment. It’s a very fickle industry, and things can easily fall apart, but at the moment, that’s the next cab off the rank.

“Dangerous Animals” opens nationwide in U.S. theaters June 6, via IFC Films.