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If ever there was a shark movie that encourages audiences to root for the Great White, it’s CHUM.\u00a0\u00a0That reaction isn’t accidental.<\/p>\n
In this exclusive interview with the filmmakers of CHUM, director and co-writer JONATHAN ZUCK and producer EAMON O’ROURKE revealed that one of the guiding principles behind CHUM was a deliberate inversion of audience expectations. While the film delivers the blood, suspense, underwater carnage, and escalating mayhem expected of the genre, the shark itself was never intended to be the story’s true villain.<\/p>\n
“Part of the reason you’re rooting for the shark is because he’s not the villain,” Zuck explains. “He’s just a shark, whereas the villain is the fisherman.”<\/p>\n
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That fisherman is Roy, portrayed with increasingly obsessive intensity by Jim Klock. Consumed by revenge against the Great White he believes killed the love of his life years earlier, Roy becomes the film’s most dangerous force, transforming the shark into a weapon in his crusade against grief.\u00a0\u00a0For Zuck, casting Klock was an easy decision.<\/p>\n
“I’ve known Jim for 25 years, and so it was a no-brainer putting him in that role. He’s a terrific actor.”<\/p>\n
But Klock’s contributions extended far beyond his performance.<\/p>\n
“He played a critical role on screen, but he played a critical role off screen as well, just being first on set, last to leave, always ready to shoot any scene. He modeled amazing behavior for the entire cast and crew.”<\/p>\n
Finding someone capable of standing opposite Alice Eve proved equally important.\u00a0\u00a0“You’re trying to find this antagonist for Alice Eve and somebody that can be on the same frame with her because she’s such a seasoned actor and really match her beat for beat.”<\/p>\n
Yet beneath Roy’s obsession and the shark’s ever-present threat lies an unexpectedly emotional foundation.<\/p>\n
At its core, CHUM is built around two very different love stories.\u00a0\u00a0One has already been shattered.\u00a0\u00a0The other appears ready to collapse.<\/p>\n
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Roy’s story begins with devastating loss. Years after the death of the woman he loved, he remains trapped by grief and consumed by the need for revenge. Meanwhile, the newlyweds at the center of the story, Tina and Tom (Alice Eve and Eric Michael Cole, respectively), are discussing annulment almost before the wedding champagne has gone flat.<\/p>\n
For Zuck, the challenge was ensuring that the marriage conflict remained nuanced rather than simplistic.<\/p>\n
“Their essential conflict was about some ideological differences, philosophical differences,” he explains. “In an early draft of the script, he was a good guy and she was sort of the bad guy in that ideological battle. How do we balance that by telling a little more nuanced story about where she’s coming from?”<\/p>\n
That search for nuance became central to the film’s emotional spine.<\/p>\n
“I think fundamentally they were a great couple because they’re both, in the end, trying to do the right thing.”\u00a0\u00a0The filmmakers intentionally built the relationship around sacrifice rather than agreement.\u00a0\u00a0“He saved her, and then she ends up saving him, in both cases sort of risking their lives for each other. Hopefully, we deliver the message that that’s where true love lay.”<\/p>\n
O’Rourke credits Alice Eve and Eric Michael Cole with fully embracing the emotional discomfort of a relationship in freefall.<\/p>\n
“They really found a way to not just have, okay, we’re going to deliver lines that convey the fact that we’re upset with each other. They really found a way to be in that and to live that.”<\/p>\n
The tension audiences feel between the couple was entirely intentional.\u00a0\u00a0“A lot of the desperate disconnection that you feel between them is actually quite planned and quite well coordinated between the two of them.”\u00a0\u00a0That emotional uncertainty also serves a larger narrative purpose.<\/p>\n
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“There’s times where I’m like, holy hell … why are these people even\u2014how did this happen?” O’Rourke laughs. “But I think that also plays into the movie’s favor.”<\/p>\n
By allowing the marriage to feel genuinely fragile, the filmmakers keep audiences uncertain not only about the relationship’s future, but about the fate of the couple themselves.<\/p>\n
The wedding party surrounding them was designed to further complicate those dynamics.<\/p>\n
“Part of what we’re trying to do is to look at how different people would react to the troubles in that marriage,” Zuck explains. “They got different advice from everybody, different motives from everybody.”\u00a0\u00a0That philosophy extends throughout the ensemble.<\/p>\n
No character embodies it more completely than Johnny Gaffney’s Rick, whose combination of entitlement, poor judgment, and inability to read a room repeatedly escalates tensions.\u00a0\u00a0“He’s an instigator that doesn’t know when the mood is over, when the time, when the moment’s gone,” says Zuck.<\/p>\n
