STEVEN SPIELBERG: I'm in Wilshire Boulevard,
Downloaded from YTS.MX
and I just came across a theater
that has a very apropos sign.
If you can read it, the sign says
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
"Robert Shaw in Jaws."
Also, "Take the Money and Run."
That's pretty funny, wouldn't you say?
Well, there were all sorts of reasons for people going in,
but the people coming out, they were ecstatic.
Smoking lounge is sold out,
seats downstairs in the first seven rows only.
I was in New York at the time,
and I went with two friends of mine,
Janet Maslin and Albert Brooks.
The three of us were in the car,
going over to the Rivoli
to see if there might be a line.
MAN 1: The ticket holders' line went on and on.
It became this spectacle.
I kept thinking, "Who are the lucky people
that made this movie?" (LAUGHS)
This shark, swallow you whole.
WOMAN 1: Was it good? Very tasty.
Bloody as hell. All these people got eaten up, you know.
They just... Ah!
The best I've seen in my life, the best movie.
MAN 2: Fifty years, and we've come so far.
We're still talking about Jaws and the effect and value
of what that movie said and still says.
I'll never forget walking into the theater,
and all the lobby cards were on the wall.
And I thought, (GASPS) "That shark is huge."
Part of the film's charm today is almost the nostalgia factor
of remembering what it was like to see it then.
(SCREAMS)
It was sort of life-changing.
At nine years old, I don't remember
having an experience that was that visceral
and that thrilling.
The whole theater reacted like a musical instrument.
Ahhh!
I read the book first,
so I sort of knew what I was gonna see.
MAN 3: Peter Benchley wrote a book called Jaws.
A film was made from the book.
It has already made more money
than any motion picture in history.
(LAUGHS)
It was the first blockbuster.
(SCREAMING)
I've seen Jaws in a theater 31 times.
I was 12, and this started me
thinking about a career in movies.
MAN 4: ls this your first time? Ninth time.
Your how many? Nine.
It's the film I've seen the most,
and I could still watch it if it's on any time.
Who are you? Matt Hooper.
I'm from the Oceanographic Institute.
I wanted to be Matt Hooper.
I wanted to be a shark scientist.
That's a 20-footer.
Twenty-five. Three tons of him.
WOMAN 2: Jaws has been an inspiration,
and there is a completely different attitude now
about sharks and the ocean.
In 50 years, it's been used in so many different ways.
It was a time when movies
were at the pinnacle of a cultural conversation.
I loved Jaws. I really did.
Because it didn't eat up no Black people.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)
You said that there are very few perfect movies.
I think Jaws fits into that.
MAN 5: ls that movie gonna keep you out of the water?
It'll keep me out for a while. (LAUGHS)
I definitely won't be going in now.
MAN 5: Ever again? Never.
I was one of those people who, in a bath,
would have a hard time
not picturing a shark underneath me.
NARRATOR: it is as if God created the devil
and gave him Jaws.
See it before you go swimming.
For me, the story of Jaws is the fact that a movie
that I thought would really end my career
is the film that began it.
INTERVIEWER: Steven, 50 years since Jaws.
When you hear that, what do you think?
When I hear 50 years...
MAN 1: Roll sound. SPIELBERG: ...I think of home.
Because the theme of home
is so consistent with the story of Jaws.
It's about getting home.
(ALL SINGING) Show me the way to go home
SPIELBERG: About returning home...
(SIGHS) Can we go home now?
SPIELBERG: And already being home.
MARTIN BRODY: Want to take him home?
Like to New York?
No, home here.
SPIELBERG: So when I look back at Jaws today,
at those moments of difficulty...
Was there good movement like that?
SPIELBERG: The film wound up 100 days behind schedule.
The shark was not working...
MAN 2: No, cut, cut!
SPIELBERG: ...and I was terrified I was gonna be fired.
All I thought about was going home. (CHUCKLES)
INTERVIEWER: ls there anything that you've never said about Jaws?
(SPIELBERG LAUGHS) Let's find out.
Steven, how old are you? Quantos anos tienes?
Twenty-seven. Veintisiete.
How long have you been in the motion picture industry?
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
( IN ENGLISH) Oh, I've been professionally making movies
since I was 21.
MAN 3: I have always had an incredible belief
in Steven's ability to do material
that sometimes others questioned.
There may have been occasions
when I had a belief in Steven's ability
to make material that exceeded
Steven's conviction about the material.
And I never had any doubt in my mind
that Steven would do a great job.
MAN 4: Steve used to hang around the film department at USC
and so that's where I met him.
He was always coming over
to see if he could find a cameraman
or somebody who could help him with the student films.
So when Steve did Duel
and it was like a feature film for television,
I said, "Wow, this is fantastic."
(TRUCK HONKING)
DEL TORO: Duel opened in Mexico as a feature.
And I remember seeing it in the drive-in,
and people clapped with their horns.
(CHUCKLES)
I met Steven for the first time
when he brought Sugarland Express
to the USC Film School.
WOMAN 1: I want my baby back.
Now, are you gonna help me or not?
ZEMECKIS: I couldn't believe
that this really young filmmaker
made a movie on that scale.
He became instantly my hero.
CROWE: I held filmmakers and directors off
as people that existed in another world.
And I remember feeling like Spielberg was a guy
who was kind of from my side of the world.
And that was the beginning of me feeling like,
"Maybe I could do something like this, too."
He had made his bones as a director
long before he did Jaws.
I think we all felt that this was somebody
who was going places.
But not until Jaws was there any idea
of how big this could get.
I didn't know what I wanted to do next.
I had been wanting to do a UFO movie,
not yet called Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
but that was sort of all I had in my mind.
And I was also in post-production
on Sugarland Express.
I had gone into Richard Zanuck
at his partner David Brown's office
many, many times.
When I saw a stack of papers
in the outer office, and it was galleys.
I looked at the top sheet and it said
Jaws by Peter Benchley.
And I had no idea what that meant, Jaws.
I mean, was it the history of dentistry?
I read it and I was enthralled.
And if I read Peter Benchley's Jaws
for the first time right now,
I would have the same rush of excitement
that I had when I first read the galleys.
Because, in a way, Jaws was a sequel to Duel.
Duel was this murderous leviathan on the highway
trying to kill this traveling salesman
in a little car.
And Jaws is the story of this leviathan of the sea
that is rending this seaside resort into bankruptcy
unless they hire somebody to kill the threat.
When I wrote a novel called Jaws,
I was faced with a fascinating challenge.
How to describe the instincts of an ancient animal
that threatens modern man
with the most horrible of deaths.
Most people, when they hear about Jaws and they realize
what a culture-changing event that was,
they want to know, how did my dad come up with the idea?
What I've always heard from him was,
growing up as a New York City boy,
born and raised in New York...
He also spent the summers in Nantucket
fishing with his dad.
I grew up on a neighboring island, Nantucket,
where I first encountered sharks.
We used to fish for swordfish, but they were rare,
and we caught sharks instead.
Not only did he see a lot of sharks
when he was fishing with his dad,
but he also knew what it was like
to live on an island.
Our father explained what it means to grow up
in a community like Amity or Nantucket,
and he talked about islanders.
And by islander, I don't mean a year-rounder.
To be an Islander, you have to have been born here,
and nothing short of reincarnation
can change your status.
When do I get to become an Islander?
Ellen, never. Never!
Before writing Jaws, I had had very little experience
in the water with sharks.
I knew a lot about them academically.
I'd studied them since I was a child,
but I really had no experience with sharks at all underwater.
And then Blue Water, White Death came out.
MAN 1: Oh, he's gotta be 12.
MAN 2: Yeah, at least 12. Look at his back.
BOTH: Oh!
I first started diving in the early '50s,
and then a little bit later on,
I got a 16-millimeter movie camera
and was shooting film for television,
and people wanted to see sharks.
WOMAN 2: it was in about 1965 or '67
where we first started to work with great white sharks.
Nobody else in the world had ever done it before.
There, look at him. Sitting on top of the cage.
Eventually, Peter Gimbel wanted to make a film,
and he employed us to work on it.
You couldn't believe. It's fantastic.
Peter Benchley saw Blue Water, White Death
and that was one of the reasons
that he got the idea for writing Jaws.
Peter also had seen Frank Mundus,
who caught a huge 4,500-pound, 18-foot shark
off of Long Island.
So Peter, with his imagination,
put all of that together and thought,
"What would it be like if one of those sharks
"just randomly decided to stay in one place?"
SKERRY: Peter eventually researched the science.
He knew these animals, he understood their behavior.
But if you read the book, the animal is not a villain.
It is doing what it does.
And he created characters who could represent
both a hardened shark fisherman like Quint...
I wrote the character of Quint as a man who begins
with great contempt for sharks,
and is finally obsessed with
and driven to kill this particular one.
SKERRY: And he created a PhD scientist like Hooper
who understands this is just an animal.
That doesn't make it good or bad, it just is.
It's part of nature.
Peter filled in all these other stories
about Brody and his wife and the affair with Hooper
and all the stuff with the Mafia
because that added texture and depth to the story.
WENDY: Really, one of the most
humorous things, though, about the book,
was finding the title.
There are several pages of suggested titles,
and Peter and Wendy and our parents
were struggling over what to call it.
Oh, we had pretentious ones like "Leviathan Rising,"
and then we had ones... "The Terror of the Deep."
And Peter's father said,
"I know what we should call it."
"What's That Noshin' On My Leg?"
(LAUGHS)
And this went on for months.
None of them quite worked.
NAT: The day the book was to go to press,
Tom Congdon from Doubleday said,
"I hate to bother you about this,
"but we kind of need a title."
Peter said. "Yeah, we've been worrying about that,
"and the only thing that comes to mind
"that has pleased everybody is the word 'jaws."'
Congdon said, "Okay, what's it mean?"
He said, "I don't know, but it's short."
The cover of Jaws was really difficult.
The dust jackets for the books evolved.
The first one was Amity,
like an idyllic island in between the shark jaws.
And they scrapped that one.
And then they did a version of the shark underneath her.
And the shark wasn't very scary.
It was a little too phallic-looking.
You know, what you wanna say is a penis with teeth, right?
That's exactly what it looked like. (CHUCKLES)
NICOTERO: And that's when Roger Kastel came in
and created that painting for the paperback.
And then Universal used the same painting,
which is probably one of the perfect movie posters.
Jaws was rocketing up the bestseller list in 1974.
And then when the paperback came out,
it was a multi-million bestseller.
Peter just wanted to get a novel written,
and when his agent came and said
the movie people were interested in optioning it,
he said, "I don't care. Sell them the option."
WENDY: it was Helen Gurley Brown
who was the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine,
who gave it to her husband, David Brown, a producer.
And he and Richard Zanuck bought it,
and the rest is history
Just by reading the book, the last...
I think it was 110 pages of the novel,
the hunt for the shark.
It was so enthralling and so suspenseful. MAN: Yeah.
You know, it's frightened me so much.
And I was so angry at being frightened,
that I wanted to frighten back.
"I'll make this movie and scare them all back."
SPIELBERG: When I read it,
I went to Dick and David's office on Monday
and I said, "Do you have a director?
"Because I would love to direct this."
And they said, "Oh, my goodness,
"there's already a director assigned."
Peter was part of the process
of interviewing various people to be the director,
and remember that there was one director
who called the shark a whale all the time.
So he was out.
(PHONE RINGING)
SPIELBERG: A week or so later, Dick and David called me
and they said,
"It's available. Do you still want to do it?
I was as hungry, as the shark was hungry,
to tell the story of Jaws.
And I didn't know how it was going to be done,
how it could be done.
But my instincts told me that it needed authenticity
so the shark wouldn't get laughed at.
When I made Duel, the studio tried to get me
to do the whole thing on process stage
with screens out the windows of the car.
And I basically said I'd rather not make Duel
if I have to go and do it all fake
on a soundstage, using rear projection.
And I felt the same way about Jaws.
I wanted to go to the natural environment,
so there was some kind of verisimilitude,
so it needed to be in the ocean, out to sea.
And so I knew somehow it had to be done on location.
You know as an audience member,
when something is real and when something is not.
And that choice to shoot in open water,
the audience wins.
Because when you see these characters
surrounded in complete isolation,
the loneliness of them, we feel that, we're scared.
If you really think about Jaws,
it really is an exercise in pushing the boundaries.
Like, they could have made that movie on the backlot or in a tank,
and it would have been a very, very different movie.
But they were pushing the art form.
At the same time as Jaws was made,
you saw this new crop of unbelievable talent
coming in to Hollywood in the '70s
that challenged every assumption
of what was possible, and challenged everything.
1974.
(PEOPLE LAUGHING)
In 1974, when I started making Jaws,
my focus was trying to figure out
how to adapt the novel.
I had never experienced adapting a novel before.
And Peter Benchley wrote the first three drafts of the screenplay,
admitted that a screenplay and a novel
are two different kettles of fish.
That was a completely different kind of writing for him.
So he put a lot of effort into the screenplay
and did it a couple of different times.
And then various other writers came in.
David Brown said, "Why not Howard Sackler?
"He's a great writer.
"He won a Pulitzer for The Great White Hope."
I was thinking Great White Hope, great white shark.
That makes sense.
He created the structure.
And then after that, for a comedy punch up,
I wanted to bring my friend Carl Gottlieb along
to just try to find some lightness and some humor
between these three disparate characters.
The mate. Where's the mate? The mate is dead. We'll have to...
Where's the body? Why is the boat torn to pieces?
Because it's a great white shark.
GOTTLIEB: Nice thing was, I was able to write a nice part for myself.
I play Meadows, the editor of the newspaper.
I want to get on the state wire services,
see if Boston will pick it up and go national.
Call Dave Axelrod in New York,
tell him he owes me a favor, all right?
And Steven sent me a script
with a note on the cover saying, "Eviscerate it."
We decided to lose the love interest
because it was in a movie
that was a straight-line adventure film
about the shark and the town
and the, uh... the, uh... the hunt.
The film became much more a story of Chief Brody,
a kind of reluctant hero, in this case,
tested by the elements, by nature itself.
This is a great white, Larry, a big one.
And any shark expert in the world will tell you
it's a killer. It's a man eater.
CAMERON: The great white shark was not well-understood
by the public at large when the film first came out.
And it became this kind of mythical beast.
What we are dealing with here
is a perfect engine,
uh, an eating machine.
MAN: I've never seen anything as perfect as a great white shark.
What really strikes you
when you see a great white shark in person
is not just how long they can be,
but how big around they are.
Great whites are one of the most epic predators
that you'll ever find in the wild.
They're essentially governors in the way that they control
the sizes of all the populations beneath them.
VAUGHN: And what did you say the name of the shark is?
It's a carcharodon carcharias. It's a great white.
The great white shark is a species
that has been described all over the world
in many different ways.
From man eater to white pointer
to great white shark.
I remember seeing the shark in Jaws for the first time
and being completely blown away
at how realistic it looked, how large it was,
how impressive and truly authentic
to what white sharks actually look like.
This animal still looks just as good as anything
that's coming out today if not better,
relying almost exclusively on practical effects.
INTERVIEWER: So, Joe, tell me, where are we?
ALVES: Well, this is what I call the art department.
This is sort of my home base.
These are the concept sketches that I did early on
before we had a finished script.
What happened was David Brown called me
and he said, "Joe, we think Jaws
"might make a damn good movie
"if we could sort of illustrate
"the activity of the shark."
So he said, "Just give me a couple dozen illustrations
"of the shark activity."
I pretty well did these as it's described
in the galley sheets.
Joe Alves designed drawings of a shark
that he could put up against the wall
in a production office.
He did an 18-foot long shark.
He did a 26-foot long shark.
He did a 32-foot long shark.
These are full-size drawings.
And we had to evaluate,
"Which one do we commit to, which one do we build?"
And for me, the 18-foot shark was not that intimidating.
But the 32-foot long shark was not realistic,
and it would've turned the genre of the film
into science fantasy.
The 26-foot-long shark was just right,
I thought, for Jaws.
ALVES: October 1st, 1973.
Marshall Green had a meeting.
He was the head of production at Universal.
And he said, "Okay, Joe, can you make the shark?"
I says, "Yeah, I certainly could try."
He says, "Okay, find somebody and make it off the lot.
And somebody recommended Bob Mattey,
and I found Bob and put a crew together.
To the ingenious shark building team. Cheers.
Bob and Whitey. Yeah.
Whitey doesn't like to turn around and look at the camera,
he's camera shy. ( INDISTINCT)
Right. Okay, just for Steve.
Final pose here. (LAUGHS)
One in a million.
ALVES: We got seven in the crew.
I called them the Magnificent Seven.
MAN: Joe Alves? (GROANS) Yes.
And we started building the shark.
Bob Mattey was taken out of retirement
to create the creature,
the great white shark and its many incarnations.
ALVES: What we needed was a shark to go left to right,
and one to go right to left.
And then one on a big crane.
So we had three sharks to build.
BROWN: A shed was set up in the San Fernando Valley.
It was like making Apollo.
It was like a new invention.
NICOTERO: Bob Mattey, he had the chops.
And the fact that he had built all this other great stuff,
like the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea giant squid.
He knew how to build it.
So, yeah, in theory, it'll work.
SPIELBERG: I thought it'd be fun to nickname the shark
after my attorney, Bruce Ramer.
So I started calling the shark Bruce.
And then in the shark shed,
where Whitey and Bob Mattey everybody else was working,
they started calling the shark Bruce.
And then everybody forgot why it was being called Bruce.
It just was named Bruce.
CAMERON: The film happened to come out at a time
when I was really teaching myself
how visual effects and mechanical effects
and makeup effects were done.
Like Bruce, like the shark in Jaws.
Because I wanted a career in that business.
And I just loved all that stuff.
As a constructor of animatronics and puppets,
to operate in that scale with basically hydraulic
and incredibly powerful machinery,
that is remarkable.
Basically, I was doing a lot of research with sharks,
and talked to Ron and Valerie Taylor.
SPIELBERG: Ron and Valerie Taylor,
I knew well from the documentary, Blue Water, White Death.
And I wanted them to bless our production.
I also wanted them to be able to work on the film.
And I said to them, "Was there any way
"we can get actual great white footage
"that I could intercut with a mechanical shark?"
And they said, "Absolutely.
"We'll go to the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia,
"and we'll get the footage that you need."
He simply left it up to Valerie and I
to get what we could
according to the script.
He basically realized at that time
that there would be the possibility
that he would have to shoot around what we got
because it's a wild animal,
and they just don't do what you want them to.
ALVES: Back on the lot, the studio said,
"We're going to start shooting this movie
"in the next month."
And I'm saying, "Wait a minute.
"I have a year and a half to build the shark."
"No, you don't.
"We're going to start shooting because the book's so popular."
That's all they care about, is the money.
They don't have any idea what we're doing,
how complicated it was. No.
So Steven got them to postpone it until May.
SPIELBERG: I remember going out there
with John Milius and George Lucas,
and John stuck his head in the shark and said,
"Okay, close the jaws!"
And I was screaming "Don't close the jaws!
"John, get out of the shark!"
A bunch of us went and visited Steven,
and he wanted to show us the construction of the shark,
which was impressive.
So I thought, "Great, this'll be a good movie."
And it was obvious it was going to be a big hit.
SPIELBERG: George looked at the shark and said,
"Wow, this is gonna be the most successful movie ever made."
And I, of course, looked at George like,
"Well, from your lips to..." You know.
But I didn't believe that.
We never, until the last minute,
had a script that was to everybody's liking,
and the studio wanted us to go ahead before some strike.
And so we were forced to go on the location,
forced to start shooting.
And he had some serious reservations
whether we were doing the right thing.
We did not go into this picture fully prepared.
CAMERON: In the first frames of the movie,
you are a shark and you're just hunting.
It really shows you what's possible in cinema.
And so my favorite scene in the film is the opening.
LUCAS: The opening is sensational.
Really sets you up... like that.
Where are we going? Swimming!
PEELE: The opening of a film is everything.
If you don't get that part right,
the rest of it doesn't matter.
The opening of Jaws, it's simple,
and it may be the most violent scene in the film,
and at the same time,
it is one that obscures the monster.
(PANTING)
SPIELBERG: In the original script that Peter Benchley did,
we did show the shark.
But the shark was down, getting repaired.
And it was dawning on me that things were scarier
without the shark than with the shark.
(SCREAMS)
I always kind of relate my scene in Jaws
to the scene in Psycho.
The lady in the shower,
because it's that kind of horrifying thing
that comes out of nowhere.
And I think a lot of what made the scene very, very scary
was the fact that you knew what was down there
and you knew what was happening,
but you couldn't see it.
SPIELBERG: The one filmmaker that influenced me the most
in the making of Jaws was Alfred Hitchcock.
What Alfred Hitchcock could do with the power of suggestion,
I thought, "if just a little bit of that
"could be sprinkled on my mojo,
"then maybe I could make Jaws
"with a real tip of my cap toward Hitch."
PEELE: The whole question of Jaws is "How big is it?
"What does this fish really look like underneath?"
And throughout the film,
he gives us a little bit more of a taste as we go.
When we were shooting the scene,
she had a harness on,
and so we had a line that would go
to five people on one rope,
and five people on another rope.
I wanted this effect.
Back and forth.
And I thought it would be a lot scarier
if we see the force
of how the shark is carrying her across the water.
I will never forget the opening sequence,
where she is dragged ruthlessly through the ocean,
and the different camera perspectives
and how she's being pulled away from us,
powerless to this threat beneath the surface.
If they're willing to do that three minutes into the movie,
what else are they willing to do?
(SCREAMING) Oh, God, help me!
God, please help!
Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts,
an island off the Eastern Seaboard.
Beautiful, picturesque, and about to be disguised
as the fictional town of Amity.
MAN: ls it true that the art director
is the one that chose Martha's Vineyard?
The art director came down
and looked at the entire Eastern Seaboard.
I don't know why, but I had heard a lot about Martha's Vineyard
as a small summer community
that might suit this picture,
and I suggested he go to see it.
ALVES: I needed a bay with a 25-foot depth and a low tide.
I had a whole map of New England,
and I went through all these various little villages,
and I see there's a boat to Martha's Vineyard.
So I went there, January 17th,
and I found out the depth was only 25 feet, two-foot tide,
and I thought, "Oh my God, this is gonna be a success."
KRAMER: Martha's Vineyard is an island.
It's a little spit of land
off the coast of Massachusetts.
It is a stunning piece of land and a summer resort.
I've spent a lot of time in Martha's Vineyard,
and all of the non-actors that he used,
they really represent the spirit
of this idyllic, peaceful, safe place
that's sort of bohemian,
and I think even if you go now,
it feels like a '70s time capsule still.
And I think all of that helped
because it gives the world such authenticity.
Listen, Chief.
Be careful, will you?
In this town?
Hey. Hi, Dad.
Martha's Vineyard was a delightful place to shoot.
I really enjoyed it.
It was thrilling.
I'd never been on a location before,
other than for television shoots.
But never for a movie,
and I was feeling so full of myself.
MAN: Martha's Vineyard means so much to this movie, Jaws.
If you think of it, there are only eight people
that came from Hollywood to be in this movie.
You have Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss,
Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary,
Murray Hamilton, Teddy Grossman,
Susan Backlinie and Carl Gottlieb.
Everyone else you see in the movie
are locals from Martha's Vineyard.
We had a shark attack at South Beach
this morning, Mayor! Fatal!
I've got to batten down the beach!
KRAMER: I read about the shooting of Jaws
in the Vineyard newspapers.
So I called my agent and he set up a meeting,
and I flew to Boston and met Steven.
He knew I was from the island,
and I think he wanted some real island feel.
And listen, I was lucky to be in this.
You folks were born here, right? Yeah. I'm an islander.
When we did Jaws, I turned 19 in January of that year.
They tried to put me in a pair of sort of bell bottom blue jeans,
and what almost would have been the top of a union suit
that was sort of tie-dyed and pink.
And I was like, "it's not really what I'd wear."
So they said, "Okay, well, bring your own wardrobe."
So a pair of khakis, an Oxford cloth shirt,
and I still have the sweater that I wore.
INTERVIEWER: Wow, put it on like this.
There we go.
INTERVIEWER: Wow. You know what the best news is?
It still fits. Yes! Amazing, huh?
SPIELBERG: Well, I had very good success casting Sugarland Express
with a casting director named Shari Rhodes.
And we had tremendous success with real people.
Did you ever do some time in prison, son?
So I asked Shari if she would cast Jaws,
and I said, "Let's get locals from Martha's Vineyard
to perform in this movie, or even from Boston.
SODERBERGH: Shari Rhodes did an amazing job
of casting people who looked and acted
like they just walked in off the street.
What kind of shark?
A tiger shark.
A what?
She spent time there and got to know people.
I just put some sun tan lotion on
and, uh, I'm trying to absorb some of this sun.
Nobody's going in.
Please. Get in the water.
I mean, all those people in that board meeting
in the town hall, they're real.
Is that $3,000 bounty on the shark in cash or check?
(ALL LAUGHING)
I don't think that's funny.
I don't think that's funny at all.
It gives the whole movie
more of a documentary impromptu feel.
Hello. Hello back, young feller.
How are you?
MAN 1: This is Craig Kingsbury,
known by some folks on the island
as the island character.
KINGSBURY: it's like one big family.
And you hear what's going on in Edgartown?
A lot of it's laughable and joking and fun
and family fights and all that,
but they all get out.
MAN 2: What's the serious business, though?
We don't have anything too serious.
