Exclusive Interview: Anthony Ferrante & the Cast of Sharknado 2: The Second One

Sharknado 2: The Second One airs July 31st on Syfy, and we got to interview director Anthony Ferrante early when NBC-Universal presented its summer programming, including its cable networks, to the press. Ian Ziering and Tara Reid return to find Sharknados attacking New York, because of course they do.

Adding to the cast are Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath, horror veteran Kari Wuherer and 30 Rock funnyman Jonah Friedlander, who chimed in with a few tidbits after I spoke with Ferrante.

Look for Sharknado 2: The Second One on Syfy this summer, and get your first look behind the scenes here!

Shock Till You Drop: You put a shark pretty much everywhere in Sharknado 1. Where else can you put a shark?

Anthony Ferrante: There’s still a lot of places left. In New York we had a subway thing that we wanted to do so you definitely have a subway. You have big iconic landmarks where we definitely, Liberty Island. There’s definitely that. Mets City Field, I don’t think we’ve seen a ballpark yet with sharks.

Shock: You didn’t do Dodger Stadium in L.A. so there you go.

Ferrante: That’s the thing. I was actually the person who really, really wanted to do the baseball thing because of the sports communities embracing the film. We had talked about hockey because they have the Sharks, but no, if you’re going to New York, it’s baseball. It has to be baseball. It was always the thing of “No, Major League Baseball’s never going to play ball with us so to speak. They’re never going to do it. They’re never going to let us do a shark attack in a stadium.” It’s like, why not? “Because, it’s just too complicated.” So one of the producers, David Garber, kept working it and working it and we wrote it into the script. It was in the script. It was about a week before we were starting to shoot and it’s like you’re going to have to start thinking about shooting a public ballpark if you want to get this. I’m not going to think about that, we’re going to get it, we’re going to get it. Finally, we got it. It was a military operation that day because we had one day to do tons of stuff in addition to a subway platform sequence that was right across from City Field.

Shock: That was the same day?

Ferrante: It was all the same day. It was a long day but we accomplished so much. The Mets were gracious. That was one of those dream situations where they just got it and they let us get away with murder and they were fantastic. So I have so much respect. If someone has to ask me what my favorite New York team is, it’s the Mets now because it takes a lot to trust a filmmaker to come in and not destroy your legacy, and they were fantastic.

Shock: And these aren’t spoilers either, right? Because once you tell people about these scenes it only makes them want to see it more.

Ferrante: The hard part is in the first movie we did what we did. No one cared we were shooting Sharkando in L.A. At the time it was called Dark Skies because they didn’t want to put the Sharknado title on there. No one cared. I went out on the beach with a GoPro with one of my actresses. We were in post and I needed to show her surfing and I needed a few extra things. My DP was out there. He just fixed a GoPro, I got in a wetsuit, got in the water and I’m chasing her. No one knew what we were doing, but the moment we landed in New York, the first day of shooting was like TMZ paparazzi everywhere. So half the stuff that we were doing was being captured. We kept joking, we’ll just go to TMZ to get B-cam footage so we have extra angles. It was nuts, but the thing is I think this is the journey. You even see stuff like Avengers, they’ve got people showing clips from the sides of the road. You just don’t know how it’s being put together. Even TMZ is going, “Oh, look at this ridiculous footage of them on top of a car.” But we’re going to have digital stuff all around it. There’s a whole other part of that so in some ways I’m kind of excited because people will actually get to see how insane the process is from that little tiny thing where there’s no water and they’re reacting to things that aren’t there to how it’s all pieced together in editing. It’ll actually show how scrappy we are in making things happen.

Shock: Some people might have approached Sharknado as “so bad it’s good,” but is the reason to do Sharknado because it’s awesome?

Ferrante: Everybody says “it’s so bad it’s good,” but at this point I think it’s like any movie. Every single movie that’s out there you have people that love it or hate it. I’ve met people that have hated it but I’ve met a lot of people that are not in the industry that just enjoyed it because it was ridiculous and fun. Someone at Comic-Con, this woman was probably late-50s, we were doing autographs there. She was so sweet. She goes, “Thank you for making Sharknado. I’ve seen it 10 times. It made me happy.” There’s just something crazy about the concept that we didn’t take it too seriously. To do a second one, it was successful. There’s always that question of should you do the next movie. Certainly Ian, Tara and myself were all like, “Does it make sense?” The moment they said they wanted to do New York, it was another playground. It was an easy decision to make of let’s do it because there was more stuff to do. You still are trying to make a good movie with this stuff. It’s just you’re limited. Captain America can shoot for 80 days. We’re shooting for 18 but we’re still trying to reach it. Some things are going to work and some things are going to fail but I think there’s an earnestness in what we tried to do.

Shock: If people loved a certain level of visual effects in the first one, is there a certain point where you don’t want to fix it too well?

Ferrante: No, we’re still trying to make the best movie. There were things we were limited with on Sharknado where we had sun the entire time shooting in Los Angeles. It was a curse. We had three days of actual rain from January to June. We were waiting for rain so we could do pickups to get our cars so we didn’t have to do digital effects. We could never do it because there was only one day in that entire time, I’m not talking night rain, I’m talking day rain. We had to do a digital effect. Digital rain never looks good. It’s unfortunate, so we were always hiding that fact. We’ve got to shoot this angle and this angle. In New York, we got overcast weather. We got stuff so it actually aids in the film. The digital effects guys care about what they’re doing but they have a small amount of time to do it in. They had three months to do 400-500 visual effects shots for that first movie. A studio can’t pull that off, but they succeed in a certain way. They want to make it the best they can but when you have to do that many shots, it’s an average, you’re going to have to do stuff. Some things are going to look great. Some are just going to look okay.

