Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Tyler Hamilton: Hello? Hello, mics are working here. Well, this is a pleasure, I have to
say. I have recently read the book, "Save the Humans", and I'm glad we've got a guy
like Rob trying to save us all here in this room. It was a fascinating book. I particularly
enjoyed it because it gave us a good idea of who Rob is as an individual and what led
him to become a maker of a movie like "Sharkwater", and to even stretch beyond that and to, I
guess, take that bold step of trying to save humanity.
TH: What I want to do is just start off by asking Rob, why did you make "Sharkwater"?
What was it that motivated you? Does it go back to your early childhood, and did you
feel that this was something in you from the day you were born, or is there something,
some moment in your life that said, "Hey, this is what I gotta do"?
Rob Stewart: I think for me, it was just the information that did it. As a kid, I loved
sharks and I grew up... I was chubby, I stuttered, but underwater it didn't matter. Underwater,
I was in this three-dimensional world with super predators, and I could fly. And I fell
in love with sharks. The first time I met them, I was nine, I was holding onto a little
rock in the Cayman Islands, and instead of this shark coming up and trying to eat me,
like I'd been told my whole life, the shark was afraid of me. And if sharks are afraid
of a nine year old kid, then maybe all the media that's been telling us sharks are dangerous,
and sharks are gonna eat you, maybe that was false. And every shark I met after that was
afraid of me as well, sort of opening up the entire world for me to explore and really
giving me a far deeper appreciation for these misunderstood animals.
RS: And then, I became a wildlife photographer 'cause I figured the pinnacle of what I could
do as a human, would be to travel the world and spend time with these animals and then,
I had my most exciting trip ever, my first photo assignment to photograph hammerhead
sharks. So sharks are amazing animals, sharks are 450 million years old, they predate the
dinosaurs by 150 million years, they've survived five major extinctions on earth, they have
two more senses than humans, they can sense movement in the water through a lateral line
that runs down the sides of their bodies and they have senses on the underside of their
snout called, ampullae of Lorenzini, which detect electromagnetic fields so they can
follow undersea ridges like roadmaps and they can feel your heartbeat, they can tell if
you're excited or you're scared, and they can find animals that are hidden from view.
RS: And hammerhead sharks are a recent evolutionary experiment. They're only 70 million years
old, so the sensors on the underside of their snout have a far greater surface area to work.
So hammerheads are some of the most sensitive sharks in the world. So when you want to dive
with them, or you want to spend time with them, you gotta be really calm and really
careful, and you've got to approach them really slowly and make sure they're accustomed to
you. And I couldn't be more excited to photograph what was my favourite shark in the world which
I'd never seen. And when I arrived in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, a place where
they're supposed to congregate in schools, I found a fishing line that would stretch
from Earth to outer space with 16,000 baited hooks and hundreds of dead and dying sharks,
and sort of quickly realized that if sharks are being killed in the most protected places
on the planet, in a UNESCO World Heritage site protected by the Ecuadorian military,
in one of the seven underwater wonders of the world, then the rest of the world, which
is unprotected, is probably in even worst shape. And it was.
RS: Shark populations had dropped 90% in 30 years. We were killing a hundred million sharks
a year, and no one knew, and no one really cared. And I tried using magazine articles
and newspapers, and trying to use my talents in this career that I thought was mine for
good to get the word out. And I set up a fund with the Charles Darwin Research Station in
the Galapagos, so anyone reading these articles, these impassioned pleas could donate money
to getting a patrol boat in the Galapagos to stop illegal long-lining. And after a year
in getting magazine articles in all of, every paper and every news magazine I could, we
got $1,300 in donations. And we needed at least $100,000 to get the boat we were thinking
of.
TH: That was far more money than you had put in to actually getting to that point, right?
RS: Yeah.
TH: You could've just donated the money and...
RS: I could've just donated the money and yeah, I spent way more than that. So, I figured,
I had to give the public my impression of sharks 'cause if people cared about pandas,
and elephants and bears, but didn't care about sharks, then there was something missing.
And I thought what was missing was our love of these animals and that Jaws, and the media
portraying sharks as menacing predators of people, had blinded us to the fact that they're
being wiped out. So I thought, if I could give the public sharks through my eyes, then
maybe they'd want to fight for their protection and that's why I tried to make "Sharkwater".