SPIELBERG: Kingsbury made all his dialogue up.
Every time he opens his mouth, that's Craig talking.
We didn't write lines for him.
Why don't we get them silly bastards
down in that rock pile?
There'll be some fun.
They'll wish their fathers had never met their mothers
when they start taking their bottoms out
and slamming into them rocks, boy.
Every character has a little bit of an arc,
a little bit of a story,
so that when they enter the picture,
you're interested in them,
and when they exit the picture, you miss them.
SPIELBERG: I feel that Jaws is more of a people picture
than a shark movie.
Without those people,
you wouldn't give a hang about the shark.
We're in one of our locations here on Martha's Vineyard
in the town of Oak Bluffs,
and this is one of our four retail stores in town,
and it's one of the places
where we keep the Jaws memory alive.
I'm Todd Rebello, my brother played Michael Brody.
His name was Chris Rebello.
Mom. I got cut.
I got bit by a vampire.
I have one great memory
of the day when he says, "I got bit by a vampire."
We were out on the front lawn,
and it was my brother and I and Steven,
and he was just asking us question after question.
He really did relate to somebody young.
You know, it could have been your older brother in a sense.
The pond's for old ladies.
I know it's for the old ladies,
but just do it for the old man, huh?
TODD: My brother passed away at 37.
It was fairly tragic. Three kids.
So anything I could do to keep that memory alive
and the memory of him, I try to help.
After a couple of days of being on the set with my children,
I was asked to be in charge of taking care of the kids.
Most of the time, I was in the background
and I had my movie camera with me.
That was back in the Super 8 days.
I was very happy to see all the local people
being a part of this,
and we would talk about it even years later.
We still do, as a matter of fact,
with Jeff Voorhees,
the little boy that gets eaten by the shark.
I'm gonna go and get my raft and go back out in the water.
Let me see your fingers.
Oh. Alex Kintner, they're beginning to prune.
Just let me go out a little longer.
Just ten more minutes.
Thanks.
VOORHEES: They filmed that here in May,
that's when that scene I was in.
And if you know the water up here
in New England, Martha's Vineyard,
you know, I won't swim here now until July.
This water's freezing cold in May.
So people were like, "Were you afraid of the shark?"
No, I was afraid of freezing my 12-year-old ass off in that water.
SODERBERGH: I think the Kintner scene
is a beautiful example of Spielberg's gift.
J.J. ABRAMS: Every single choice he makes,
it's about the tension and the paranoia
and that sense of, you don't know quite where to look.
JORDAN PEELE: The tension that's built with the cinematic devices
in this scene are so immersive,
so seamless and flawless.
It's got the wipes, it's got the split diopter.
And then when it hits the push-pull zoom
that Hitchcock pioneered...
It just brings the audience along
in the perfect pacing,
and then it's delivered.
SODERBERGH: All of this is in the aid
of putting you inside of Brody's experience
of being on the beach that day
when this terrible thing happens.
Get everybody out! Come on.
Everybody, get out!
In those days, I wasn't thinking about cinema.
I was thinking about shots.
When to go close and when to be wide,
when to give the audience a sense of geography
so they're not lost.
VOORHEES: At first, shooting the scene, they had a mannequin.
They put it on a raft,
and the mechanical shark bites this little mannequin.
And there was this big barrel
right near the top of the water,
and it's full of blood. He goes,
"You're gonna take your raft out to that barrel,"
and all of a sudden,
all the blood starts shooting up like a rocket.
When you see me go up and down,
that's two guys lifting me in and out of the water,
then pull you under and give you air.
(GASPING)
FLIGOR: Poor Jeff.
He came up out of the water,
you know, he got all that stuff out of his eyes.
Alex?
FLIGOR: And then he did it again and it worked fine.
Alex?
These are rare events, but the reality is it does happen.
A shark is attracted to the exact kind of splashing
and activity that occurs whenever human beings go in swimming.
You cannot avoid it.
The sharks are not infesting the waters,
the sharks live in the water, right?
And we put ourselves into their environment,
and so we are taking an inherent risk
any time we choose to go into the water.
The only way that a shark can taste something
or can know what something is,
is literally by biting it.
And they make a decision about whether
that's going to be what they're going to eat or not.
And in a lot of cases, they'll just say
"No, that's not right," and they'll swim away.
There was a deadly shark attack on Cape Cod.
It is the first fatal shark attack
in Massachusetts since 1936.
When boogie boarder Arthur Medici was killed
by a great white shark off Cape Cod,
where we do all of our research,
it had a profound effect personally
and subsequently, professionally.
It was the first fatality in over 80 years on the Cape,
and it impacted the whole community.
Are you going to close the beaches?
Yes, we are.
(ALL CLAMORING)
SKOMAL: Unlike the film, we weren't trying to hide anything.
And I will admit there was one or two beach managers
that didn't want to talk about sharks.
It's all psychological.
You yell, "Barracuda,"
everybody says, "Huh? What?"
You yell, "Shark,"
we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.
SKERRY: Jaws came out at a moment in history,
certainly in the United States,
but worldwide as well,
where we were just emerging from civil unrest.
That era in the early '70s
spoke to these emotional elements within humans
about fear, about danger,
about things that don't have easy answers.
What was happening in America was the Vietnam War
and Watergate.
I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
SPIELBERG: These were the turbulent times while we were making the film.
The idea of a corrupt politician
trying to hide something from the citizens
was very powerful.
Murray Hamilton, in a kind of local government,
represented power and commerce over human safety,
so he represented a lot.
(SOBBING) You knew it was dangerous,
but you let people go swimming anyway.
PEELE: The shark isn't even the greatest monster in the film.
The fact that the money in the bottom line
is working under the surface
as being more valuable than the lives at stake
is something that is always
true to a certain extent in this capitalist society.
We will be open for business.
It's gonna be one of the best summers we've ever had.
The book got a lot of curious reviews.
Some people really liked it a lot,
some people hated it.
Those beaches will be open for this weekend.
My favorite review of all,
I never even read because it wasn't written.
Frank Mankiewicz was interviewing Fidel Castro
and asking, "What do you read?"
And Castro said,
"Well, most recently, I've read a book called Tiburon."
And Mankiewicz said
"Why are you reading commercial American thrillers?"
And Castro said, "Ah, no, you're wrong.
"This is not a commercial American thriller.
"This is a marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism."
And I tried to get Doubleday to use it in an ad.
Can you imagine the ad that says,
"Marvelous metaphor about the corruption of capitalism
"- Fidel Castro"?
Who else could have a quote from Fidel Castro. Please?
But they wouldn't do it.
REPORTER: In recent days, a cloud has appeared
on the horizon of this beautiful resort community.
A cloud in the shape of a killer shark.
MAN: I was in my apartment, and Jaws was on the TV.
My dad has almost been dead for 20 years now,
and suddenly I heard my dad talking to me.
And I kind of stopped and turned around.
It was because it was the scene in Jaws,
where he was interviewing the mayor on the beach.
MAN 1: Background action.
With me here today is the mayor of Amity, Lawrence Vaughn.
Now, Mr. Vaughn, how about those rumors?
MAN 2: All right, Murray, that'll do it.
MAN 3: Cut!
CLAYTON: I love when we're able to go back and see him
and remember everything about him.
And it's really a gift.
The beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time.
Amity, as you know, means friendship.
MAN: David, you and I have talked about this.
We were both around during the shooting
of a big beach panic scene, and we wondered,
"God, what would happen if something really did come in
"during a scene like this, and begin to eat people?"
The Cape Cod radio, only last night,
recorded the spotting of a great white.
So close to the shore that it was observed by a lifeguard,
which adds further credence to the notion that our beach panic
might indeed have been invaded by a great white,
in which case, we would have had a double beach panic,
or, more horrifyingly,
our actors would have thought it was part of the movie.
We would have had to use the old Pearl Harbor line,
"This is no drill." (MEN LAUGHING)
The bridge is the number one spot,
and it's also the number one fun spot
because while you're not supposed to jump off the bridge,
150,200 people jump off that bridge an hour.
I have yet to jump off the Jaws Bridge.
I have not plucked up the courage to do that.
Sha... Shark!
It's a shark!
Jaws Bridge is where it all happened for me.
I was one of the three boys on the sailfish
inside the estuary.
I can't do a damn thing until we get this undone. Get that rope undone.
You gotta untangle that up there!
( INDISTINCT) I'm doing it!
BEN DAVID: My biggest highlight in life was having my children.
This was probably number two.
You guys okay over there?
I was gonna be a victim in the estuary.
When I dropped into the mouth,
the shark head would open,
and there's a lot of mechanism under there.
And so that particular shot
was worked by the guys in the barge with air rams.