The comparison to Die Hard<\/em>‘s Ellis immediately resonated with O’Rourke.\u00a0\u00a0“Perfect. You hit it on the head.”<\/p>\n At the opposite end of the spectrum sits Elle Haymond as the bride’s sharp-tongued younger sister.\u00a0\u00a0“She’s the Greek chorus,” Zuck says.\u00a0\u00a0Often ignored by those around her, she nevertheless becomes one of the film’s most grounded voices and one of the few characters consistently capable of recognizing the insanity unfolding around her.<\/p>\n Balancing all of those personalities ultimately fell to editors Ethan Maniquis and Dan Riddle.\u00a0\u00a0While audiences may focus on the shark attacks, O’Rourke views the editing process as the mechanism that keeps CHUM from becoming repetitive.\u00a0\u00a0“We spent all that time out there on the boat shooting the stuff, and when we were in the booth, that was a big part of it. How do we squeeze every drop of the work that we did that was not easy to do and make sure the best aspects of it all get on there?”<\/p>\n For O’Rourke and Zuck, maintaining variety was essential.\u00a0\u00a0“It was very important to make sure that this wasn’t just a series of shark attacks in the movie; that we had characters that you cared for, and different dynamics, and throwing different aspects of what can be entertaining and what can be compelling and interesting, and really trying to mix it up.”<\/p>\n The editors constantly shift audience attention and allegiances.<\/p>\n “Audiences get bored very, very easily, especially if they feel like they have a sense of what’s going on. So, trying to say, okay, now we’re going to focus on these emotional elements. Now we’re going to focus really on the shark. Now we’re focused on the internal navigation of grief versus revenge, and just really, really switch it up.”\u00a0\u00a0That constant rebalancing gives CHUM its unique rhythm.<\/p>\n “Those guys, as you said, they’re fantastic,” O’Rourke says of Maniquis and Riddle. “They were able to find even more than we knew was even there.”<\/p>\n Visually, much of the film’s success belongs to cinematographer Mac Fisken.<\/p>\n Having seen his prior work on films like The Last Stop in Yuma County<\/em>, Zuck knew Fisken was the right choice to capture both the beauty and danger of the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n “We spent several days in pre-production with a great big diagram of the boat and basically tried to plot out where they would be, how they would get from point A to point B, and then how we would capture that in the camera.”\u00a0\u00a0Yet the challenge wasn’t simply photographing actors in open water.\u00a0\u00a0Fisken and Zuck also had to photograph a shark that wasn’t there.<\/p>\n “We were careful, Mac and I, in planning out this; we were careful to leave room for the shark. It’s easy when you’re there without a shark to forget that you need to put a shark in.”\u00a0\u00a0To support the eventual visual effects work, the production captured additional underwater plates between shooting days.\u00a0\u00a0“We went out in between shoot days to get underwater plates and things like that, so that there’d be plenty of variety for the shark under the water.”<\/p>\n Fisken’s adaptability became one of the production’s greatest assets.\u00a0\u00a0“Mac would literally yell at the actual captain of the fishing boat, ‘Can you come about 15 degrees to port?’ and the light would change and we would just start shooting again.”<\/p>\n And when underwater photography was needed?\u00a0\u00a0“When somebody needed to be shot underwater, he grabbed a GoPro and jumped overboard.”<\/p>\n The shark itself largely came to life in post-production.\u00a0\u00a0“All of that was introduced in post.”<\/p>\n But creating convincing shark attacks required extensive planning and collaboration.\u00a0\u00a0“Once we got into post, it’s the really, really difficult balance,” O’Rourke explains. “Jonathan took on the extremely difficult task of figuring out how to create an edit, create room for those shots, and came up with interesting, creative ways, even if they’re very low-fi, of letting us know here’s the position of the shark, or the relationship of the shark’s position to our character.”<\/p>\n Because so much of the tension depended on the shark working convincingly, the filmmakers relied heavily on practical techniques whenever possible.<\/p>\n “If you’re trying to get the performance you want out of an actor in a shark cage that’s being rammed by a shark, that’s tough to do if the shark cage is still in the water,” says Zuck. “We ended up tying ropes to the shark cage and running them under the boat and having stunt people and divers pull on them.”\u00a0\u00a0The result was a delightfully old-school practical solution that effectively turned the shark cage into an underwater gimbal, creating the violent movement and kinetic energy necessary to sell the illusion of impact while giving performers something tangible to react against.<\/p>\n And then there was the inflatable alligator.<\/p>\n Because Alice Eve needed a physical target during one sequence, the production found itself improvising.\u00a0\u00a0“We were in Malta,” laughs O’Rourke. “It’s the island life. We’re limited to what they have in stock.”\u00a0\u00a0According to Zuck, cinematographer Mac Fisken may have had something to do with the decision.\u00a0\u00a0“Mac had a childhood memory of these inflatable alligators and was very wedded to the idea of using these alligators.”<\/p>\n The unusual stand-in ultimately created one of Zuck’s favorite memories from the production.\u00a0\u00a0“The quote from Alice that I will treasure probably for the rest of my life is she said that day was the most fun she’d ever had on a film set.”<\/p>\n The production’s commitment to environmental stewardship extended far beyond the themes explored onscreen.<\/p>\n Because CHUM was filmed in open Mediterranean waters rather than within Malta’s well-known water tank facilities, the filmmakers became acutely aware of their responsibility to protect the marine environment in which they were working.\u00a0\u00a0A key figure in that effort was Abby Bonello, the production’s water safety coordinator and environmental overseer.\u00a0\u00a0According to Zuck, Bonello played a critical role in helping the filmmakers understand the real-world consequences of introducing foreign materials into the ocean.<\/p>\n “She sat us down and talked us through the real environmental issues associated with movies dumping things in the water,” Zuck explains. “And we made an affirmative decision not to do that, and to again make room for things that we could add later in post. We didn’t add anything to the ocean that would pollute it or change the biosphere at all.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That decision directly influenced how the production approached blood effects, floating remains, and other visual elements that traditionally might have been created practically on set.\u00a0\u00a0Instead, the filmmakers deliberately left room within compositions and visual effects workflows to add those elements later, ensuring that the Mediterranean ecosystem remained untouched throughout production.\u00a0\u00a0“We committed to leave no trace,” O’Rourke adds.<\/p>\n The approach creates an interesting parallel with one of the film’s central conflicts. While the newlyweds find themselves divided by competing environmental philosophies, the production itself embraced a clear commitment to environmental responsibility, allowing the filmmakers to capture the beauty of Malta’s waters without compromising the environment they had come to photograph.<\/p>\n Just as CHUM sought to distinguish itself narratively from traditional shark thrillers, composer JoJo Draven approached the score with a similar philosophy.\u00a0\u00a0The filmmakers knew from the outset that they had no interest in replicating the musical language most commonly associated with the genre.\u00a0\u00a0“A lot of that is JoJo,” O’Rourke says. “To be fair, and give credit where it’s due, she brought a lot of it. Jonathan knew from the beginning that he wanted to create a distinction.”<\/p>\n That distinction began with the film’s environment.\u00a0\u00a0“We’re on an island, and the movie takes place during daytime for the most part. These are things that are very different from Jaws and a number of other entries in the genre.”\u00a0\u00a0Draven embraced those differences immediately.<\/p>\n “JoJo immediately came with her own sense of, let’s take it into a slightly different kind of musical genre. Let’s embrace the location. Let’s embrace the island nature of things, and we’ll still find ways to create sound and score that will create dread and tension, but will feel appropriate with the colorful, poppy images that you’re seeing.”<\/p>\n Rather than fighting against the film’s sun-drenched aesthetic, Draven’s score works in harmony with it.\u00a0\u00a0“The idea was to really create a more modern feel,” Zuck explains. “As much as I love John Williams, his music almost becomes a character itself in the movie [Jaws<\/em>].”<\/p>\n Instead of calling attention to itself, Draven’s score was designed to support the drama unfolding onscreen.\u00a0\u00a0“JoJo was really focused on driving the movie. What can I do to enhance the moments that we’re looking at?”\u00a0\u00a0That restraint proved critical.<\/p>\n “Music can be tricky. It can give things away too early. It can undermine tension if you’re not careful.”\u00a0\u00a0For CHUM, the goal was never to announce the shark’s arrival before the audience saw it coming.\u00a0\u00a0“I think she did a really good job of helping push moments along in the movie so that we were all along for the ride.”<\/p>\n As Zuck reflects, the greatest lesson learned from CHUM may be one familiar to independent filmmakers everywhere.<\/p>\n “Constraints lead to creativity.”\u00a0\u00a0Those constraints ultimately became one of the film’s greatest strengths.<\/p>\n “Our motto was ‘movie first’ the whole time. The sound guy knew how to fix the monitor. One time, Eamon was holding a silk to block light. There was nobody that was too proud to get their hands dirty and really get the best shots.”\u00a0\u00a0The result is a shark thriller that repeatedly subverts expectations.<\/p>\n The shark isn’t the villain.\u00a0\u00a0The humans create most of the chaos.<\/p>\n And somewhere between love, loss, grief, revenge, environmental responsibility, spectacular Mediterranean photography, inventive practical effects, and one very busy Great White shark, CHUM finds a surprisingly thoughtful emotional core beneath all the blood in the water.<\/p>\n by debbie elias, exclusive interview 06\/02\/2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n CHUM is in theatres and available on VOD and Digital on June 5, 2026.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/chum1-1-640x276.jpg\")
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