TH: But it's interesting because you had, from an early age, this fascination with predators,
right? You can go through, it's very comical actually, as childhood, the various reptiles
and animals that he had that scared his parents quite a bit, that posed dangers to you. Why
the fascination with predators as opposed to those fuzzy animals like pandas and all
the cute stuff? Like Leonardo da Vinci's focused on tigers, but you're focused on sharks. It
could have been anything, maybe not sharks. It could have been lizards, it could have
been a particular species of lizard. Why the focus and the fascination with predators?
RS: Maybe it's easier for young boys to get this, but they're just cooler. [laughter]
They eat the cute and fuzzy stuff, they've got bigger teeth, they are far more bad ***.
And so, growing up as a kid, you go into the pet store, and there's the bunny, and then
there's something that eats the bunny. Of course, you want the thing that eats the bunny.
I did.
TH: But that's why they are feared. You're on a mission to try to show people that sharks
are actually not that dangerous, yet you used to get fascination watching these things operate
as predators and to use these special skills. You said that you were most interested in
the specialists, those predators that have a specific sense, a specific skill or evolutionary
design that made them lethal killers.
RS: I guess, I just sort of saw everything as competitive, as a kid, right? Competitive
in terms of how you're gonna survive on this planet. Are you gonna make it or are you not
gonna make it? Where have you come from? And why do these animals survive when other animals
were wiped off of the face of the earth? And imagining their evolutionary history, like
why are there not dinosaurs right now? Why do we have crocodiles? Why do we have things
like sharks? As soon as I understood the evolutionary significance or how long these animals have
been on the planet, not that I understood this from an early age, but perhaps this is
an indication of why I love them so much. If you were to crown one animal as ruler of
Earth, it would be the shark. But we're doing a pretty great job right now; we're a couple
hundred thousand years old. Sharks are 450 million years old.
RS: They're the first vertebrate with jaws, the most abundant large predators the planet
has ever seen, there's sharks under Arctic ice and sharks in the deepest, darkest trenches
of the oceans, that if we succeed in wiping out a lot of our ecosystems, those sharks
can repopulate the planet in another age of sharks. But as a kid, I think it was sort
of an enigmatic quality of them, the fact that we knew so little about them, the fact
that we hadn't explored them, like we couldn't get up close and really figure out what they
were all about, unless they were dead. And so the live lives of sharks and what they
did and how they manage to endure through all this time, I think that's pretty fascinating.
TH: But I'm surprised that you're alive.
[laughter]
RS: Me too.
TH: Because when I was reading about your childhood and then going into your teenage
years and then into university, you had Satan, which was, what kind of lizard was, iguana?
RS: Satan... I didn't name Satan, by the way. [chuckle] But Satan was a water monitor lizard,
the second biggest lizard in the world underneath the Komodo dragon.
TH: That's right, yeah, so you had Satan, you had a olive python with a personality
disorder that destroyed your room and attacked you and your dad. When you were in Africa,
you kept a highly poisonous scorpion in your shirt pocket just for fun, and you're, in
the book, you're like, "Ah, I was lucky, it never stung me." You caught a Mamba, Mamba
snake? One of the most poisonous snakes in Africa with his bare hands, not knowing that
it was that poisonous, and then he showed it to the folks he was with on this field
studies course in Africa, and they all ran when he opened up, I guess it was a laundry
bin or some kind of plastic bin. And then, at one point, as a kid, I don't know how old
you were, but you were riding your bike and you saw an alligator, and you just decided
alone to jump on its back and wrestle it. And then you figured, "How am I gonna get
off of this thing?" So that, I had thoughts of Steve Irwin coming into my mind, and I'm
thinking when is the day gonna come where he gets the spiky stingray barb in the heart?
Do you ever worry about that, given your line of work that you're in now?
RS: Not really, no. No, I just sort of figured I'll be alright.
TH: Your parents?
RS: My parents worry all the time, yeah. But what I've always told them, I just have this
belief that I'm gonna be okay and I'm sure I'm gonna be okay, and the amount of times
that I've almost died and ended up okay, have sort of reinforced that belief, that I'm gonna
be okay. [laughter]
TH: But that's a dangerous path to go down.
RS: Unless I'm gonna be okay.
