cdiver2
Contributor
After my first dive with SC I had no respect for them, after reading this even less. Stressing a shark so you can manage it for filming.
The shark whisperer
(Filed: 24/12/2004)
When Hollywood directors want to simulate a shark attack they invariably go to Stuart Cove - a scuba diver who can rustle up a school of man-eaters quicker than you can say 'Jaws'. He takes Adam Higginbotham under the waves to meet his killer cast
There are two, three, then four of them. Five, seven, ten, and then... more than that. Gliding in from where delicate turquoise fades into darkness, where the visibility fails and the bottom drops sharply from 30ft to 6,000ft, the sharks idle by, swimming in long curves of languid disinterest.
Stuart Cove: the sharks circle around him and eat what he has to offer
Stuart Cove kneels alone on the sandy sea floor. One hand rests on a plastic crate filled with freshly chopped chunks of fish; in the other he holds a short steel spike, bound at one end with silver gaffer tape, for grip. The sharks circle him in lazy, elliptical, overlapping orbits, closing on the bait box, nuzzling it until he pushes them away.
When he opens the crate to spear the first piece - a silvery chunk of grouper the size of a man's hand - even more sharks appear in the water around us. By now there are perhaps 20 of them - caribbean reef sharks - the smallest 4ft, the largest 9ft from nose to tail. They crowd in, bumping him, forcing themselves beneath the arm he keeps braced against the box, circling and returning, snatching suddenly at the bait.
Up close, from two or three feet away, their eyes are yellow and black, with narrow pupils like a cat's. Fine ridges of muscle kink across their bodies as they turn towards the food. Twenty minutes later all the fish has gone, and the sharks drift away. Afterwards, on the surface, Cove changes over his scuba tank and eats a ham sandwich as he prepares for another dive. I ask him how he feels it went: the first feeding of the day.
'That was nice,' he says cheerfully. 'Nice and mellow.'
Stuart Cove is Hollywood's most famous and prolific shark wrangler, a solid, jovial man who refers to the world above the surface of the ocean as 'topside' and speaks with the gently lilting Caribbean accent of a Bahamian native.
There is a slight tremor in his hands, and his face and arms are red-brown and covered with tiny purple lesions, the result of recent preventative skin cancer treatment made necessary by 40 years' exposure to the sun. 'I look pretty,' he says drily, 'don't I?'
'In my first film they said to me: "If the shark comes to you, just jump on its back"
On a beautiful morning in early November he strides down the dock on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, where his fleet of dive boats is moored. He sips a cup of tea made with evaporated milk, and gamely poses for photographs with his pet parrot on his shoulder. He has the affable but distracted air of a slightly harried corporate executive: smiling and friendly, but with a distant look in his eye that suggests his mind may be elsewhere.
Cove is the owner of Stuart Cove's Aqua Adventures, the largest scuba-diving and watersports operation in the Bahamas. With separately branded scuba, snorkelling and underwater-photography wings, and a contract with the islands' newest resort complex - the colossal
2,300-room Atlantis - Cove's distinctive hot pink logo is ubiquitous around Nassau and nearby Paradise Island. His list of diving students includes Princes William and Harry, Robert Redford and an apparently somewhat reluctant Sean Connery.
('He's a golfer,' Cove says carefully, 'Not a diver.') The company is successful enough to make him reluctant to admit exactly how much money he makes. 'Could we just say multi-million dollar? How about that?' he asks, when I enquire about his annual turnover.
But outside the Bahamas Stuart Cove is better known for one specific part of his business. Over the past 25 years he has created some of Hollywood's most memorable underwater sequences. He's captured, manipulated and cajoled sharks into scenes where they appear as sleeping sharks, radio-controlled sharks and - naturally - giant, man-eating sharks. His body of work includes three James Bond films, one Jaws sequel and,
a few years ago, a television advertisement for a Japanese toothpaste which involved him getting a shark to hold still underwater while he scrubbed its teeth with a 5ft pink toothbrush. This summer Cove completed filming on Into the Blue, a remake of the 1970s undersea classic The Deep.
But the film that made him famous is Open Water, the sleeper hit of 2004 and the most remarkable shark-horror film of the past ten years. Made with practically no money and filmed on shop-bought digital video cameras, the film depicted a young couple stranded in the open ocean by a negligent dive operator - and then menaced by sharks.
What made the film notable was that it didn't use any stand-ins or effects. The two principal actors were actually filmed in the water with a school of feeding caribbean reef sharks. 'A lot of it wasn't acting. It was real fear. It should have been stunt people,' says Cove, who still hasn't seen the finished film. 'But they had no budget for that.'
The shark scenes were so frightening and so authentic that, earlier this year, the American magazine Entertainment Weekly included him on their list of the 100 most creative people in Hollywood.
