With Sharknado 2: The Second One debuting tonight on the Syfy network, we can be certain of a few things: There will be sharks. Lots of sharks. Attacking New Yorkers as they exit a tornado. And if that’s not enough to entice you, alongside the returning Ian Ziering and Tara Reid, there’s a cast diverse enough to include Vivica A. Fox, Kelly Osbourne, Matt Lauer, Al Roker, Billy Ray Cyrus, and “the Subway guy” Jared Fogle.
The man behind this surefire cinematic masterpiece of a sequel is Anthony C. Ferrante, who also directed the first film in the series. In the middle of San Diego Comic-Con, in a crowded of room of journalists, Glide talked with Ferrante, the director of Sharknado 2. In this brief interview, we discussed shooting on location in New York City, loathsome snowballs, the pressure of topping the chainsaw-filled climax of original Sharknado movie, and his belief that there’s some meaningful social commentary in the viral-friendly sequel.
Glide: What was it like shooting Sharknado 2 in New York City in the winter? Were you miserable?
Ferrante: The day before I went to New York to shoot this in late January, I was in shorts. It was hot in Burbank, and I was suffocating. I get to New York, and it was like, “Winter!” My wife and daughter came, and my daughter was like, “Snow!” And she was throwing snowballs at me in New York, and the New Yorkers are going, “What is wrong with these people? There’s something seriously wrong. Why is she throwing snowballs? This is supposed to be loathed.” And I loved it.
The first movie was so hard to shoot in Los Angeles because we had sunny skies everyday. It’s a weather movie! We can’t shoot the ground; we can’t shoot the sky. We didn’t have the visual effects to get around that, so we had to be creative in how we did the film. In New York, you could just shoot up. You’ve got the sky. Bad weather. Snow. Make it a part of the story.
Why did you choose to shoot the sequel in New York?
Syfy thought it would be cool… New York can support a whole movie. There are not a lot of cities that can support a lot of different things. You’ve got Times Square and Liberty Island. The palette is just gargantuan. Everybody knows New York whether it’s their impressions of New York from watching movies and TV or from living there. Thunder [Levin], the writer, is from New York, so he knew it well. I didn’t know New York that well, so when I got there and started walking around, I started going, “Oh, we’ve got to do this.” There was never a pizza place or a bodega. I didn’t even know what a bodega was. There was a scene in a hardware store, and I said, “We’re going to split all this stuff up and we’re going to do a pizza place and a bodega because we need to have it in the movie.” And we shot at my favorite pizza place, Famous Amadeus, where I started going every day when I was in New York.
So there’s stuff that happened by being there. You start understanding things. We were on a subway once, and there was a busker on there, and I was like, “We’ve got to put a busker in the movie.” I ended up being the busker in the movie because our cameo fell out at the last minute.
How did the fan’s reaction to the first movie influence what you decided to do in the second one?
All we knew is we had to live up to it. And the hard part is we had an iconic moment from the first movie. And you can’t say, “This is going to be it.” Fans just embraced it; seeing him [Ian Ziering’s character Fin] go into the shark [with the chainsaw]. We knew it was a cool moment but we never would have thought it would go viral like that.
There was always discussion of “What is a Sharknado moment?” And I kept saying, “We have to accept that we may never get that again. Ever.” So, what we have to do is have a ton of Sharknado moments, a ton of cool stuff that’s different, and let the audience decide. Actually, until the last minute we completely avoided the idea of going into a shark until I was walking around Manhattan with Ian and people kept asking him how he was going to get out of the shark this time. So, we had to do something to go there and pay homage to that. That was one thing, because of the fans, we didn’t want to go there but then we did something like it. We went off and did something crazier.
How is the tone of this movie different?
In the first movie, everybody’s kind of in it for themselves. When the crap hits the fan, even Tara’s character is like, “Forget the kids in the bus. Let ‘em drown.” They threw bombs at a tornado; they destroyed half of Los Angeles! They may have stopped the tornado, but Los Angeles probably wasn’t happy with them.
In this one, Fin and April are from New York. And part of that was they’re going back to their roots…New Yorkers come together when crisis happens, and that’s what we wanted to pay tribute to. It’s like, “If I hate you and sharks are coming, let’s band together and fight this threat.” That’s the difference. That was the fun part of this movie; it’s definitely there, especially the last 20 minutes.
Can you speak more about the film’s theme of having people from different walks of life band together?
The whole cast is diverse. We had a great, great cast that’s all over the place. Surprisingly, there’s social commentary in a Sharknado movie. The role that Vivica A. Fox plays was originally written for a different character, a 30-year-old groupie of Fin. When they cast Vivica, it’s like, “We can bring back this idea of a high school romance with Fin. And then there’s this balance between Tara and him. So, they let us do that. And we re-wrote this like two weeks before. And it’s really sweet. It’s a really interesting thing because they’re talking about why did they break up and what happened. In the middle of all the madness, we got to do that. Only in a Sharknado movie could you get away with it and not have it feel heavy-handed.
