The Scuttlefish

Today, 36 days ago, in 1975 was a day that kept many people off the beach for decades to come. It was the day that Jaws hit the theaters. And that was the movie that taught director Stephen Spielberg the power of unseen fear and the unpredictable nature of the ocean.

Shark attacks were not widely publicized at this point in time, and could have easily been likened to an attack from martians. Spielberg was most certainly aware of how difficult it might be to depict a remote-controlled mechanical great white shark as real, which is why, when it came time to shoot the film, he would have no other location but the high seas, first off Martha’s Vineyard and then off Catalina Island in California.

“I was naïve about the ocean, basically”, said Spielberg in an interview with Quint of Ain’t It Cool News on filming Jaws:

Click to hear Spielberg discuss the difficulties of filming at sea

“I was pretty naïve about mother nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank.

But had I to do it all over again I would have gone back to the sea because it was the only way for the audience to feel that these three men were cast adrift with a great white shark hunting them.”

Relying on the ocean and weather of Martha’s Vineyard to comply with filming “took its toll”:

“…if I made the movie in a tank it would have had that same mythological feel that the Spencer Tracy film, The Old Man and the Sea, has…It feels like half my work was talking people off the ledge, when cast and crew had no idea when we’d ever leave Martha’s Vineyard, when people could return to their wives and families and real lives. They kept turning to me saying, ‘When are you going to finish the movie?’ I kept saying, “Ask Mother Nature! I don’t know! Ask the tides!”

During the interview Quint pointed out to Spielberg:

“What’s great about the three leads of Jaws…Those were guys who were both leading men and character actors…with those guys in the lead the movie automatically has kind of reality, so you buy the shark.”

“Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director’s point of view” said Spielberg.   That may be, but either way, and despite how long it may have taken, he ended up with a most skillful and talented cast.  Each of the three main roles were character actors, men who played rather eccentric roles: Robert Shaw as the shark-hunting societal dropout Quint, Richard Dreyfuss as the young and eager marine biologist Matt Hooper, and Roy Scheider as the overzealous local police chief Martin Brody.

Quint makes a good point.  For example, if Robert Redford or a young Jeff Bridges had instead taken Robert Shaw’s role as Quint, the shark may not have been taken so seriously; females in the audience would have been wooed and the men disgusted.  Robert Shaw was that eccentric antihero, and he had just come off playing a similar role in The Sting, which as a matter of fact, he had just finished with Redford.  Take the famous scene when the three characters are drinking below deck aboard the Orca at night. Robert Shaw tells the horrific story of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and ensuing shark attacks, leaving Richard Dreyfuss terrified:

Click to Hear Spielberg recount Shaw’s performance in the scene

To say the least, Spielberg, his crew and his equipment–namely the shark–were not ready for long days working at sea.

“So, when we were shut out many days because of mechanical problems and weather problems, all we could do was wait and bounce up and down on the waves and watch each other vomiting over the side.”

Thank you Mr. Spielberg, for your hard work and resilience at sea.  Most importantly however, we’d like to thank you for keeping surf lineups everywhere a little less crowded over the past 36 years!

To see more images and hear more tales from behind the scenes of Jaws, read Edith Blake’s book, On Location…..On Martha’s Vineyard: (The Making of the Movie Jaws):

*via aintitcool, wikipedia, litscapeart and travelmaharishi, video via quarryman88*