You know, everybody's working the mouth,
one guy works the head, moving back and forth.
You think, "Jeez, am I gonna get in this shark's mouth?
"Thing's gonna clamp on me."
(PANTING)
But Bob Mattey did all the shark special effects.
He was fabulous.
(MAN SCREAMING)
There are a couple of scenes that were shot
where he really does look like a great white shark
that I would see in my work right now.
When the shark turns on its side,
that to me is an incredibly realistic view
of a white shark.
SPIELBERG: I wanted it to be real.
I wanted to show what happens when a shark bites you.
I was certainly aware I was going to make it
as scary and as realistically brutal as I possibly could.
MAN: Marking.
And then later on in the editing room,
I was able to come to my senses
in a couple of sequences, and cut things out
long before the MPAA ever saw the movie.
I think a great horror or great thriller
is the perfect tailor-made nightmare
for its protagonist.
And, you know, when you talk about
the mysticism of Jaws,
this shark getting closer and closer
to this person who doesn't like the water.
It's this mystical connection between
hero and monster, and you feel that.
MAN 1: Guys, we can't shoot right now. Hold on. MAN 2: Hold on.
MAN 3: Pull the anchor up and reset it out there, okay?
YOUNG SPIELBERG: This is my second day at sea, and I have 54 more days to go.
And if I survive this, I'll have learned a lot,
because right now, all I can tell you
is it's twice as slow shooting at sea
as it is shooting on land.
MAN 4: When they finally went on the water,
they needed local support boats and operators.
I did my acting part
and then I was fortunate enough
to be able to be part of the Marine department.
And that's where I really saw the bit of behind the scenes
of what went into the show.
They started filming at the beginning of May,
and thought they were gonna be gone by the Fourth of July.
And the schedule wasn't really holding that well
just because of what they were dealing with.
The month of August 1974 is a death march on the water.
We were on the ocean for, like, four and a half, five months,
and we all began going off the deep end, literally.
It's not the time it takes to take the take that takes the time,
it's the time it takes between the takes
that takes the time it takes to take.
CAMERON: Anytime you're dealing with water,
it doesn't get twice as hard,
it instantly gets five times as hard.
He always laughs whenever I do a water film.
He says, "Don't you know how hard this stuff is?
I said, "Yeah, I know!" (CHUCKLES)
SPIELBERG: There was nothing fun about making Jaws.
It was a very, very hard thing to go out on the real ocean,
be knocked around by the waves,
by the currents.
One more time.
Shark comes up.
And then we have to re-anchor, reposition the camera boat.
Suddenly, the electrical barge
with the generators running the arcs is too far away.
And then on top of all that,
80% of the time, the shark didn't work.
The first mistake with the shark was,
they built it for freshwater.
INTERVIEWER: What's the difference? Well, electrolysis.
They built the shark in a hurry,
and then they realized that saltwater eats everything.
They tested the shark for the first time in the water,
and we had at least 20 boats of tourists
who had gathered around an area
to watch the shark work.
And we had the shark on a huge 90-foot platform,
30 feet underwater.
At the press of a hydraulic button
and pulling the lever back, supposedly,
the shark comes shooting out of the water headfirst,
and this has absolutely happened,
the shark came up tail first.
(PEOPLE LAUGHING)
Tail first, and it was like a 25-foot moon.
(BOTH LAUGH)
Some nights, we'd go to the warehouse,
and you'd see the sharks lined up there,
and they were always working on it.
And sometimes you'd get in the water,
and you'd see the shark go,
"Whoa... womp!"
You thought, "Oh, my God, are they gonna finish this movie?"
There were all these radio mics all over the island,
and they were always saying,
(MIMICS RADIO BUZZ) "The shark is not working.
"The shark is not working."
And then one day, you heard this,
"The shark is working. Repeat, the shark is working.
"The boat is sinking. The boat is sinking."
(LAUGHS)
And I was on that boat.
Time!
SPIELBERG: What happened was we were pulling
one of the barrels away from the boat.
The problem was the motorboat went so fast,
it pulled the planking out from the hull of the Orca,
and, of course, the water rushed in,
and the boat sank in about two minutes.
DREYFUSS: "Get the actors off the boat!
"Get the actors off the boat!"
John Carter, who won an Academy Award for best sound for Jaws,
picked up the Nagra.
He was on the boat. And held it over his head,
and said, "(BLEEP) the actors, save the sound department!"
And I had this image to this day of John sinking,
holding the Nagra over his head,
and he came up months later
with an Academy Award in his hand instead.
Sea conditions have been so impossible
that it's really hurt our schedule,
and we've been here 105 shooting days,
and we were only scheduled for something like 65 or 70.
MAN: What's this done to the budget?
Well, it's kicked it up about a million and a half dollars, unfortunately.
We're not sailors.
We were filmmakers and we were a film company,
and we were way out of our element.
There were times making that movie
where I thought Jaws would probably be
the last thing I ever made
before people would stop hiring me.
I mean, it was reported everywhere.
And when I did talk to him once in a while,
I knew he was having a hard time.
SODERBERGH: You're a story.
I mean, people in the entertainment industry
are talking about
what a troubled production this is.
The director said he faced the head of the studio
and he said, "I can't do it in time!"
SPIELBERG: About 60 days into the schedule,
and we were already, like, 20 days behind schedule.
And somebody from Hollywood, an actor,
came over to me and said,
"Everybody's talking about you're never gonna get a job after this movie
"because you're irresponsible with budget."
This actor was so sure I would never work again,
they didn't care if they told me that.
It was a very mean thing, by the way, to do.
I totally forgot about it when I got back to studio,
the movie that next week.
But that was really demoralizing.
And halfway through Jaws,
I couldn't guarantee control over anything.
There's a very real point
in the production of this film,
where conversations are being had
about whether or not it's actually physically possible
to make this film.
We were so far over budget
on both shooting days and money,
there was a strong undercurrent
that the studio would close us down, they'd say, "Enough."
I never once felt like I wanted to quit.
I was terrified I was gonna be fired.
At one point, Sid Sheinberg, who ran the studio,
flew to Martha's Vineyard just to assess the damage.
And he was staying at the Kelley House,
a hotel there in Edgartown,
and he just pulled me behind the house.
We sat on these steps, these gray steps, together.
And we sat on the same step.
And he said, "I'm not sure this is possible,
"finishing the film this way.
"What do you think we should do?"
And I just said, "No, I want to go. I want to finish it.
"I can finish this movie."
When you're by yourself at night,
it weighs more heavily than during the working day
when your mind is on getting good film.
SPIELBERG: Scorsese used to come over to the set.
From New York, he'd fly down to Martha's Vineyard.
And he would just sit there feeling sorry for me,
(LAUGHS) and we would commiserate.
I noticed you bite your fingernails a lot.
Is that why, because you're juggling all the cash?
Yeah. No, because I don't smoke, I don't drink.
I asked Steven, "What did you do to unwind on those days where,
"if the shark wasn't breaking, your spirit was breaking?"
(LAUGHS) Like, "What did you do to relax and blow off steam?"
And he said, "I used to go to the arcade."
SPIELBERG: I talked to my mom a lot.
I mean, I was talking to my mom, kind of like,
"Mommy, this is really impossible! Help!"
It's really hard to read how slow things were going,
but also fascinating to see
how he's recalibrating, rebuilding it, reshooting,
coming up with ideas on set
to keep bringing the movie to life as he saw it.
"Slow ahead."
I can go slow ahead.
Come on down and chum some of this.
When the shark comes out
and Brody backs into the cabin,
I say, "Roy, when you back in, don't even look at him.
"Just keep looking at where the shark breached.
"Just back into the cabin."
"And just say, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat."'
You're gonna need a bigger boat.
Chief Brody was, like, my first on-screen crush, with that tan.
It's actually the expression on his face,
where he's chumming, and then he comes up
and his head comes into frame like that,
and the cigarette's, like, wet, you know? (LAUGHS)
I will never forget that shot.
I was like, "Oh, God, he's like my dream guy."
You're gonna need a bigger boat.
(LAUGHS)
"You're gonna need a bigger boat",
is a flag that you can fly after you leave that movie.
CAMERON: I think it's impossible to write a timeless line.
You know what I mean? I don't think you're sitting there going,
"Oh, that...
"What I just wrote, that's gonna be timeless."
You know, because it's all the context.
Where is the audience in the film?
How tense are they?
And what kind of release will it trigger?
Even a line that's not that funny.
When Arnold said...
I'll be back.
CAMERON: You know, I didn't think that was going to be any big deal.
But the value of it is,
the audience is already in on the joke by that point,
so they read into it.
You put your gloves on, both of you!
