Shark Week: Eli Roth On His After Show, Kissing a Shark, Prepping for ‘Meg'

Shark Week officially begins July 5, and for the third consecutive year, Discovery will have its own on-air after show, “Shark After Dark.” This time it’ll be hosted by Eli Roth, the writer/director who, appropriately enough, recently signed on to helm MEG.

 

Is there anything that you’ve learned that will influence how you approach Meg?

Absolutely. The fun of Meg is that you’re making a movie with a shark the size of a Greyhound bus that’s eating people like Ms. Pac-Man. That’s what I want to see. I want that line of surfers and the shark comes and just eats them in one gulp. But I think what’s great is when you can do it like Jurassic Park where they ground it in real science. We can use this giant shark wreaking havoc on the ecosystem to talk about the function of sharks, and how important they are, and how they really are the ocean’s doctors, and how we need them, and how they really don’t have any interest in eating us but what we’re doing to their food supply. You can make the Megolodon the scariest shark and it puts everything into relation, just how friendly, and nice, and helpful the other sharks are. Sharks have gotten a terrible rap, but they’re fascinating, incredible animals. They say whale sharks live up to 150 years — think what that shark has seen in its lifetime. There’s almost 500 species of sharks, but everyone thinks of the great white. A lot of them are very gentle and filter feeders.

So I just want to have all these experts involved in the movie when I’m making it to really, really get the science right. And I’m gonna want to get real shark footage, too. I’m gonna wanna go in the water and film with great whites — and now I know the best people to do it with. So this is actually the perfect complement to the movie I’m about to dive into, no pun intended.

Shark After Dark airs Sunday, July 5 to Thursday, July 9 at 11 p.m. ET on Discovery. Shark Week runs July 5 to July 12 on Discovery.

Excerpt Yahoo.com