Steven Spielberg's Shark Hits 50: Steven Soderbergh On Why ‘Jaws' Is The Most Disruptive Film Of Our Lives & Why Spielberg Is The GOAT

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On its 50th anniversary, Steven Spielberg's Jaws can claim to be the most disruptive film of the last half-century, maybe even ever. While predecessors like The Godfather and The Exorcist drew theater lines around the block through word-of-mouth, Jaws was the one for which the term summer blockbuster was coined. Opening on a then-unheard-of 409 screens, the film caught the zeitgeist in an unprecedented manner, helped by marketing techniques that would center escapism as a staple of the summer movie season.
Spielberg's film followed hard on the heels of Peter Benchley's bestselling 1974 novel, with screenwriter Carl Gottlieb throwing out the book's myriad subplots to focus on New England police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) and the team he assembles to stop a great white shark that is terrorizing Amity Island: intellectual oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and salty, no-nonsense shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw).
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In Spielberg's hands, Jaws was a lot more than a terrifying great white shark; the characters of Quint, Hooper and Brody are indelible, their grudging camaraderie bolstered by the film's centerpiece: the chilling tale of the USS Indianapolis. Devised by script doctor Howard Sackler and punched up in a later draft by John Milius (with some finessing from Shaw himself), Quint's gruesome monologue explained the fisherman's hatred for sharks, having been on board the ill-fated ship when it went down in shark-infested waters in July 1945 ('The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in and they rip you to pieces').
An early admirer of the film was 12-year-old Steven Soderbergh, who came out of the screening with two questions: 'What does 'directed by' mean? And who is Steven Spielberg?' Spielberg's giant shark hooked Soderbergh not only enough to fuel his own disruptive filmmaking career, but also to start work on a long-gestating book that reconstructs each day of shooting what must have seemed like an impossible task: making a movie on open water with a mechanical shark that just would not work. (Amblin is producing Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, to premiere on National Geographic this summer.)
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Here, Soderbergh reflects on his enduring admiration for the film.
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STEVEN SODERBERGH: Overwhelmed, on a lot of levels. It was probably the moviest movie I'd ever seen at that point, this incredibly combustible combination of super-high concept and bravura filmmaking. But the thing that I think separates it from most movies before or since is the character work. And the clear understanding on the part of Spielberg of what Stanley Kubrick used to call the non-submersible units of narrative. When you look at how the narrative of the movie is built, what each scene or sequence is accomplishing, it's just a model of movie storytelling, combined with what was, at the time, unprecedented hype and expectation. And then, that expectation is not only met, it's exceeded, and he makes an instant classic, which nobody was anticipating.
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It was already, at that point, a sort of legendarily difficult production. And until the first preview in Dallas, nobody knew what was going to happen. But you've got these forces that are smashing into each other — cultural and artistic forces — that result in this kind of nuclear detonation of popularity. But also, you've got a singular, multi-generational talent emerging with this film that everybody in the world is going to see.
There was just so much fissionable material there to generate an explosion, and that's what happened. But what makes it unique even in retrospect is this: Let's say you look at the five movies nominated for [the Oscar] Best Picture that year: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. All of them are great. I would argue, though, that of the other four films that aren't Jaws, there are other filmmakers that could have made versions of those movies. They may not have been as good or distinctive, but they are possible to be made by other filmmakers.
But there was no other director on the planet who could have survived and made Jaws. None of those other four directors could have made Jaws. Whereas I think Spielberg could have made a variation of any of those other films. It was just a totally unique property and a totally unique talent blowing up, and that's why I think it still resonates, and it just keeps getting better because it's all in camera.
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SODERBERGH: There's no C.G. They were out there in the middle of a f*cking ocean. There's a reason people don't do that. There is no technological advance that has happened since that would make it any easier to do what they were doing. That shark was just a pneumatic mechanical device, in the actual ocean. There's no shortcut to that, and nobody's been able to come up with an easier, better way to do it, which is why people have stopped doing it.
DEADLINE: What was the most calamitous thing that those choices brought?