Where the Hooper and Brody and Quint characters
came together and had to deal with each other's backgrounds,
it involved a lot of improvisation.
Hey, Quint. Let it go.
Hey, Hooper!
You may be a big yahoo in the lab,
but out here, you're just supercargo!
If you don't want to backstroke home, you get down here!
YOUNG SPIELBERG: And we had tape recorders running.
And taking that improvisation,
finding a good line from Dreyfuss here
and a good line from Robert Shaw here,
writing it down,
that became the day's work for the next day.
Hey, Chief. Best drop another chum marker.
SPIELBERG: And a lot of the movie was done that way.
The whole scene between Dreyfuss and Shaw,
sort of challenging each other,
where Quint drinks an entire can of beer,
and he crushes the can.
And Dreyfuss has a little Dixie Styrofoam cup of coffee,
and he crushes the Styrofoam.
That was made up on the day.
But we kept throwing ideas into the pot.
SHAW: Well, you know, we'll go out there.
There's just the three of us,
Scheider, Dreyfuss, me and the shark.
I think I know every detail of those two men's lives,
and it has been, to some extent, very boring.
They were three very different men
at three very different stages of their careers.
But I think part of the chemistry
is that there was a bit of themselves
that bled into those roles.
You've got city hands, Mr. Hooper.
You've been counting money all your life.
All right, all right. Hey, I don't need this!
I don't need this working-class hero crap!
SCHEIDER: We were very competitive.
And the desire for all three to excel
pushed most of the scenes right to their limits.
And I think it was a challenge every day out,
to do as good or better as the other guy.
It also is exactly what's happening in the story.
And that, of course, helps the film.
What you got here?
A portable shower or a monkey cage?
Anti-shark cage.
Robert's off-screen skirmishes with Richard
helped the chemistry of the piece.
SHAW: We all have different methods.
I do tend to drink when totally bored,
and Roy does exercises and sunbathes,
Scheider does that, and Dreyfuss talks.
Dreyfuss just talks.
DREYFUSS: The character, as explained to me
before we began shooting, interested me.
INTERVIEWER: And after you had started shooting, what happened?
I had made a mistake.
SPIELBERG: There was a lot of Richard challenging Robert,
and Robert challenging Richard.
Stop playing with yourself, Hooper!
They were kind of sparring partners.
Hooper! Full throttle!
I don't have to take this abuse much longer.
But it really turned out, in hindsight,
to be a kind of playful banter
that was unique to their personal relationships.
DREYFUSS: Robert was one of the most powerful people I've ever met.
Incredibly intense.
I mean, there was something that radiated out of him.
He was a remarkably gifted actor and writer.
He was also, unfortunately,
the most extraordinarily competitive person.
Unnecessarily competitive.
LAN: There was a love-hate relationship
between the two of them.
Robert was very frustrated with Richard's attitude.
As an actor, it's been an exercise in futility.
And Robert gave him a really hard time,
at least publicly.
But also, Robert could see the talent that was there,
and wanted him to succeed.
You want a drink? Drink to your leg?
I'll drink to your leg. Okay, so we drink to our legs.
(LAUGHS)
SPIELBERG: The scene that I'm proudest of in Jaws
was everything that takes place
in that one night in that cabin.
From the scar comparing
right through the Indianapolis speech,
is something that I actually and objectively,
can watch over and over again.
(LAUGHS)
So, Hooper, that's the USS Indianapolis.
Not only is it the 50th anniversary of Jaws,
but it's also the 80th anniversary
of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
You were on the Indianapolis?
One of the greatest things
Howard Sackler left me with was,
he said, "I'd like to give Quint a motivation
for his hatred of sharks.
"Have you ever heard of the USS Indianapolis?"
And I got to tell you, I hadn't.
He told me the story of the Indianapolis
and its duty in World War ll,
bringing bomb parts for the atomic bomb.
What happened?
Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes
into her side, Chief.
1,100 men went into the water.
Vessel went down in 12 minutes.
And all hands in the water,
ravaged by sharks.
Didn't see the first shark for about half an hour.
GOTTLIEB: Sackler knew about the Indianapolis.
Well, he was in the Navy.
And he brought that incident into the screenplay.
He said, "This is the motivation we need."
Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruising.
SPIELBERG: And down the road a bit,
I went to my friend, John Milius.
He wrote Apocalypse Now and was a wonderful director.
And I said, "John, read the script
"and focus on this speech."
So John went away and he came back
and he sent me a seven and a half, eight page monologue.
Shaw said, "This is gonna bore the audience.
"I can't sit there and talk for eight minutes.
"Will you let me tonight, go home
and do a little rewrite of the speech?"
I said, "Please, have at it."
And Robert Shaw was a wonderful writer.
He had written The Man in the Glass Booth, the play.
And that's what is in the movie.
The shark comes to the nearest man
and then he starts poundin', hollerin' and screamin'.
Sometimes the shark would go away...
sometimes he wouldn't go away.
It's a fascinating thing to watch Robert Shaw
make the choice to play it with a smile, with relish,
and for you to then understand his obsession.
Like, he's haunted by the screams of those men
who all died around him, and you feel it.
The whole scene pulses with trauma.
Ah, then you hear that terrible
high-pitch screamin'.
The ocean turns red.
In spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin',
they all come in, they...
rip you to pieces.
How do you psych yourself up for this kind of...
Well, scotch, vodka, gin, whatever.
With every week we were shooting,
he was becoming more and more like Quint.
He said to me, "I just want to have
a little buzz when I'm doing the speech,
"because I don't want to play drunk or act inebriated.
"Just one small drink, and that's all I'm gonna need."
INTERVIEWER: Have you pulled any benders, you, yourself,
while you're here? No.
The only time I'm ever drunk ever is on television.
I'm never drunk in private life or at work, or...
You all know that.
Stupidly, I said, "Sure! Go ahead."
I would never do that today.
The next day, two crew members
had to help Robert onto the Orca.
And he wasn't able to really get through the speech.
That night, I'm sleeping, sound asleep, my phone rings.
And it's Robert on the phone.
He says, "What happened? Did I embarrass you?
"I am so sorry if I did, I won't have a drink.
"Please give me a chance to do this tomorrow."
And he knocked it out of the ballpark the next day.
That was it.
Anyway...
we delivered the bomb.
Quint chose to be a shark hunter,
and he's put himself in direct line
with the thing that's caused all this trauma from the past.
Part of him is thinking,
"If I can overcome this, I can let go of the past finally."
You see fear in his eyes,
and he thinks, "This is the shark that's come to get me."
There's something really powerful about that kind of
inevitable tragic end.
This was always this character's fate.
Great whites have one of the most impressive
hunting behaviors, called a breach.
Oh, my gosh!
And you see this in the movie Jaws
when it breaches on the Orca.
I've never seen a great white do this on a boat.
Most of the time, you see great whites breaching,
it is a sure-fire kill on a seal.
But the suspense, as a piece of cinema, it was great.
(PANTING)
Horror is about things that shouldn't be but are.
If the shark is on the boat,
the laws of physics and the universe are upside down.
My death, you know, going into the shark's jaws,
quite an unpleasant thing, it weighs about several tons.
And the jaws absolutely come down on me
with hydraulic pressure, you know.
(SCREAMING)
When you do it 14 or 15 times
in this kind of weather, in the cold,
slide right into it,
and then the teeth come and bite you.
Not very nice.
Now my character's left aboard the boat,
and he's trapped inside the cabin,
and the boat is sinking.
INTERVIEWER: ls this your big scene?
SCHEIDER: it's the big scene.
And I'm not gonna tell you anymore.
One of the things that, for me as a kid,
made me say, "it's real,"
is the piece of meat.
When the shark is thrashing, and you see this piece of meat
stuck between the teeth, dangling.
That is the genius.
MAN: Okay, start it.
Okay, Roy, action.
SPIELBERG: Blowing up the shark was not my idea.
Some of my earliest collaborators,
Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins,
they wrote Sugarland Express.
I gave him Jaws to read,
and they gave me a lot of notes.
And one of the notes was,
"The shark's got to blow up at the end."
"What do you mean, 'Blow up at the end"'?
"It's got to blow up in the end,
"and you know how you do it?
"You throw into his mouth, into his jaws, a scuba tank.
"And then he chomps down on the scuba tank,
"and the pressure from the bite force blows it up."
I said, "That's not credible.
"A shark cannot bite through a scuba tank."
And then either Hal or Matt said,
"Okay, well, how about one of the characters takes a rifle
"and he shoots a bullet into the tank
while the shark is approaching
"and blows it up that way?"
BRODY: Show me the tank. Show me the tank.
Blow up!
