1 of 5 | Steven Spielberg (L) sits down with Laurent Bouzereau in “Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story,” premiering Thursday on National Geographic. Photo courtesy of National Geographic
Director Laurent Bouzerau says his documentary Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, premiering Thursday on National Geographic, gave director Steven Spielberg a chance to open up about his traumatic experiences making Jaws.
Jaws was a famously troubled production, from mechanical shark malfunctions to weather delays filming at sea. For the documentary, Spielberg told Bouzereau about having nightmares about production even after the 1975 film became a blockbuster hit.
In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Bouzerau discussed his approach to Spielberg, whose films he has documented throughout his own career. Bouzereau said the 50th anniversary of Jaws gave Spielberg new perspective on how the film forged his career.
“Having had my own journey as a person for over 50 years now, we can all relate to things that can either make you or break you,” Bouzereau said. “I certainly was surprised by the generosity that he offered by sharing those stories with me.”
Those stories included Spielberg hiding on the Orca — the boat Brody (Roy Scheider), Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) and Quint (Robert Shaw) sail to hunt the shark — when it was moved to the Universal backlot for the studio tour.
“I feel also the 50 year perspective, after the career he’s had, is very different from the way he’s talked about Jaws before,” Bouzereau said. “And not with the kind of heart and soul that I think he poured into this new documentary.”
Jaws @ 50 relates how Spielberg took a meeting at Universal Pictures after making The Sugarland Express for the studio. He gravitated towards Peter Benchley’s book Jaws, which inspired the film, in galley form before it was published.
Benchley’s widow, Wendy, and their children are featured in the documentary. Wendy visited the production in Martha’s Vineyard with Peter and recalls Peter trying to convince Spielberg to reduce the shark’s length from 25 to a more realistic 15 feet.
“Steven understood that if you were going to have a dramatic movie, you needed to have a shark that was big enough to swallow somebody whole,” Wendy said. “So he had the right instincts for the movie and I think Peter had the right instincts for a book.”
Jaws is credited with starting the summer blockbuster. The film itself spawned three sequels, which Bouzerau decided were not part of Spielberg’s story.
“After Jaws, he was on the path of doing Close Encounters [of the Third Kind],” Bouzereau said. “I wanted to really end on the high note which is cinema has been changed and Jaws is a unique experience.”
Not that Bouzereau considers Jaws: The Revenge, the fourth film, a low point. He just felt it would be too convoluted to explain the sequels.
“I’m not criticizing those films,” he said. “I don’t dislike Jaws 2. I saw it when it came out and I really like that director [Jeannot Szwarc] as well. He did a movie called Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve that was really good.”
The Benchleys never saw the three sequels either.
“We were not involved at all with them so I have no opinion,” Wendy said. “It’s wonderful. Why not? But, from what I hear from people, the original is the best.”
Another perspective Bouzereau wanted to bring to Jaws @ 50 was the film’s influence on subsequent generations of filmmakers. James Cameron, Steven Soderbergh, J.J. Abrams, Guillermo del Toro and Jordan Peele also share how Jaws influenced their craft.
“Generationally. the film had been passed on from a certain type of director,” Bouzeareau said. “When you talk to someone like Jordan Peele, who’s clearly two generations away from Steven, the fact that he uses Jaws as an example of his type of storytelling is remarkable.”
The success of Jaws also led the Benchleys into careers in ocean conservation. Because the shark in Jaws was scary, it led to excessive hunting of sharks.
Wendy’s work with Environmental Defense Fun and Wild Aid has shown her that both protecting sharks and the ocean environments have led to improvements.
“There are acres and acres of marine protected areas around the world now,” she said. “If you leave the ocean alone, the coral will come back. The fish will come back. You will have much more biomass and those fish will be bigger and when they swim out, they can be caught for food.”
Cameron is also involved in ocean and shark conservation in addition to filmmaking. It was Bouzereau’s goal to show that the legacy of Jaws is more than nostalgia.
“All those cast members of my film were chosen very specifically to address a layer that I felt was needed to prove my point that Jaws is as useful as it was 50 years ago,” he said.
Jaws @ 50 premieres Thursday on National Geographic and will stream on Disney+ and Hulu Friday.