Shock: It still gets the point across. It’s still a shark in a sunroof. You still get it if it looks like an animated shark.

Ferrante: Look, these guys want to do bigger and better. If you look at all the Asylum stuff from prior to this, every show these guys get better and better and they pull off stuff. I still hold that ferris wheel sequence. Put that up against any other studio movie, it’s flawless. They did roto of the wheel behind them and it looks fantastic.

Shock: It holds up with 1941 where they did it for real.

Ferrante: That was the homage. We were definitely making a reference with that.

Shock: Does Finn have a reaction like “How can the same sh*t happen to the same guy twice?”

Ferrante: There is a reference. He definitely says it’s happening again.

Shock: Mine was Die Hard 2 specifically.

Ferrante: Yeah, he doesn’t say that but there’s definitely a reference to it. The thing that I like about the Finn character is that he just jumps in. The beginning of the movie, he’s a little hesitant about the notoriety or the infamy that’s happened. Thunder [Levin, the screenwriter] and I were talking about the second movie, there’s definitely a little reflection on the stuff that we went through that this thing became a phenomenon and Finn is in the center of it for better or for worse. One of the things I wanted to get across is that he kind of destroyed half of Los Angeles by throwing bombs into a tornado and the city doesn’t like him for that. He saved the day but the collateral damage was pretty bad. He’s from New York so when he goes back, it’s that thing of I’m trying to save people again but it’s New York and they embrace you. We have a great moment with the mayor. It’s like, “Look, we’re with you. We’re behind you. L.A. is every man for themselves. In New York, when the sh*t hits the fan, we all band together. We’re one. We’re not going to let bad things happen. I think that was kind of the fun part.

Shock: How far away are we from SharkCano?

Ferrante: Eh, that’s somebody else’s movie. There was a lot of discussion about do we want to put other animals and stuff in this movie. We were all rebelling against doing too much of that. One of the arguments was, “Well, there’s no other marine life in this?” Yeah, but it’s the Sharknado. There is one other thing that we have as an aside in the film that will be kind of a fun surprise but it’s not what you expect.

Shock: What New York celebrities wanted to be in the film?

Ferrante: When we did Al Roker and Matt Lauer for the movie, they do a newscast and they’re talking about what’s going on through the course of the film. I just got in my head, even though this happened in L.A., Matt Lauer would have a hard time saying the word Sharknado. So he would keep saying shark storm and Al would go, “Sharnkado.” By the time we get to the end, he finally embraces it. Those little things, it’s a tricky movie to do a second time but tonally it’s still in our universe. Anything goes. To get it down to 82 minutes, I don’t know what we’re going to do. There’s an A story, there’s a B story, there’s a C story and then there’s all this cameo stuff which I call the D story. You have Ian going to help his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law’s son. Ian’s sister is trying to get to them. Tara has to go through her business which I can’t reveal. Then there’s these news reports and all these other things that are peripheral but they are integrated to tell you what else is going on. So it’s dense. The good part about it is that anything that isn’t working, we can cut things out.

Shock: There will certainly be a market for an extended cut.

Ferrante: I would say the first movie, the great thing about Asylum is we’re usually in agreement. There isn’t a single thing in that movie that I did not want in the film. The stuff I wanted cut out I was allowed to cut out. There might have been one or two lines like the Pepperjack thing where there was an extra beat in there, where I liked the Pepperjack line with an extra beat, but that’s not worth going and throwing a tantrum over. It is what it is, so that movie I don’t think you can expand it. It’s as close to a director’s cut that you’re going to get. There’s nothing extra I want to see in that film because it wasn’t strong enough. On this one, there’s probably more footage than we know what to do this at this point. I would say there probably is potential for an extended cut. I just don’t know what they’re going to do. Usually it’s the Syfy version and we’ll have to see if we’re going to do anything special for the DVD. We have tags, we have little bits, so much stuff. It’s massive. Even the Al Roker and Matt Lauer stuff, we shot more stuff than we could ever humanly use and it’s amazing. Because you have them being so sincere about what’s going on.

Shock: Did you direct them on the Today show set?

Ferrante: Yeah. That was pretty awesome. They’re pros. We wrote this crazy dialogue for them. We had like five or six different pieces to it and we’d just go through it. It’s like okay, great, just adjust that, great. They did it exactly how they normally would do it. The only thing that had to be planned, because we wanted this little bit with the shark, showing Matt Lauer how to kill a shark was probably the highlight. Judah Friedlander campaigned for a role in Sharknado 2.  He was one of the celebrities who live-tweeted the original. Because of that, I had a couple questions I wanted to ask him about the role he actually ended up with in the movie.

Shock: If you campaigned for this, did they have a role for you or did they write you in?

Judah Friedlander: I think they had a couple roles. I got in a little bit late so a lot of it was already cast, but some parts hadn’t been cast. Then the director really thought this one role would be really good for me. Then he wound up writing I think a little bit of an extra scene in it too. It wasn’t like it was specifically written for me but they thought it would be a good fit.

Shock: Do you have any cool Sharknado fighting action?

Friedlander: I have a little bit. I can’t really give any away, but I have a little bit, yeah. Not as much as I would have in real life because in real life I can kill any shark out there. In this movie I powered down my karate skills to regular human strength. I’m playing a regular guy from Queens in the movie. Of course, we know Kari Wuhrer from Anaconda and Eight Legged Freaks, so naturally she would end up in the path of a Sharknado at one point. Wuhrer really worked the red carpet too, playing up the damsel in distress for photographers while holding a Sharknado beach towel. We got some one on one time with Wuhrer after her photo session.