SODERBERGH: Going through the production reports, there's a period of a few weeks where the shark's not working. And it's not working to an extent that they're beginning to confront the real possibility that what they're attempting to do just physically cannot be done. It's a testament to the studio, the producers and Spielberg, that they continued to shoot, and continued to believe that essentially, they would figure it out. But when they first got the thing in the water and tried to make it work, they were looking at the real possibility that they'd made a mistake.
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SODERBERGH: From what I've read, it was obvious very early on, they would have to take the basic premise of the book, and those three characters, and just start over. It makes sense that in the course of talking about this story, somebody would say, 'Hey, why does Quint hate sharks so much?' And that they should try to answer that. My understanding, which could be wrong, is that Howard Sackler was the one who came up with the idea of him telling that story.
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SODERBERGH: As is well-documented, it went through many, many iterations. But the audacity of stopping the movie — for nine minutes — to have that scene! It starts out as a very funny scene and then morphs into something much darker. It is just still amazing to contemplate today. Can you imagine, in the middle of a Star Wars movie, a nine-minute dialogue scene? It's unthinkable. And so, again, the fact that Spielberg understood this. He's like, 'We've got to do it, and this is the time to do it. The night of day one when you need a breather — we're going to give you that breather, but then we're going to slip this other thing in there too, something that's going to make Quint an unforgettable character, through a story that is also unforgettable and true.'
So, just the fact that, under enormous pressure, everybody continued to do their best work and to make the best version of that movie is, to me, a real clinic for a young filmmaker about the kinds of obstacles that you encounter. If you're going to make a movie, this is the most extreme example, but as a portrayal of the idea, 'never panic and never give up,' it's pretty hard to beat.
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SODERBERGH: You have to attribute that to Universal, recognizing they had a rocket in their pocket and tripling down, quadrupling down, on this wide-release strategy. If it's not this movie by this filmmaker, it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. You can't just do it with any film. It was the beneficiary of a lot of different elements coming together in this one circumstance, and the studio saying, 'We should really weaponize this movie, because there's 100% awareness and 100% want to see. And the guy made a masterpiece. So, we throw everything at it.' That was the right call. Of course, when it works, everybody goes, 'OK, let's do that too.' The problem is, you've got to have a movie like Jaws to pull it off.
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SODERBERGH: Well, to your point, it's a huge idea. It's a really big hook, and everybody who came into contact with the novel knew it. It's a testament to how big the idea is that the novel was as big as it was, because it's not a great novel. It's just got this massive hook in it that keeps you reading. Those are rare, those high-concept horror movies that are applicable to experiences that you have in everyday life. Psycho was one of them. This is another, and whether they all have to involve water, I don't know. But it's the equivalent of finding a horror movie that makes people afraid to step off the curb, or something that they do multiple times a day and now they will never do without some amount of anxiety. Those are really hard to come by — and, believe me, there are lots of writers sitting around trying to come up with them.
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SODERBERGH: The component that needs to be present for these two to become something other than single-use plastic is great storytelling. And so, two years later, Star Wars meets both those metrics and that's why it blew up in the same way Jaws did. But we're talking about a period of time when it was still conceivable that the most popular films of the year were also the best films of the year. And I don't know that that's been true for some time.
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SODERBERGH: He's a singular talent who was going to emerge one way or another. He was unstoppable. A born filmmaker, and everybody that interacted with him knew it. The weird thing is, despite being the most successful director in history, I still think he's taken for granted. He has generated so much astonishing material, and some doesn't get its due because he's prolific and unpretentious in the way that he works and the things that he makes and the way that he talks about his work.
There are things that he's done that if any other filmmaker had made them, these would be their career best. But he's done it so often that he gets taken for granted. I mean, there's no filmmaker that I'm aware of that can wrap their head around what he did on Ready Player One [2018]. You get any group of directors together, and they're like, 'I don't even understand how that's possible, what he did in that film.' And that's just one of two films he made back-to-back [after 2017's The Post]. Anybody else after any one of these things he'd done would be on bed rest for three years.
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SODERBERGH: That's ridiculous. Either one of those would put another filmmaker in the hospital. So, for his facility and, like I said, his lack of pretension, I just still think he's taken for granted, strangely.
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