Blanchard: It’s the barracuda that you see in the film that Daniel and I are swimming around. Chris has a very big bright red camera casing that I’m sure was a red flag to the barracuda and we were swimming over and under him in his territory, bothering him. He just got fed up and took a swipe at me. When you’re underwater you’re pressurized so it was gushing blood, but as I got close to the surface and rinsed it off, I realized that it wasn’t that bad. I had a few nervous moments underwater, when I didn’t know how bad it was, because it was just bleeding so much. My next question once I realized it was fine was “Did you get it on camera?”
CS!: There was one scene Blanchard is sleeping in the water and there are all these sharks swimming around her. How was that done?
Daniel: She got fooled a little bit.
Blanchard: Yeah. When you shut your eyes for some reason, it’s so much scarier. We were laughing to ourselves, because what difference does it make? So you can see the shark coming and biting you? It’s not going to help you to be able to see! For some reason, it was so threatening having your eyes closed. Plus Daniel wasn’t there. When you’re together with another person, you’re just that much bigger and animals don’t attack anything that is their size or bigger. The bigger I could be the safer I felt. Some of the sharks were eight and ten feet long, so I wanted to be as big and long as I could. So I was out there by myself and with my eyes shut, so when I was laying back, Laura would say to me that there were no sharks around. “Just lay still and don’t open your eyes because if one shows up you don’t want to ruin the take.” And when I saw the footage later, they were everywhere.
Open Water is playing now in select cities and opens everywhere on Friday.