TH: That actually, that flows into our discussion, which we'll hit on in much more detail later,
about trying to save humanity and how part of the problem with humanity is that we've
constantly gone down this path of, "We've always been okay, so what we're doing is okay."
but anyway, I just wanna throw that out there. We can talk about that later. One of the things,
and I'll move on from childhood shortly, but school was never really something that interested
you. You were always kinda like teachers, you had this, not hatred but a resent I think
you said, for teachers and you just wanted to go out and do your own thing. In doing
your own thing, I found you to be an excellent negotiator, so you could have been a lawyer,
the way you managed to negotiate various situations either to get things from your parents, or
to get that trip somewhere, or to manage to get into a country to get film permits. Do
you think that there's an element of your negotiating abilities that made it impossible
for you to really like school, and that you really were just too curious and school did
not really give you that kind of excitement that you craved as a teenager?
RS: I think so. I think, particularly in the situation we are today, I understand why I
wasn't that interested in school. For me, animals and life and ecosystems and the outdoors,
that was what I cared about, and that was what was really important to me. And then,
I'd get locked inside for long periods of time in rubber chairs and told to study stuff
that I knew would have no relevance in my life, wouldn't make me happier, wouldn't make
me love more or understand ecosystems or species. I was crunchin' numbers and doing French.
And I wish I'd paid attention in French class, I really do, 'cause that would be infinitely
useful. But I just never understood why I had to learn what I had to learn. And so I'd
sort of put my effort into trying to figure out how to do well in the tests, not to actually
learn. So by the time I was done university, I was amazing at multiple choice questions.
RS: But I don't think I've learned anything in school, and as soon as I was done with
those multiple choice questions, everything left my brain. And I think, particularly,
we do have a flaw in our education system which, considering where we're at now, and
we'll get there later, but considering the environmental consequences we potentially
face and where our planet is going, I think we need to revamp in our education system.
We should be taught how to be happy and how to survive on this planet before we're taught
algebra and Shakespeare. And if you sat kids down in, day one and said, "Look, we're sorry,
but we've screwed up. We've burned and consumed most of your life support system. And your
future doesn't look too bright unless you pay attention and get out of school and start
doing something about this", kids would be getting As right away, 'cause their future
depends on it. Right now, we're pushing them towards things that really mean nothing to
them and their lives. And why we should be telling them that at the beginning, we'll
get to, I'm sure.
TH: You must have a photographic memory. You said you never really remembered the stuff
you're answering in multiple choice, yet when it comes to animals and studying the details
of creatures down to the microscopic level it seems, you said you couldn't get close
enough to these things to study the very fine details. And then to be able to recite everything
that you've read in a book or learn, like you seem to be a voracious reader of this
stuff, and you just absorbed it. Do you have a photographic memory? Are you able to really
retain information in an easy way?
RS: I can retain information that I'm interested in.
TH: That you're interested in, yeah.
RS: Yeah, really well. I mean, all sorts of useless facts. Like almost every reptile and
amphibian, I know how big it gets, what it eats, where it comes from, what its ideal
temperatures were, because if I wanted to have these as a kid, I needed to know everything.
But, politics or world news and all sorts of stuff, just in one ear, out the other.
TH: Next, I want to move on to the days that led you to the making of "Sharkwater" and
maybe you can discuss what actually got you into that position and the relationship that
you had with the Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson's crew, and the various, you kind of touched
on it earlier, but the various conflicts that you experienced or observed in that journey
and how you overcame them.
RS: When I was talking to the Galapagos National Park research station, Charles Darwin, and
failed miserably at getting a patrol boat there, they said, "But Sea Shepherd just gave
us a patrol boat." and I said, "Who's Sea Shepherd?" And they pointed me in the direction
of Paul Watson, who is one of the original activists of Greenpeace. You might have heard
of him, he's been ramming Japanese Whaling boats for 20 some odd years and he's now an
international fugitive because of what happened in "Sharkwater". And he said Sea Shepherd
had donated a boat, so I called Sea Shepherd and started getting some information and asked
them what they were up to and they said, "We're about to launch a campaign into Galapagos
Islands, Ecuador and Cocos Island, Costa Rica. Would you like to come and do a photo story
on it?" and I said, "Yes, for sure. You're gonna get me to the most shark rich waters
in the world, amazing." and this is the same sort of time when I was thinking, "How could
I make a movie out of this?" and I had no film education whatsoever, so I really didn't
know the first thing. But, my dad told me about this newer format of video camera that
George Lucas was shooting "Star Wars" with.
