SPIELBERG ON JAWS
Shooting at sea with malfunctioning sharks, Jaws was no easy movie to make
In November 1975, Steven Spielberg — single, beardless, unafraid to speak his mind — sat down in Los Angeles to discuss his latest movie project, Jaws. The groundbreaking thriller adapted from Peter Benchley’s novel already had a box-office take of US$131m in the USA, but the global phenomenon was still in its infancy, with many international cinema fans still waiting for the opportunity to be scared in their seats.
“The first challenge involved getting up in the morning, and the second one was working on the ocean with mechanical effects that really should’ve been done on dry land,” admits the 30-year-old Steven Spielberg, already one of Hollywood’s hottest young directors as he meets with the press to discuss his shark movie which birthed the descriptor ‘blockbuster’. “Had we shot this movie on dry land it would’ve still been difficult, but we were taking all this apparatus and we were putting it out in the ocean; not in a tank, but in the real ocean. We were trying to control the elements, but four weeks into production we discovered we could not control the elements. It was like working in an earthquake. For eight hours a day, the ship was being tossed around. You’re slipping and sliding, and the effects aren’t working. The tides are pulling the boats apart and the anchors are ripping up the sand 30 feet below. It was probably the toughest movie I’ll ever make, or ever really want to make.
Is it true that you threatened to quit the project?
I threatened to quit three times. Not because of the circumstances, the weather or the mechanical effects — but because there were things in the movie that I really wanted to do. For instance, I was ready to quit the picture when I heard that the studio was considering making the movie in a tank with miniatures. Now, all the great miniature artists who made Captain Courageous and the original Mutiny On The Bounty — with all the great sea footage — have all passed away. All the great masters of miniature and matte work and glass work and special effects have all moved on. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to make miniature effects like that look convincing today, and I felt that I would lose a lot of credibility if I took this movie and made it in a controlled environment. I wanted to go out into the high seas to shoot the picture. That was one instance where I had to fight for what I wanted.
How proud are you of the movie?
I’m very proud of how the picture turned out. I think I realised 65% of my intentions and I made certain things work in a very experimental way. I’m especially proud because the film works well as a film on an audience. I’m not talking about how well it did financially, I’m talking about response from the audience, and emotional truth.
You say you only realised 65% of your intentions. What didn’t make it in?
There are a lot of things that didn’t make it. I wanted a closer relationship between the husband and wife in the story. The day I realised I couldn’t
make a three-hour movie and I couldn’t take 45 minutes to show this man in his home life, I compromised by dreaming up the scene where the police chief and the little boy make faces at one another. There are also a number of things I wanted to do in the third act that I felt would achieve more tension.
I wanted to add things that were more terrifying and more spectacular, but our shark was a prima-donna and only performed on certain days. I had to cut a lot of my shots and a lot of my ideas. There was one point where I wanted the shark to knock a hole in the bottom of the boat and stick his whole head through. This was in the first draft that I had [writer] Peter Benchley write. Then the boat begins to sink very quickly. They’re stuffing mattresses into the hole. They’re trying to seal the hole in a race against time before the boat sinks. What is in the movie now is a very small scene where the shark is ramming the hole and he breaks the seal on the starboard side and some water comes in. Beyond that, nothing developed.
Were you able to rehearse underwater scenes?
We didn’t. It’s very hard to direct underwater. What I did was I planned every shot and I had a sketch artist paint the shot in black-and-white and colour. Then [cinematographer] Ron Taylor would look at the angle and the focal length lens that was to be used. They would go out and they would match the different sketches with the actual great white shark they shot in Australia, which would attack the cage. Sadly, you can’t direct a live great white shark. In the scenes where the cage is attacked, it’s actually two very large 17-foot great white sharks on different days. To act with them is like a happy accident that we didn’t expect to happen. For example, the scene where the shark becomes tangled in the cage, that’s a real shark who actually got tangled in the cage. He got tangled in some rope and he couldn’t extricate himself. He panicked and began to drown; he was thrashing around until the ropes were cut topside and he was able to go free.
Did you go over budget?
We were twice the original budget, but no one was surprised. We sat down with the head of the studio and predicted it would probably go over schedule by four days on the land portion of the story and perhaps twice the schedule on the sea portion of the story. We had budgeted 25 days out in the ocean. We told them we might go to 50 because we didn’t know how the ocean was going to treat us. We wound up going [up] to about 100 days [shooting] on the ocean.
Did you ever consider making this as a 3D movie?
No. I thought it was more challenging to create 3D in the audience’s mind. When the shark comes out of the water and people jump, it’s like 3D. I don’t know what 3D would add to that. I think 3D is a promotional gimmick. The only technique I endorse is widescreen Panavision and stereophonic sound. When you get into the realm of smell-o-vision, three dimensions and seat-shaking, you’re getting into the area of gimmick promotion.
You worked on the final draft of the movie’s script. What did you add?
Writing is a total collaboration. I never stand over the writer’s shoulder and say, “Write this, this and this.” What I do is have meetings with each writer and I tell them exactly what I would like the movie to be like. My main contribution in the story involves not showing the shark for an hour. Instead I wanted to create suspense from just seeing the water, horizons and clouds. I wanted the film to be much more psychological for the first 60 minutes, before the shark comes on-screen.
My contribution is also in the area of humour. I made Roy Scheider’s character much more human. He’s a guy from New York who is looking for a safe harbour: a safe place to raise his kids, and the irony of having to cope with this challenge on his first summer as a policeman. There were things with all the characters that I contributed to.
Plus, most of the shocks or the jumps and screams in the movie were things that weren’t in the script, but I worked on them with all the writers. We also improvised scenes with the actors between takes, too. [Actor/screenwriter] Carl Gottlieb would write down the improvisations and then we would sit and draw scenes from the improvisation. A lot of the dialogue in the movie comes from actors improvising and is not from the original novel.
“Would you consider making a sequel to Jaws?” “No, never. Never. I wouldn’t even go to see the sequel when it comes out. I think a sequel to Jaws is embarrassing and somewhat funny.” “But will there be one?”
“I’m afraid so. Yeah.”
What personal mementos did you take home?
In my office, I have a pair of tiger-shark jaws — but the only memento I have from the movie are some very bad tick bites on my leg that won’t go away. I got them from living on the island. I was attacked by ticks over the six months I was living in a house there. The other memento I brought back with me is my life...
Were you happy with the publicity before the movie launched? I’ll be drawn and quartered for saying this, but a film like Jaws didn’t need as much promotion as it acquired. Most of the promotion was accidental and automatic. We had a lot of free promotion that we didn’t intend because at the beginning of the making of the movie, [producers] Dick Zanuck and David Brown and myself decided to keep our shark secret and put him in a warehouse. Every journalist on the East Coast came running with cameras to find out the big secret and that’s where all the publicity came from. There was a great rush of promotion. Time magazine swiped one of the first pictures. Christian Science Monitor swiped the second picture. We had armed guards guarding the shark, but they kept getting in and taking pictures. That was completely unintentional. I really wanted to keep the special effects a mystery until the picture came out and had gone through its first run. With a picture like Jaws, there was so much pre-hype that it was like beating the dog to death to kill the fleas.
Did you suspect the movie was going to be such a big hit?
I foresaw the film was going to be very successful. I even predicted what the film would make. I wrote it down and put it in a sealed envelope that I gave the president of the studio, Sid Sheinberg. I hope he still has the envelope, but it went way beyond my expectations. It went way beyond anybody’s expectations. The studio was nervous. I was nervous. Nobody knew how it was going to do. We previewed the film in Dallas and there was cold sweat the whole way on the airplane to Texas. No one talked to each other. We couldn’t eat our dinner. When we went to the preview house, people were lining up because they put the book cover in newspapers without the title. There were about 2000 people in a line around a theatre that only held 800 people — and that was four hours before the film began. There was already a consciousness about this motion picture before the preview — and the preview was wildly successful. The powers that be who saw the movie took Sid Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman into the bathroom in the theatre in Dallas and they changed their entire campaign. They decided not to go into 1000 theatres but to go into only 409 theatres.
They knew what they were doing.
What figure did you put on your prediction?
It’s a little embarrassing. I thought the film would make $31 million in this country, but it’s already made $140 million. I was way off, by about $110 million.
How much did the film cost? It cost $7 million to make.
How much has your life changed since the release?
It hasn’t changed my life that drastically because the minute I finished with Jaws, I began on a new project. The overlap was so tight that I didn’t have a chance to sit back and spend any money at all.
Will you treat yourself to a new home or car when you get the money?
I haven’t spent any of my Jaws money, mainly because I don’t have any of my Jaws money until the end of the year. I am not planning to buy a new house. I’ve been living in the same house for about five years and I plan to live in the same house for five or six more years. I have the same car I’ve had for five years, too. And I have the same dog. I am not married and I’m not planning to get married for the next couple of years either.
Is it true that you have a six-foot plastic chicken in your office?
Yes. How did you know about the six-foot chicken? It’s plastic, it’s neon and it lights up. It has a fin on the back and big teeth in front — and it sits in the office. The chicken was from my movie Sugarland Express. It was on top of the chicken stand that went around very slowly, and that was my souvenir from the set. I said, “I’ve got to have that chicken. Andy Warhol will be so jealous if I take the chicken home and put it in my house.”
Did you give the shark a screen test before you made the movie? We gave him four screen tests and he failed three of them. True.
Are you planning to write more scripts in the future?
My next picture [Close Encounters Of The Third Kind] is a project that I wrote myself, but I don’t want to discuss it today. It’s the first time I’ve written a complete motion-picture screenplay and then had the courage to do it. I’ve written a few screenplays before, but at the last moment I became insecure. I chickened out and didn’t do them.
How can you tell if a script is good or bad?
I prefer to read old novels in libraries rather than reading the original screenplays that are written for the marketplace today. So many of the scripts I read are not innovative. They’re either remakes or adaptations of other movies that have been enormously successful.
Would you consider making a sequel to Jaws?
No, never. Never. I wouldn’t even go to see the sequel when it comes out. I think a sequel to Jaws is embarrassing and somewhat funny.
But will there be one? I’m afraid so. Yeah.