CAMERON: I think it's been debunked that you can actually blow up
a charged scuba cylinder with a high-powered rifle.
But I was a diver and I understood
the power of compressed air,
so I bought it.
You screw around with these tanks and they're gonna blow up!
CAMERON: And it was just a perfect moment of character.
The fact that he hates water,
the boat's sinking out from underneath him,
the shark's coming back for him.
All the pieces fell into place instantly in the moment.
And you just wind the tension tighter and tighter and tighter,
and, man, I'll tell you, that is an art form.
BRODY: Blow up!
When you think about it, it is a bit like the Death Star moment.
Smile, you son of a...
SODERBERGH: There is an undeniable satisfaction
in finally destroying this thing
that you've seen cause such carnage.
(LAUGHING)
For a movie in which you've invested two hours,
you need that kind of release.
I think the reason it works is that they really...
They earn it.
When the film wrapped in Martha's Vineyard,
I had a full-blown
panic attack.
I was in it, shall I say, over my head
for about seven or eight months on Martha's Vineyard.
It was, logistically, the most difficult movie
I think I'll ever make.
I couldn't breathe, I thought I was having a heart attack.
I couldn't get a full breath of air.
I kept going to the bathroom
and splashing water on my face.
I was shaking.
And I was... I was out of it.
I was completely out of it.
And I think it was everything
that I had experienced on the island,
at least trying to not only hold myself together,
but hold the crew together.
And I had great people helping me hold the crew together.
I had Tom Joyner, the AD, I had Bill Butler, the DP,
Mike Chapman, the camera operator.
I had just a great crew,
and yet I felt responsible for everybody there,
and I felt really responsible for keeping them there
for as long as we had to stay.
And I think I just lost it.
WOMAN: Well, we're looking for a nice place
to show that Quint refuses to slow down the boat.
And we'll splice it.
Verna Fields, she was a force of stability for me.
Am in trouble with Jaws? (LAUGHS)
In Jaws trouble?
Verna was working at Martha's Vineyard.
I mean, I'm looking for our mark, our good place.
That's the spot, Steve.
But once they wrapped in Martha's Vineyard,
they came back to LA and they shot in the MGM tank.
MAN 1: You want to walk the plank here, Steven?
This is it.
We are ready.
MAN 2: Roll B camera, please.
The whole attack in the cage of the mechanical shark
attacking Richard Dreyfuss, was done in the tank at MGM.
MAN 2: Okay, attack!
And also the close-ups of the shark on the surface,
with the tank in its mouth.
And even the shots of, like,
the marbles that they were slingshotting
through the water to resemble the bullets.
Even though we wrapped in Martha's Vineyard,
the film kept shooting for another two months.
Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
Once again, right away.
In a couple of cases, he had to go rogue
and pick up some of these inserts on his own
without really letting anybody know.
Because they told him, like, "The spigot is off."
I actually went into my editor Verna Field's swimming pool in the Valley.
I think Sherman Oaks.
When Hooper goes underwater and finds Ben Gardner's head.
We went into the pool, we shot it.
Keeps going back and making changes
and redoing things and making them better.
Hey! I got it!
(LINE ZIPPING)
What? Get behind me.
Watching Jaws for the first time
was a wonderful experience,
I would say, also very typical of Steven Spielberg
and his filmmaking technique
and the fun that he has making films.
And I remember thinking and telling him that
it was a great opportunity for me to create music
with a very young man that I worked with once,
Sugarland Express, who I liked enormously.
Show me the bass.
It should be big on the A, D. MAN: Yeah.
You have two notes there. (NOTES PLAYING ON INSTRUMENT)
I don't know that you can talk about Jaws
without talking about those two iconic notes
that John Williams created.
SPIELBERG: All human beings come equipped...
Hey, take, please.
...to be able to suspend our disbelief,
to be transported more by music
than any other single art stimulus.
Music, with our eyes closed, will take us places
that no other medium or art form can take us.
John Williams told us when to react
and when to start getting ready for an attack.
One, two, three, one.
John Williams showed you the power of just music and image,
and you see the victim from the predator's point of view.
That relentless score with those low cellos,
you become that shark.
This idea of characterizing the shark musically...
He's taking it. He's taking it. Hey!
WILLIAMS: ...was the result of a very simple idea that I had.
I thought maybe some kind of bom, bom, bom, bom, bom,
might indicate this mindless attack of the shark,
this relentless drive that it has.
And you don't know if it will work on an audience
until you try it.
REBELLO: Next door is The Island Theater.
It's closed down at the moment.
But back in 1975, when the movie came out,
it had the premiere there.
It was the biggest thing to really hit the island
in my lifetime, at that point.
When they had the debut in June,
it was very crowded, very hot.
And a bunch of us got to go in and sit upstairs,
which is like the VIP area.
We didn't know what to expect.
Within ten minutes, I'm jumping out of my seat and I'm saying,
"I never saw that when I was on the beach all summer."
We started to realize that, while we experienced
this whole summer on the beach,
we never really knew how a movie's made.
My whole first time I saw it,
was just seeing who was in it that I didn't know.
MAN 1: You know, it was almost embarrassing.
It was the first time I'd seen myself on the screen,
but to see the finished product
be as spectacular as it was,
was very rewarding.
WENDY: David Brown and Richard Zanuck asked Peter and I
to go to a private screening of Jaws
along with many of our dive friends,
Ron and Valerie Taylor, Stan Waterman.
And we had no idea whether this movie
was going to really work with people
who knew the ocean and knew sharks.
And at the end, they all got up and applauded
and thought it was absolutely fabulous.
MAN 2: it was the first movie to break $100 million.
It annihilated the competition that had come before it.
The Exorcist, The Godfather, those big massive hits.
Jaws eclipsed them by a long, long way.
And by the end of it, it actually finished its domestic run,
it had made a quarter of a billion dollars,
which is over a billion dollars today.
GOTTLIEB: There were mixed reviews.
The reviews at first were what we were expecting,
which was, "Okay, here's the popcorn summer picture."
And it wasn't until, like,
the third month of release when it kept grossing.
A lot of the reviewers said,
"You know, there's something here we missed,"
and that turned out to be true.
The summer and fall of '75
had two major events in terms of our culture.
Jaws became a part of the culture.
And they had the first live telecast
of Saturday Night Live.
Live from New York, it's Saturday night!
I was in the audience when the land shark showed up.
What is it?
Land shark.
Remember Candygram? MAN 1: Candygram.
That was hysterical!
(SCREAMS)
Not only was it summer,
and suddenly you were afraid of going to the beach,
but it was also just something that
was on everyone's lips.
Jaws! (LAUGHS)
Jaws wasn't just a movie, it was a pop culture phenomenon.
People wanted to put things on that were about Jaws.
And I desperately wanted a T-shirt.
The first two records I bought as a kid with my own money
were The Godfather and Jaws.
MAN 2: Shark business has been terrific.
Everything's gone that even looks like a shark.
And I just wanted to get every little thing I could find,
toys, magazines, books.
SPIELBERG: Jaws made the cover of Time,
and we also made the cover of Mad Magazine.
I got to tell you, I was prouder
of being on the cover of Mad Magazine.
(LAUGHS)
They had towels and T-shirts.
There's that great picture of Dick Zanuck sitting there
with all the merch around him.
So it became this monster in its own right.
When a film is on the cusp
of being considered for awards,
it's not so much what you want for yourself,
it's what everybody else says is going to happen for you.
Steve, if you're not number one,
then I know there's a fix in.
SPIELBERG: So I just understood
that I guess I'm getting nominated.
So when I wasn't, I was surprised,
and I was disappointed.
I wasn't nominated for best director for Jaws.
Because I was believing the noise,
and you have to not believe that stuff.
But the film won for music.
John Williams for Jaws.
SPIELBERG: And sound.
Robert L. Hoyt, Roger Heman, Earl Madery
and John Carter for Jaws!
SPIELBERG: And editing.
Verna Fields for Jaws.
SPIELBERG: And Jaws was up for best picture against
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
which, of course, won the Oscar.
Oh, yeah, I would have voted for
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
over Jaws for best picture.
I would have done that.
REPORTER: You have to ask the question,
would people have gotten this excited over a shark
two or three years ago,
before the book and the movie of Jaws?
Well, one of the crewmen on the boat that caught it
said, "Two or three years ago,
"we wouldn't have even taken the time to catch it."
When Jaws came out, we were truly horrified
to see that some people took it as a license
to go kill sharks.
One of the bad things that came out of the film
was shark hunting spiked.
MAN 3: Teeth fall out and you put them on a gold chain
and you go to the movie and see Jaws,
and you have it made.
Everybody thinks you're the best.