RS: And he said the video resolution is so high you can pull stills from the video and
use them in magazine articles. So, I went to every magazine editor and each photo agent
that I had and I said, "I'm gonna do my next photo assignment with digital cameras instead
of film cameras," and got them to give me way more money than I could, and I borrowed
a bunch of money and rented the most expensive motion picture cameras in the world. One of
them actually, which was like a $35,000 rental for this camera, and then started talking
to two of my buddies who had helped me on film shoots before and said, "Do you want
to come on this adventure to try to make a shark movie?" And then I told Sea Shepherd,
"I'm not just gonna come and make a photo story, I'm gonna come and try to make a documentary
about this." And at the time, I wasn't really thinking Sea Shepherd was gonna be a big part
of it, because I didn't know how to tell a story with people in it. But I figured, 'cause
I could take pretty pictures underwater, that maybe I could take pretty motion pictures
underwater.
RS: All the most expensive underwater movies I'd ever seen, these IMAX movies, the camera
never panned, the camera just stayed stationary and just filmed what was in front of it. So
I figured, I could do this. All I've got to do is point the camera and keep it steady
and not move it; this will be easy. So my girlfriend at the time bought me two books
on how to make movies, and I had "***" and "Amelie" on my laptop computer. And so
I was...
[laughter]
TH: Hey, those are good movies to have.
RS: Yeah. [chuckle] So I'm reading books on how to make movies on the plane on the way
there, and the manual for this camera was that big, and even, I devoured the manual
like two or three times and still, it contained enough information and words that I could
maybe only understand a half to two-thirds of what the camera could do, because it had
whole computers inside it, like whole parts of its memory system devoted just to each
colour and whether the colour goes to its full extension range or compresses based on
how much light is in it. So, I'm reading all this stuff. And Sea Shepherd invited me to
join them in Los Angeles and then to take this trip from Los Angeles, south to Costa
Rica. And so, I met one buddy in Toronto, and we took 35 cases of equipment to Air Canada
and checked excess baggage.
[laughter]
RS: And at the time, there was no limit on how many bags you could take, it was just
100 bucks a bag. So we just, 35 bags of equipment onto Air Canada and then wham, we're in Los
Angeles on board Sea Shepherd's ship, about to start a journey south to Costa Rica. And
I'm 22 at this point, and I probably look like I'm 18. I don't have much facial hair,
I've probably got a squeaky voice still, and I jump on board Sea Shepherd and all of a
sudden I'm with all these other people, who are basically my age or older. And I have
to sort of exert some sort of authority and say, "I'm here to make a movie. So if you
guys cooperate with me and the movie's better, you get me underwater with sharks, we have
a better chance of saving sharks." And so I had to sort of like, grow as a person and
try to win these people over.
TH: That's what was mind-boggling is, here's this 22-year-old doing the equivalent of Doogie
Howser going to work in a hospital, right? And you've got a guy like Paul Watson who's
seen everything, he's been around. And part of the trip was trying to show him that you're
competent and that what you're doing is something meaningful and worth his time. You eventually
did win over Paul, right?
RS: Yeah, I think so. What really helped was the fact that I had giant cameras, [laughter]
and really expensive cameras. 'Cause if I showed up with a dinky little camera, as a
22-year-old kid, they'd be like, "Yeah, whatever". But I had this giant camera which is worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars, so like, everyone was flabbergasted. Like, "How did
he get this camera if he's... He's gotta be worth something or he's gotta have something
behind him." So that helped significantly. And meeting up with Paul Watson, he was a
little jaded, and he's a bit of a interesting cat to begin with. So meeting him, I just
sort of got brushed off a little bit like, "Yeah, right. Good luck. Come on. Sure," type
of thing. And it took me a while to actually engage him, and I don't think I had won him
over until...
TH: The turning point was the shark fins on the roof, right?
RS: Yeah, until we got him into the shark fin warehouse in Costa Rica, and filmed all
these shark fins drying on the roofs of the building which basically proved that Costa
Rica was allowing this massive illegal fin industry worth millions of dollars. And because
of that, we had to run from Costa Rica in a rapid boat with barbed wire, but that got
through to the footage and the evidence that Costa Rica was doing something serious.