Maximilian Erlenwein Knows What Filming With the Sharks Is Like

There is one thing in this world I fear and it is the ocean. Mainly because I am terrified of sharks. The ocean is their home and I stay out of it because that’s their territory and they don’t come into my home so why should I go into theirs? When I was watching Maximilian Erlenwein’s film The Dive, I thought to myself “This would never happen to me because I wouldn’t be in the ocean for it to happen.”

But one thing I found fascinating was the creation of the film as a whole. When I was trying to figure out how he set up the cameras and situated the filming of it, I couldn’t see how it was done in a tank and so I was lucky enough to speak to Erlenwein for the release of the film about the mechanics of it all and he told me that the movie wasn’t filmed in a tank but was actually filmed in the ocean, you know like how Spielberg shot Jaws way back when and what is my biggest fear.

I asked Erlenwein how he mapped out what he wanted everything to be and he said “Well, it was very easy because it was not shot in the tank. This is all shot in the ocean. And that’s why it looks so beautiful. There’s no chance to do this in a tank. You know, those shots, I mean you can with like a big CGI budget, but this is a really low budget film, so the only chance to compete with those, with this super extreme images everybody’s used to was like, okay, we go, we really shoot it in the ocean. So that’s why it looks beautiful because the ocean is beautiful, the underwater world is stunning and breathtaking.”

You can see our full interview here:

The Dive is available digitally now.

(featured image: RLJE Films)