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‘Jaws @ 50' Gives Longtime Spielberg Historian Laurent Bouzereau Final Word On The Original Summer Blockbuster
Steven Spielberg, Director of Jaws and Director Laurent Bouzereau are pictured during an interview ... More for National Geographic's Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story.
What can be said about Jaws that hasn't been said over the last 50 years?
That was the big question for longtime Steven Spielberg documentarian Laurent Bouzereau (Faye, Music By John Williams) once he teamed up with Amblin and National Geographic to make Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, a star-studded look back at the original summer blockbuster, featuring brand-new interviews with Spielberg, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, production designer Joe Alves, and many more.
'When we set it up at NatGeo I was like, 'Oh my God, there are so many documentaries on Jaws!' [There are so many] books. [Even] I've done a book! What is left to say about Jaws?'' Bouzereau remembers over Zoom.
A valid fear. As one of the most iconic and influential movies of all time, the big screen adaptation of Peter Benchley's bestselling novel has endlessly been picked over and analyzed since it first took a bite out of the big screen on June 20, 1975. But if anyone could pull off a new angle, it was Bouzereau, who is not only chummy with Spielberg (no pun intended), but also brings a uniquely international perspective to the topic.
'I grew up in France, and we didn't have summer blockbusters,' he explains. 'It's changed now, but essentially, big movies came out in the fall or the early fall. So I didn't really grow up with that concept of the summer blockbuster.'
He wouldn't become familiar with the idea until arriving in the United States for the first time in 1977, the year of a certain game-changing space opera. One of the first things Bouzereau saw upon entering the airport in Athens, Georgia was an issue of People with R2-D2 and C-3PO on the front cover.
'I said, 'What's that? I want to see that!' So that's summer blockbuster [for me], it's People magazine. I think it established a certain type of expectation of big films … [Jaws] certainly gave birth to a much bigger recognition of the impact that a film can have on an audience and how the audience wants to live it [with] merchandising, books, and knowing the secrets behind them. Building a whole mythology around a cinematic experience, down to having a [theme] park ride. Jaws is beginning of that movement, which, of course, explodes even bigger with Star Wars."
Nevertheless, Jaws (or Les Dents de la Mer — aka The Teeth of the Sea — as it was titled in French) sparked a major cinematic 'awakening' in the future filmmaker, who was around 13-years-old in the summer of '75.
'It was such a phenomenon, that it immediately [drove home] the importance of the director for me,' Bouzereau says. 'From that day on, I wanted to see everything Steven Spielberg ever made, and that name became symbolic of a dream for me, much more than the film itself. It was the realization of the power of images in the hands of an incredible artist … I was mesmerized by the shots and, of course, the economy of the first scene where you never see the shark and [hear] the music by John Williams. So everything was sort of summarized in that one movie, not to mention that I collected all the lobby cards and poster. My bedroom was wall-to-wall Jaws. But it was not a fanatical thing. It was really an awakening for me as an appreciator and it never left me. Sometimes, I go back to that initiation I got from Jaws as a young kid and remember those feelings of the very first time [I saw it]. It's like a first of anything."
Half a century later, and Bouzereau found himself sitting across from Spielberg, free to ask any and all questions about the movie that changed both their lives. Rather than focus on the making of Jaws, a topic that had been covered so extensively over the years, the former angled for a thematic exploration of the classic picture, viewing its turbulent production as a reflection of the plot itself. Like Brody (Roy Scheider), Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and Quint (Robert Shaw) searching for and battling the man-eating shark, principal photography 'became a story of survival," Bouzereau notes, later adding, 'I think it's about not giving up. It's the human experience, right?'
He continues: "The first time I sat down with Steven, I felt the humanity that we know from anything he's done — before Jaws and after. He was so young then, that it was still forming in a sense. But it was so mature and so much of it was there, that you can look at Jaws and say, 'That's the man who did Schindler's List years later,' and not blink at that association because his humanity is just so obvious. Not only in the story and the way that he put it together, but in his own journey as an artist making it, what he's learned from it, and how it affected him. I felt that story had not been told.'
Director Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws with the mechanical shark in the background. (Courtesy ... More of Universal Studios Licensing LLC)
While the film's runaway success skyrocketed the 26-year-old wunderkind to the top of Hollywood's A-list pretty much overnight, Spielberg understandably did not recover from the trauma of a production marked by one setback after another (the most notable obstacle being an animatronic shark that refused to cooperate in salty water) for years after. Such commitment to realism, a fierce desire to shoot on the Atlantic and work the local Martha's Vineyard populace into the frame, proved to be a double-edged sword.
'A few years before, Jaws would have been made on a soundstage with local background artists who were just coming off the set of another movie,' Bouzereau says. 'There would have been no sort of colorful characters like Craig Kingsbury [who played the ill-fated Ben Gardner] from Martha's Vineyard. Going there and realizing that Jaws is something that is passed on generation after generation on that particular island —that's a microcosm of what the impact of Jaws is.'
But as Spielberg reveals in the documentary, he'd often sneak aboard the screen-used Orca on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot tour and cry. 'Everybody knows it was a nightmare, but they all say it with laugh, because we can laugh at the fact that here is one of the best movies of all time,' Bouzereau adds. 'It could have been a disaster, but I think [Steven] said it with heart and humility in a truly inspiring way that I think feels relatable for anyone, especially young people who are starting a career in anything, and feel like, 'Wow, I just learned that from my own craft.''
Speaking of which, Jaws @ 50 devotes a good amount of attention to the acclaimed storytellers who, like Bouzereau, grew up to be directors after seeing Jaws: Guillermo del Toro, J.J. Abrams, Cameron Crowe, Jordan Peele, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Zemeckis, and James Cameron.
'To really see the impact it had on some of the most important filmmakers of our times, to see the the lessons that they got from Jaws, was was eye-opening to me," admits Bouzereau. 'Because it wasn't just, 'Oh, I love the movie. It scared me.' You know, the usual sound bites. It was a very profound and big discovery for me. I also think the other aspect of the film that I had not really known about, even though it was in plain sight, was how it affected the ocean and [led to] sharks being massacred … The fascination with this novel and this movie have changed the dialogue about the ocean. I don't know if there are many movies that have had that kind of social impact.
"Very few works of art turn 50 and are relevant today. I don't have any children, but I have nieces and nephews, and I have forced them to watch Jaws, and now they're forcing their kids to watch it. So it's something that's passed on, and it's pretty extraordinary to see that 50 years later. Listen, I asked myself a lot of questions if I was still relevant when I turned 50. Jaws doesn't have that problem.'
'Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story'
Jaws @ 50 premieres exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu Thursday, July 10
