Year of the Shark: How was the movie monster created?

In 2021, together with Teddy, they put a werewolf in their native Southwest. Today, Ludovic and Zoran Bucher left the sea in the year of the shark. As the title suggests, this is the first French feature film about a man-eating shark, tracked here by Marina Foys, Jean-Pascal Zad and Christine Gaultier.

Cass is also in the cast as Maja’s husband, a cop who decides to delay his retirement for a few days to tackle the beast. But the second star is obviously the shark, which is rarely used, as Steven Spielberg did in Jaws, which is no reason not to give it a lot of care.

“Our initial motivation was a shark on the shelf”Answers Ludovic Bucher speaking at AlloCiné l’Emission. “We didn’t want any CGI. The question that inevitably comes up from pre-production is, ‘How do you want to do a shark?’

“Even just because there’s Jaws. We’re big fans and we love this idea of ​​a shark that can be a little fake at times. Because it’s super cute at the same time, that’s what we love. Our genre. The movie references are 70s and 80s. Films from the ’90s where there’s always this slightly wrong thing. But we think as we get older, those effects are always better than digital.”

“Here we asked Pascal Molina, an animatronics specialist, to make us a shark. But production times for films are so tight these days that he had to do it for us in seven to eight weeks. He even had to take the first shot. For four weeks, with the cast, everyone on the set was talking about the shark, but no one had seen it before. We didn’t even know if it was going to work.”

“One time it worked very well. He made a shark that was plugged into a jet engine, on a flyboard: we had a boat with an engine, forty meters of pipes, and a shark was plugged into one of them. Then on another boat, three. Guys who could activate the mouth or the fins. Our first desire (…) was to have fun with the animatronics, because it’s so funny.”

“Then maybe we had some frustration on the set because, of course, because they had a little time to practice, we tried it a little bit during the shoot. And on the first day of shooting, he had to come out. Water with his mouth open. Except to do that figure He was supposed to dive in and then come back up. But then he dived and got stuck in the mud. So we lost two hours of filming because we had to go find him.”

Our first wish was to have fun with the animatronics because they are so funny

“We weren’t even sure it would grow up one day”Zoran Bucher continues. “We shot it once. We just saw the fin in the shot we took earlier and thought it might be the only thing we had of it.” And how big is the creature? “4.50 meters. Half a Spielberg shark.”

“The funny thing was that we printed out A4 sheets and stuck them together to show a life-size shark”Ludovic continues. “It looked huge in the prep offices, but once you’re in the water, without a clue, you don’t know it’s big. One of the challenges in the picture was to show that ‘it was big, which it wasn’t.’ on stage or with an actor.”

And you’ll never guess where he is after the shoot is over. “That’s one of the first questions we asked Pascal Molina: ‘What do we do next?’– Ludovic answers. “Officially, I believe it belongs in production. But the sad thing is that traditionally they always destroy this thing because you leave it in the box first, but it’s too expensive to produce, so we destroy it. Shame.”

“There, as it happens, it is stored in the garage of the grandmother of one of our growers.” Who knows that such a beast is in his house.

Our entire show with Zoran and Ludovic Bucherma: