High Tide

Forget snakes on a plane, now it's all about sharks in a supermarket. Guy Davis circles Bait 3D director Kimble Rendell.

There are times when a little explanation is required to outline a movie's particular appeal. And there are times when not much explanation is required at all. The new Aussie thriller, Bait 3D, falls into the latter category because its hook can be summed in four little words: Sharks in a supermarket.

The notion of a group of people stranded in a flooded shopping centre and menaced by a couple of marauding Great Whites after a tidal wave lays waste to their coastal town proved enticing enough for director Kimble Rendell to take on the project after original helmer Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, Resident Evil: Extinction) had to pull out due to international commitments.

Known for his homegrown '90s slasher movie, Cut, Rendell had been working as a second-unit director on big-budget productions like the Matrix sequels, Ghost Rider and I, Robot when he got the call from Bait 3D producer Chris Brown (no, not that Chris Brown) about shooting the Queensland-set thriller.

“I asked what it was about and he said 'Sharks in a supermarket,'” recalls Rendell with a laugh. “That's what hooked me in! Then I read the script and liked it, but I was also attracted by the challenges of making it. It's why I've been doing a lot of second-unit stuff – I'm intrigued by working out the logistics of shooting this sort of thing. If Bait was just two people in a room for 90 minutes, I'd get pretty bored doing that. But something like this keeps me on my toes. With the characters in Bait, it was like a theatre production upstairs with these people trapped on top of the shelves while downstairs it was a cross between The Poseidon Adventure and Cujo for the people trapped in the car park.”

Working as a second-unit director on blockbusters has allowed Rendell to hone his technical skills – “the job is to help make their film, not your own film, and you're generally matching stuff made by some of the best directors and cinematographers in the world,” he points out – and some astute casting of established actors and young stars on the ascent help accomplish the rest on Bait 3D.

The likes of Xavier Samuel, Sharni Vinson, Lincoln Lewis, Alex Russell and Phoebe Tonkin are becoming more and more well-known in the international market – Samuel has a Twilight sequel to his credit, Lewis has just completed After Earth opposite Will and Jaden Smith, Tonkin recently landed a role on the hit TV series, The Vampire Diaries – and the combination of their acting talents and rising profiles helped make Bait 3D an appealing prospect to overseas buyers.

“We did a casting session in Los Angeles and a lot of well-known actors were trying to get into this film,” says Rendell. “Their agents were hounding us but it was an Australian production and we found that the Australian actors who came in were really good. I was looking for the best performers but I was also mindful of selling the film to an international market, and people could look at the credits of these actors and be excited about their involvement.”

Still, Australian audiences may notice that some of those local actors occasionally sound... well, less than local. “It's really only Australians who notice it, though,” the director admits. “The distributors, the sales company, wanted all American accents and they wanted that because they say they find it very hard to sell films with Australian accents. Certain markets don't understand the accent at all, so they won't buy it! We wanted to sell the film so our actors dubbed the film with American accents but it was clear that some of it just didn't fit. So we decided some characters could be American