Canadian film-maker Rob Stewart is passionate about creatures most of us wouldn't want to get up close with. He talks to SCOTT KARA
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You can tell Rob Stewart has spent a lot of time around sharks. Sitting in an Auckland hotel suite, the Canadian film maker is svelte, preened, and stealth-like. It's a look you can imagine becoming even more sleek and streamlined when he's swimming around underwater with his beloved predatory pals.
But this 29-year-old, who is also a marine biologist and wildlife photographer, doesn't just swim with sharks - he talks about "meeting" them.
They're his mates, and the self-confessed revolutionary has made a movie which he hopes will let the world know about the plight of his misunderstood buddies.
Sharkwater, a feature length documentary which opens at cinemas on September 9 after screenings at the Auckland International Film Festival, was shot over six years in some of the most shark-rich waters around the world.
The movie's most impressive footage comes from time spent in the marine reserves of Cocos Island in Costa Rica and Ecuador's Galapagos Islands. But these protected waters are anything but a sanctuary.
Stewart and his team find sharks being fished illegally - to the point of being wiped out - to support the billion-dollar trade in fins for the Asian delicacy, shark fin soup.
During the documentary he teams up with environmental hero and rebel, Captain Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, in an attempt to protect the sharks.
The film combines stunning underwater scenes, including serene meet and greets with sharks, and gritty encounters with renegade shark fisherman; footage of Stewart and Watson getting arrested in Costa Rica, and undercover recordings inside mafia strongholds where tens of thousands of shark fins are stored ready for distribution to markets around the world.
"When you think of the mafia you think gangster movies, you don't think about the trade in animal parts or fisheries or sharks," says Stewart.
"You don't think it's a billion-dollar industry and it's controlled by organised crime. It's a crazy industry and it's testament to what's going on on this planet."
With this he proceeds to reel off facts and figures about the future of the world's fisheries, the fate of the human population, and proclaims, "we've built an economy and industry all based upon the destruction of the natural world".
"We're destroying everything, even sharks.
"Why destroy the one animal that's actually lived in balance with the world for 400 million years, especially when we're trying to figure out how we're going to survive?"
It's no surprise Stewart's next movie is about how humans are going to survive the next 100 years.
He's a revolutionary - you could even call him a madman after seeing him go undercover in Costa Rica where the Government stands accused of being in cahoots with the Taiwanese mafia who run the illegal shark fin trade.
The inspiration for the film came from an experience Stewart had as a 19-year-old on one of his first assignments photographing hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos Islands.
During the course of the shoot the team came across longlines riddled with sharks.
"Instead of diving we were trying to cut all these sharks loose," he says.
This incident, which he had a 15-year-old-boy on board the boat record for him using his video camera, provided the perfect start for Sharkwater.
"It was supposed to be a pretty underwater movie with no people in it," he laughs.
"That's all I knew how to do. I was hoping to come back with a movie that would end up on TV and change people's perceptions of sharks."
In the end the movie helped expose the mafia operation in Costa Rica and much to Stewart's delight, when he returned to the country, there were street protests against the illegal fishing of sharks in the area.
Those protests were a satisfying result for someone who as a kid thought "sharks were the pinnacle of everything I thought was cool as a kid".
The first time he interacted with them was when he was seven and fishing in Florida with his dad.
"I'd catch little black tip sharks on the beach and pull the hooks out of them and revive them and let them go. That was interesting but not really life-changing for me."
Until then he had the same attitude as many - that sharks were man-hunters.
"I'd seen Jaws and I was afraid of sharks for that reason."
"But,", he says, and this is where he enthuses about "meeting" sharks, "the first time I met a shark I was nine in the Cayman Islands and it didn't want to eat me at all. It was afraid of me. And the second shark I met did the same thing. That sort of shifted everything for me in my brain. The next sharks I met came around and checked me out a little bit and that's when I got really excited because when you see a fish underwater it's one thing, when you see a shark it's a totally different experience. Fish move around here and there, sharks are in one straight line, they scan you, and make full eye contact.
"They're animals made of teeth, their skin is made of teeth that all point in one direction, they are the most highly dynamic thing we've got on the planet, they've got two more senses than people. They are super, super cool."
Which is why he's baffled that there is always money for research into saving whales and cute and cuddly pandas but no one wants to help save sharks because they are seen as "the last villain we have on the planet".
"But," he smiles wryly, looking a little like the beaming great white shark Bruce from Finding Nemo, "people are starting to like sharks now."
LOWDOWN
Who: Rob Stewart, film maker, marine biologist and shark fan
What: Sharkwater, feature length documentary about sharks
Opens: Rialto Cinemas, September 9