The shark whisperer
(Filed: 24/12/2004)
When Hollywood directors want to simulate a shark attack they invariably go to Stuart Cove - a scuba diver who can rustle up a school of man-eaters quicker than you can say 'Jaws'. He takes Adam Higginbotham under the waves to meet his killer cast
There are two, three, then four of them. Five, seven, ten, and then... more than that. Gliding in from where delicate turquoise fades into darkness, where the visibility fails and the bottom drops sharply from 30ft to 6,000ft, the sharks idle by, swimming in long curves of languid disinterest.
Stuart Cove: the sharks circle around him and eat what he has to offer
Stuart Cove kneels alone on the sandy sea floor. One hand rests on a plastic crate filled with freshly chopped chunks of fish; in the other he holds a short steel spike, bound at one end with silver gaffer tape, for grip. The sharks circle him in lazy, elliptical, overlapping orbits, closing on the bait box, nuzzling it until he pushes them away.
When he opens the crate to spear the first piece - a silvery chunk of grouper the size of a man's hand - even more sharks appear in the water around us. By now there are perhaps 20 of them - caribbean reef sharks - the smallest 4ft, the largest 9ft from nose to tail. They crowd in, bumping him, forcing themselves beneath the arm he keeps braced against the box, circling and returning, snatching suddenly at the bait.
Up close, from two or three feet away, their eyes are yellow and black, with narrow pupils like a cat's. Fine ridges of muscle kink across their bodies as they turn towards the food. Twenty minutes later all the fish has gone, and the sharks drift away. Afterwards, on the surface, Cove changes over his scuba tank and eats a ham sandwich as he prepares for another dive. I ask him how he feels it went: the first feeding of the day.
'That was nice,' he says cheerfully. 'Nice and mellow.'
Stuart Cove is Hollywood's most famous and prolific shark wrangler, a solid, jovial man who refers to the world above the surface of the ocean as 'topside' and speaks with the gently lilting Caribbean accent of a Bahamian native.
There is a slight tremor in his hands, and his face and arms are red-brown and covered with tiny purple lesions, the result of recent preventative skin cancer treatment made necessary by 40 years' exposure to the sun. 'I look pretty,' he says drily, 'don't I?'
'In my first film they said to me: "If the shark comes to you, just jump on its back"
On a beautiful morning in early November he strides down the dock on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, where his fleet of dive boats is moored. He sips a cup of tea made with evaporated milk, and gamely poses for photographs with his pet parrot on his shoulder. He has the affable but distracted air of a slightly harried corporate executive: smiling and friendly, but with a distant look in his eye that suggests his mind may be elsewhere.
Cove is the owner of Stuart Cove's Aqua Adventures, the largest scuba-diving and watersports operation in the Bahamas. With separately branded scuba, snorkelling and underwater-photography wings, and a contract with the islands' newest resort complex - the colossal
2,300-room Atlantis - Cove's distinctive hot pink logo is ubiquitous around Nassau and nearby Paradise Island. His list of diving students includes Princes William and Harry, Robert Redford and an apparently somewhat reluctant Sean Connery.
('He's a golfer,' Cove says carefully, 'Not a diver.') The company is successful enough to make him reluctant to admit exactly how much money he makes. 'Could we just say multi-million dollar? How about that?' he asks, when I enquire about his annual turnover.
But outside the Bahamas Stuart Cove is better known for one specific part of his business. Over the past 25 years he has created some of Hollywood's most memorable underwater sequences. He's captured, manipulated and cajoled sharks into scenes where they appear as sleeping sharks, radio-controlled sharks and - naturally - giant, man-eating sharks. His body of work includes three James Bond films, one Jaws sequel and,
a few years ago, a television advertisement for a Japanese toothpaste which involved him getting a shark to hold still underwater while he scrubbed its teeth with a 5ft pink toothbrush. This summer Cove completed filming on Into the Blue, a remake of the 1970s undersea classic The Deep.
But the film that made him famous is Open Water, the sleeper hit of 2004 and the most remarkable shark-horror film of the past ten years. Made with practically no money and filmed on shop-bought digital video cameras, the film depicted a young couple stranded in the open ocean by a negligent dive operator - and then menaced by sharks.
What made the film notable was that it didn't use any stand-ins or effects. The two principal actors were actually filmed in the water with a school of feeding caribbean reef sharks. 'A lot of it wasn't acting. It was real fear. It should have been stunt people,' says Cove, who still hasn't seen the finished film. 'But they had no budget for that.'
The shark scenes were so frightening and so authentic that, earlier this year, the American magazine Entertainment Weekly included him on their list of the 100 most creative people in Hollywood.