Steven Spielberg's Shark Hits 50: Steven Soderbergh On Why ‘Jaws' Is The Most Disruptive Film Of Our Lives & Why Spielberg Is The GOAT
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.
DEADLINE:Jaws Jaws
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.
DEADLINE: The ExorcistThe GodfatherJaws
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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DEADLINE: Psycho
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.
DEADLINE: JawsOrca Star WarsJaws
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.
DEADLINE: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.
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.
DEADLINE: Jurassic ParkSchindler's List
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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Francis Ford Coppola had a plan—or seemed to have one, at least. When the famed director of The Godfather walked onto the stage of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts Theatre after a screening of his latest film, 2024's Megalopolis, he told the audience that he intended 'to change the world tonight.' An assistant wheeled out a whiteboard listing the 10 topics Coppola wanted to discuss: time, work, money, politics, education, law, war, art, religion, and celebration. By the time the talk ended two hours later, however, the 86-year-old filmmaker had covered only five of the items; almost half of the audience had trickled out; and the world appeared regrettably unchanged. Billed as 'An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola,' the event earlier this month was the last stop in a six-city road tour meant to honor Megalopolis by indulging in an in-depth study of its themes. The whiteboard, the 10-pronged approach to fixing human society, the hours of unmoderated discussion—all of it was an apparent attempt to build the mythology of a film released less than a year ago that had already seemed to be forgotten. Movies have been resuscitated before: Now-beloved films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Princess Bride, and The Big Lebowski have for decades been embraced by audiences after being overlooked during their initial releases. But as much as Megalopolis fits the vague outlines of notoriety that could one day make it a cult classic—Coppola's epic film, which envisioned America as a retro-futuristic version of the Roman empire, was critically derided, dramatically underperformed at the box office, and endured a shaky behind-the-scenes production that involved the director plopping down $120 million of his own money—its revival feels different. Indeed, the response to Coppola's cross-country tour came off less like the beginnings of an underground fan base, and more like a film community tolerating an auteur's exhaustive defense of his work. 'The Coppola thing's a bit unusual,' Jamie Sexton, a film professor studying cult cinema at Northumbria University, in England, told me. The director seems to be a one-man army who's attempting, Sexton said, 'to facilitate a cult following.' Of course, the notion of a 'cult film' has grown nebulous over time: Many movies that have been bestowed the title, such as Blade Runner and This Is Spinal Tap, gained widespread popularity anyway, and the proliferation of streaming services makes it easier for people to discover nearly any movie on their own. But rather than allow audiences to organically find Megalopolis, Coppola has made it hard to screen legally. (The film is currently unavailable to stream in North America.) Rather than wait for reevaluations of it to emerge over time, Coppola initiated the conversation from his end. Coppola, for his part, leaned into the weirdness of his endeavor. During the live events, he covered topics as varied as education reform, the benefits of jury duty, and the oppressiveness of time—only very loosely linking them all to Megalopolis. The director, who wore mismatched socks onstage, beseeched his audience to ask him anything. One attendee pressed him to discuss the allure of organic architecture. Another thrust a hand into the air for a two-part question: First, did Coppola have anything to share about a third cut of Apocalypse Now, and second, could Coppola please sign the custom Harley-Davidson motorcycle he'd designed to honor the director's filmography? (It was parked right outside!) Coppola answered most queries patiently, but always turned back to the guiding principles on his whiteboard. His efforts to reintroduce Megalopolis to the public demonstrate the challenge of transforming a flop into a cult classic. No formula exists for that process, but the building—and maintaining—of underground-hit status, Sexton told me, requires audiences to take full control of a work's legacy. Regardless of cinematic quality, such projects tend to be transgressive in some compelling manner, enough to inspire devotion: They're thematically controversial, stylistically challenging, or simply enjoyable in ways that fans want to passionately defend. 'There is a special flavor to the cult following when the art is not considered mainstream, because that fills you with a sense of almost conspiratorial-style comfort,' Amanda Montell, the author of Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism and a co-host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, told me. 'Like, I have access to something that the sheep do not.' Viewers grant these movies a rarefied status by continuously rallying behind them and pushing for them to be reconsidered by critics and mainstream audiences. When studios try to mobilize niche fandoms, however, by rereleasing much-memed movies, fast-tracking sequels, and coining portmanteaus, that interest seldom translates into sustainable, influential communities. The power to define a film's fate after its release rests with the consumers, not the creators. Even so, Coppola's decision to take the reins appears to have worked to some extent: Several stops on the tour sold out, and a handful of attendees the night I went shouted at the filmmaker to release Megalopolis on Blu-ray in North America. But none of it proves that Megalopolis has finally won audiences over. If anything, the continued fascination with the film illustrates the appeal of self -mythology—of watching a filmmaker define the personal stakes of his work, examine his career, and tie his own worldview so closely to a single project. Montell explained that Coppola's strategy seemed to involve 'Frankensteining' the practices that materialize around cult movies (hard-to-access screenings, dissections of their production) with the circuitous chatter that can surround cults of personality. By showing up to appreciate the flaws of the film—and of its maker's aspirations—the audience countered critical consensus and displayed unconventional taste. Some of that involves direct participation, which, for many cult films, can turn into rituals: During screenings of The Room, audiences toss plastic spoons at the screen. During The Rocky Horror Picture Show, they sing along. During Megalopolis, at least at the San Francisco showing, an especially passionate group in the audience cheered during a scene that had gone viral, chanting 'club' alongside the protagonist, the visionary inventor Cesar, played by Adam Driver. Spontaneous responses such as that may indicate the beginnings of a cult legacy. But for all of Coppola's insistence that his film's themes are hugely relevant to today's society, answering the question of whether a movie as strange and ambitious as Megalopolis will truly find a fervent audience, Sexton said, requires patience: 'For me, there has to be some kind of endurance beyond the buzz.' An upcoming making-of documentary will further test the film's potential longevity. Until then, what Coppola has done is willed an ephemeral following into being, for just six nights—and maybe, for him, for now, that's enough. After all, Sexton pointed out, 'he doesn't have to do this.'
