Trivia / The Shallows

• Actor-Inspired Element: The nickname 'Steven Seagull' was Blake Lively's idea.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Blake Lively signed on mostly because she loved the challenge behind doing a film with a Minimalist Cast, partly inspired by her husband's film Buried.
• California Doubling: The film takes place in Mexico (except for the final scene with Nancy and her sister at a beach in Texas) but was shot in Australia.
• Dueling Works: At first, with In the Deep, a direct-to-video shark film with a similar concept (and the original title of this film). Said film eventually became 47 Meters Down and went from direct-to-video to theatrical release the following year.
• Enforced Method Acting: Nancy's look of disgust when eating the crab comes from the fact that it was a genuine dead crab the art department had found on the beach that morning.
• Fake Nationality: The beach Nancy travels to is in Mexico, but Carlos is played by Spanish actor Óscar Jaenada.
• International Coproduction: Not the film, but the Latin American "Spanish" dub. The reason why Spanish is in brackets is becuase the dub was done between a Mexican voice acting studio (Labo Prime Dubbing Producers) and a Brazilian one (All Dubbing) featuring Mexican and Brazilian voice actors. This was an intentional artistic choice, because in the Latin American dub, the setting was changed from Mexico to Brazil and the "Mexican" characters are voiced by Brazilians in Portuguese, while the Mexican voice actors dubbed the American characters in Spanish instead. This is to this date the first and only Mexican dub done in colaboration with voice actors from a non-Spanish speaking country, in this case Brazil.
• Never Work with Children or Animals:
  • Subverted! The plans were to use CGI or puppetry for Steven Seagull because of this trope. But in location scouting, they saw Blake Lively being able to feed a group of seagulls and realised they'd be able to use a real one. Three were used, and the only problem was that seagulls are naturally very clean animals; so the birds kept trying to clean off the fake blood.
  • Likewise any other live animals were done with CGI. The shark was done so for obvious reasons, and the crabs were CGI because the production was prevented from harming real ones on camera.
• No Stunt Double: Blake Lively did most of her own stunts. She only had a double for the surfing scenes, as she is unable to surf; 19-year-old Australian surfer Isabella Nichols. Some scenes used CGI to put Blake's face on Isabella's body.
• Throw It In!: Blake Lively actually did break her nose in a scene where Nancy slams into the side of the buoy. You can see the damage to her nose in the ending scene, meant to be a year later.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Louis Leterrier was the original director but he dropped out and was replaced by Jaume Collet Serra.
  • Nancy in the first draft of the script was imagined to be a younger and more naïve character. When Blake Lively came on board, she was tweaked to fit the actress more (she was 28 when it was filmed).
  • The script had more of Nancy talking to the seagull, but it was lessened due to potential Narm.
  "...we didn't want her to be like Snow White talking to animals. When you see her predicament, you get it. You don't need her to explain everything to a seagull!"
  • In the original script, Nancy ended up losing her leg in the climatic battle, but still survived in the end. The script also featured a much more somber ending.
• Word of God: In a interview shortly before the film's release, the director revealed that the shark is a female.
• Working Title: Was originally titled In the Deep. This is actually referenced in its tag-line, "what was once in the deep is now in the shallows."

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