Valerie Taylor: Playing with Sharks

Cover Story Playing with

By Robert Yehling

This is the time in her life when Valerie Taylor should be kicking back, reflecting on 70 years of dives with sharks, fish, moray eels and other creatures of the sea. She should be playing back the countless experiences that led to more than five dozen photography and film shoots for National Geographic, Time-Life, IMAX, movies like Jaws and Jaws II, and culminating with the Disney+ epic documentary Playing With Sharks, her life story that premiered in mid-summer (and continues to stream on Disney+).

But that’s not the case. Sadly, due to a public perception that sharks are the source of a delicacy (shark fin soup), an interfering force for commercial fishermen, and deadly dangerous predators, the world’s shark population is approaching a critically low level. As much as she’d like to step back, Valerie cannot. It’s not in her nature, as her decades of establishing protected areas in her native Australia well prove. Plus, sharks have been her friends since she was a teenager. So, at age 85, she continues to voice her concerns.

“I really feel that sharks worldwide should be totally protected,” says the subject and star of Playing with Sharks. “According to what I’ve read, we have only 10 percent of the shark population that once existed. They’ve been taken mainly for their fins for shark fin soup. We don’t need shark fin soup; we need sharks. Nature put them in the ocean to do a job. They’re apex predators, top of the food chain. They keep the marine animals alive and fit by eating the diseased, sick, unwary and stupid.”

Playing with Sharks is a 90-minute documentary masterpiece, produced by Bettina Dalton and written and directed by Sally Aikman — both keen followers of Valerie’s career since their own began. The movie combines priceless archival footage, shot primarily by Valerie’s late husband, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ron Taylor, who passed in 2012. In it, Valerie interacts with bull sharks, tiger sharks, great whites and numerous others — often playfully. Playing games with sharks? Negotiating whether you or the shark is getting the fish you just speared? Getting rides by holding onto dorsal fins? It’s all in here.

The Taylors’ historic footage is mixed with live action and candid and sassy voiceover, reflective of Valerie’s personality. The action includes a memorable return visit in 2020 to one of Valerie’s favorite spots in Fiji, and the remarkable relationship she’s forged with the ocean’s apex predators. In many ways, it was a reunion among old friends.

“Really early on, we filmed that scene in Fiji as our first scene, even though it’s later in the movie,” Aikman said. “On the dive boat on our return journey, we got the most extraordinary image of Valerie in repose, on the boat, looking out on the ocean. Then in the archival footage, there’s this image of Valerie in the 1960s, in Fiji, looking on the ocean in the same way. That night, on the rushes, I put up the shot of Valerie looking on the ocean alongside the archival image from the 60s. That’s when I realized there’s really something in this relationship of a life with the sharks that we can explore.”

A host of memories flooded back to Valerie during the Fiji shoot, including one of her most poignant experience in decades of swimming with, filming, photographing, painting and playing with sharks. To listen to her tell it, with the emotive sweep of her storyteller’s voice, is breathtaking.

“The one I’ll always remember is Nursie, who I came to know when we were working in the Coral Sea for the U.S. Navy, testing shark repellents. Along came Nursie, a very big shark, big but not dangerous… unless you put your

Sharks

Valerie Taylor began swimming with sharks as a teenager. Now, 70 years later, she reflects on her amazing journey as the world’s greatest living shark expert and protector of the species

(Facing page) Valerie Taylor wards off an overly curious shark while wearing a chain mail suit in 1982. Top row: Valerie, in scuba gear, reading the novel Jaws on top of a shark cage; she and her husband Ron filmed the movie’s underwater sequences. Ron and Valerie with Jaws author Peter Benchley, standing next to a set of jaws in 1971. Bottom row; Valerie, Ron and others a holding model shark. Portrait, 1964. (Photos: Ron & Valerie Taylor)

foot in its mouth,” she chuckled. “My husband said ‘get this thing out of here; it’s not a dangerous shark. We only want the potentially dangerous ones.’ So I put some fish on a string and swam away, and Nursie followed me. I put the fish under a dead coral. By the time I swam back to where we were working, she was with us again. I took her away again, as far as I could swim on the air I had, then swam back – and ten minutes later, she rejoined us. After that, I’d take her out with some fish, put the fish under a cave, hold it down with coral, and she’d remove the coral and suck out the fish. Then she’d let me hold her dorsal fin as we swam back to where Ron and I were working, saving me some air.”

“The next day, when we went back to the same place, she was waiting. I got criticized for riding that shark, but by this time, we were quite friendly. I put my arm around her, pushed her around, she didn’t mind, never tried to bite. We did this for three days. Well, we came back to the spot six months later – and found she’d been taken for her fins. Every shark we worked with there was taken; one of the fishermen told us.”

For that reason, the second half of Valerie Taylor’s career has been as much about protecting sharks and all marine life as filming and photographing her underwater friends. Make no mistake, either: she has a voice as big as the world when it comes to ocean environment and wildlife concerns. She is to the study and filming of sharks what Jacques Cousteau was to sea exploration at large, and what Jane Goodall is to the study of primates: a singular protective force that has changed everything from public awareness to perception to policy. She’s spent the past 70 years in the water studying, taking photographs, filming, swimming and playing with sharks of numerous breeds. She also is responsible for the existence of two of Australia’s marine national preserves, one of which protects what Americans know as sandbar tiger sharks.