Trophy hunting was very popular,
and the numbers of white sharks
had gone down as much as 80%.
People wanted to be like Quint,
people wanted to have that trophy
that they could show off.
$10,000 for me, by myself.
For that, you get the head, the tail,
the whole damn thing.
There's definitely that kind of negative connotation
that came from Jaws about sharks,
which is very unfortunate because I think
there's other takeaways as well.
The impact of the movie, you know,
was horrendous at first,
but now people are really interested
in the shark itself,
you know, not just something scary.
Because of this film,
we've had so much energy that has come into the field
of learning and understanding sharks
and also safeguarding them.
SKERRY: There's hundreds of species of sharks.
They all do vital things, keeping the ocean healthy,
and therefore, the scariest thing
would be an ocean without sharks.
Now we're much more enlightened,
but there's still horrific
slaughter of sharks going on out there.
There's a lot of the fishing industry where they fin them
and they put them back in the water still alive,
so they just sink to the bottom and die.
And those of us that are in ocean conservation
are trying to prevent that.
That is the really big issue in the oceans
for the devastation of the shark population.
With conservation efforts and protection of the species,
we're seeing the population start to rebound.
Today, if a shark washes up on a beach,
which has actually happened,
now we see people trying to get this animal
back into the water and resuscitate it.
That would have never happened 50 years ago.
The negative reaction hurt us and horrified us,
and we became passionate defenders of sharks.
We went with the National Geographic on expeditions,
and we were so fortunate
to learn with these scientists and other experts.
After all of this time of being aware of and fishing for
and somehow encouraging the animal,
now the time has come to protect it.
Peter died in '06,
and I wish he were here now
to be able to see all of these changes,
and to see that Jaws is still relevant
after 50 years.
I think he'd be very, very pleased.
We've also got people outside of the immediate Jaws family
picking up the gauntlet and driving the legacy forward.
Like Robert Shaw's son,
who has co-written a play called The Shark ls Broken,
about the making of Jaws, which is set on the Orca,
in which he plays his dad.
(LAUGHING)
Who gets top billing?
There's such a generosity of feeling towards Jaws,
and there's such a desire to revisit and go back.
My father would have been shocked.
The idea that 50 years later,
people would still be quite so interested.
He would think it would be like
some sort of weird religious cult.
I honest to God thought
I was really the only Jaws fan out there.
And then came the Internet.
Now, on Facebook, there's Jaws groups.
Instagram, there's Jaws groups.
The Daily Jaws is out there.
The goal was to post something about Jaws on social media
every day to celebrate the 40th anniversary.
People were really resonating with what we were posting,
and people said, "You got to keep going."
So 10 years later, here we are.
Just last week, I was at the grocery store,
and on the inside of the grocery cart,
it said, "You're gonna need a bigger cart."
MAN: Jaws has become one of these movies
that's kind of taken on a life of its own.
In terms of the main community, there's quite a few.
When you look on your phone and you're looking at the map,
you see Jaws Bridge as one of the locations on Google Maps.
They have names of drinks at bars named after Jaws.
For the beach scene in Us,
I remember begging Steven to allow me to use
the Jaws shirt in my scene
because what he was doing with Hitchcock,
I was piggybacking and sort of doing with him.
There's still Jaws merchandise being created.
There's a LEGO coming out.
There's people doing T-shirts, posters.
And people are still buying it because they're still drawn
to everything associated with Jaws.
My theme of my birthday party
when I was, like, two years old was Jaws..
What? Mmm-hmm.
You know what's very interesting about this, Laurent.
You know that shower scene in... INTERVIEWER: Psycho.
(PLAYS PSYCHO STING)
Which has terrified us when we saw the movie,
and now if I say it to an audience
and demonstrate something, they all laugh.
It becomes funny.
What also is funny...
(PLAYS JAWS THEME)
They will laugh.
So there's been a change of response over the years
to something that actually, when we first...
in the context for which it was written,
has become now a cultural thing.
Where it's going to be 50 years from now, I don't know.
MAN: All right, it's January 12.
So we have successfully stripped
all of the textured paint off.
NICOTERO: In 1991, the shark ended up in a junkyard.
The junkyard was closing.
It got donated to the Motion Picture Academy Museum,
and I reached out to them and I said,
"I would love to do the restoration."
I'm friends with Joe Alves. We can consult.
I have access to all the original teeth,
because the inside of the mouth needed to be sculpted,
the gills needed to be sculpted,
some of the fins were gone.
As you can see,
it's really in fantastic condition underneath.
And we had a crew of about nine people,
and it took us about six months.
So I donated a lot of the labor
because I really wanted to do it.
And lo and behold, now it exists again.
YOUNG SPIELBERG: When you make a film, at least when I make a film,
I have to be passionate about the subject matter.
I have to know that that's all I want to do
for the next couple of years.
And I have to know that's where my lifestyle
will be two years from now.
I just think it's very important to...
You know, to spend the time and, you know,
consider each film kind of
the beginning, middle and end of your life.
SPIELBERG: I had a real tough time when I finished the movie,
and the success was fantastic,
but it didn't stop the nightmares.
It didn't stop me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat,
where the sheets would be soaking wet.
We didn't have the words "PTSD" in those days,
and I had consistent nightmares
about directing Jaws for years afterwards.
I was still on the movie, and the film was never ending.
When they brought one of the boats
all the way back from Martha's Vineyard
and shipped the boat, the Orca,
to the Universal back lot
and put it in the water right next to the Jaws ride.
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
I used to get on my electric cart
without telling anybody,
and I would sneak behind the trams,
nobody could see me.
And I'd just sneak onboard the boat,
and I would sit in the cabin
in that little leather red booth,
and I would just sit there and sometimes cry.
I had nothing to cry about. The film was this phenomenon.
And I'm sitting here shedding tears
because I am not able to divest myself
of the experience.
The boat helped me to begin to forget.
That Orca was my therapeutic companion
for several years after Jaws came out.
NICOTERO: Jaws has transcended time
because it's built this mythology.
And aside from the fact that it's a great movie,
it's also a unique cautionary tale about filmmaking.
People are still enthralled with how man slayed the beast.
MAN: Break it up, will ya, Chief?
Daylight's wastin'!
This was a movie that taught me that horror
didn't have to be something that left me feeling icky.
You okay?
MASLIN: it hasn't lost a minute in terms of timeliness.
If anything, it seems fresher to me now than it did then.
We're more afraid of the natural world than we were.
And we're more acclimated to the same kind of corruption
where politicians will do anything
to hide what they don't want you to know.
ZEMECKIS: I think it's fair to say that
cinema wouldn't be where it is without Jaws.
It just supercharged the language of cinema.
Hurry it up. He's coming straight for us.
Don't screw it up now. Don't wait for me.
Jaws moved the bar in terms of
audiences and what kind of thrill they might get.
GOTTLIEB: it's only the audience that makes a hit.
And after 50 years, they've been telling us, "Okay, Jaws is a hit."
We like this movie.
It's an endless conversation you can have about Jaws,
and all the details forever seem
to reveal themselves to me.
You kind of noticed something new every time.
I love that film can morph into being
one thing for one generation
and then another thing to the next generation.
One of my favorite lines is...
Michael! Did you hear your father?
Out of the water!
Now!
I love that scene. (WHISTLE BLOWS)
The lesson in cinema for me, with Steven in particular,
is the ability to make things work
when nothing is working.
I want the safety boat out because they can't see what I'm doing.
The whole thing is a complete mess,
but it ends up being this symphony
where everything just comes together.
The editing, the music, the acting,
the wonderful direction.
A wise director understands that
directing is his hostage negotiation with reality,
and the movie is as flawless today
as it will be 100 years from now.
It's one of those rare occurrences where
a generational phenomenon
turns out to also be a masterpiece.
CAMERON: I think certain films just get a status.
Quint!
There have been movies made since, using CG sharks,
that aren't nearly as good.
It was those actors, in that moment in history,
with that director,
and no one ever having seen anything like that before.
Some films just hit that perfection.
They've become sharks, they're perfect machines.
To me, Jaws was a life-altering experience.
On the one hand,
it was a traumatizing experience for me
that was mostly about survival.
(SIGHS)
And I think all of us feel we survived something.
(LAUGHS)
Jaws also, I owe everything to.
Because of Jaws, I got final cut,
and I've had it for the past 50 years.
And I just hope that all the people
that worked on Jaws...
wore that experience proudly like a badge of honor.
And was able to go through life
in the glory of the success that Jaws became.
To be able to say, each individually,
"Hey, I helped make that movie.
"I helped tell that story.
"I share in its success."
BRODY: I used to hate the water.
I can't imagine why.