On the job, Valerie and Ron filmed the underwater shots for movies like Jaws and Jaws II, The Blue Lagoon, The Year of Living Dangerously, Honeymoon in Vegas and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They also filmed two dozen documentaries in their native Australia, beginning with 1962’s Playing with Sharks (the title was reprised in an homage to Valerie) and including shows for Time-Life, as well as the 1982 IMAX movie The Great Barrier Reef. Not to mention footage on dozens of Australian TV shows.

This treasure trove of archival footage plays a big part in the 2021 version of Playing with Sharks. Aikman and producer Bettina Dalton said that more than 60 percent of the movie consists of archival footage, reflecting their desire — and Valerie’s — to show the ocean the way it once was. “To make this 90-minute movie, besides live action with Valerie, we had about 5,000 hours of Ron’s footage at our disposal,” Aikman said. “And this wasn’t just raw footage you can race through. When he filmed, he edited daily for the rushes. Everything in there is a usable shot. Then there were thousands of Valerie’s photographs, and going through all of her journals, which date back to the 1960s.”

“In terms of way we filmed, a lot was done by Ron historically. The way Ron filmed sharks

(Left) Valerie Taylor underwater wearing a chain mail suit in 1982. (Above) Ron Taylor filming a great white shark in 1964. Valerie Taylor underwater in a shark cage in 1968. (All photos: Ron & Valerie Taylor)

Valerie Taylor on the Jaws film set standing next to a shark prop in 1974. (Photo: Ron & Valerie Taylor)

Left, Valerie Taylor underwater with camera equipment, 1970. (Photo: Ron & Valerie Taylor) Valerie Taylor framed by shark teeth, 1957. (Photo: David Mist Photography)

was never him pursuing a shark with a camera. It was always him positioning himself so that the shark glides past. That immediately conveys a sense of the benign, of sharing a world with the sharks, not ‘I’m going to show you how terrifying they are’ and throw yourself among them. There’s none of that. Ron and Valerie were really at one in the ocean with the sharks, without the rapidly beating heart of fear. When they were filming, they were at peace in their environment, and the sharks were at peace having them there,” Aikman added.

This long association with sharks paid off for the crew in 2020, as Aikman recalled. “They knew the sharks, and the sharks knew them. So when we were in Fiji in 2020, one of the sharks came playfully toward Valerie, who was trying to reach out to touch it. It gave a gentle flick of its tail, Valerie’s mask comes off, and she’s just laughing underwater… I mean, you can’t construct it or rehearse it. That’s the way it was. I think the film conveys her ease with being in their world, and we portray them not as something terrifying, but as sentient beings with every right to be there.”

How does one become so comfortable with sharks? It began with spearfishing. Valerie tells of her first encounters with sharks while spearfishing in her native New South Wales in the 1950s, again at a time when fish teemed everywhere and we were far from the need for marine national parks and preserves to protect them.

“I’m not a person who gets afraid,” she said. “If something goes wrong, I get angry, frustrated. I want to fix it. I got used to sharks when I used to spearfish. There was a time in New South Wales where, if you spearfished, it was guaranteed a shark would eventually come and want your fish. I learned very early you could keep your fish and fight the shark off, that you could look it in the eye and swim towards it. No predator expects its potential prey to swim toward it. If that didn’t work, I gave the shark the fish, and everyone was happy.”

“When I started working with sharks with Ron on film, this stood me in good stead. I knew quite a bit about the behavior of the potentially dangerous sharks.”

Likewise, Valerie does not mince words when addressing the growing incidents of shark attacks on beaches around the world. She’s just as likely to be protective of the potentially dangerous sharks as she is the humans who subject themselves to bites.

“Of course, there are potentially dangerous sharks — great whites, bulls, hammerheads. If you’re worried about them, stay on shore,” she says. “When you go into the ocean, that’s your decision. You’re deciding to go into the backyard and world of another wild animal. It’s one thing to go into the backyard of an animal on land – you can run away, climb a tree, shoot it dead to defend yourself – but in the ocean, it’s a different story. We’re very awkward, splashing around, frantic looking, even at our best. Most people bitten by sharks are bitten on the surface. The damage comes when they try to pull away and panic, and they bleed. If they got the same type of initial bite and damage from a land animal? They wouldn’t die.”

Valerie’s mountain of work and her conservation efforts have made her a major role model and influence for three generations of women and girls in Australia, not the least of which is her producer on Playing with Sharks. “I saw a NatGeo of Valerie and Ron, her in a chain mail suit and her arm in a blue shark’s mouth,” Bettina Dalton recalled. “It was an organizing moment for me and my career to see that image. She looked like a model superhero, a major influencer – I’m not the only one who had that response. And I went onto become a natural history filmmaker. About 20 years ago, I was asked by National Geographic to make a film on Ron and Valerie’s life’s work. Got to spend a lot of time with them, looking at the film archive, Ron at the lathe making his own camera housings, Valerie’s photographic and art collection, seeing her as an artist. That series went onto play on NatGeo.”

And now, they’re back together again, with a film that will let America and the Disney+ universe know what Australia and the ocean environment world have known for 60 years: Valerie Taylor is one of a kind, and the best friend the shark population has on this planet.

“I hope this film gives the general public a better understanding of not just sharks, but the marine world in general,” Valerie said. “There was so much not in the film I wanted to be there, but we had so much to work with… a lot of tough decisions to decide what stayed in. The film is a great success, but you want to see every animal that you know in there. That makes a big difference, to know them.” ■