http://www.aintitcool.com/node/49921
Steven Spielberg and Quint have an epic chat all about JAWS as it approaches its 36th Anniversary!
Published at: Jun 06, 2011 6:22:42 AM CDT
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Let me set the stage for this. I put out my feelers out a couple months back with some people at Dreamworks (with much help from mega publicist Deb Wuliger) about getting Steven Spielberg on the phone to talk Jaws, the idea being we could time it to its pending anniversary.
That was the pitch, but that was all cover. I really just wanted to talk to the director of my favorite movie of all time ABOUT my favorite movie of all time. I?m sure my ruse was as transparent as clean plate glass window (I don?t hide my geekiness very well), but the kind souls around Spielberg allowed my request to make it to him and I heard back an enthusiastic yes right before Memorial Day weekend.
We were going to schedule a time between then and June 20th, which was the latest the interview could go up as that was the anniversary of the release of Jaws in 1975, but as of Thursday afternoon I hadn?t heard anything back.
I went to the Alamo?s Super 8 marathon, which included a surprise screening of Super 8, followed by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Scanners and John Carpenter?s The Thing and when I got home at nearly 4am I checked my email to find out Spielberg had an opening in his schedule for 12:30pm my time the next morning.
Of course I had to watch Jaws while compiling a list of questions, so that gave me a little more than 4 hours of sleep before the interview.
I went in not knowing how much time I had with Spielberg? it could have been 5 minutes or 50, I had no idea? but I was bound and determined to milk my time for as much as humanly possible.
When the words, ?Eric, I?m transferring you to Steven Spielberg?s office. Please hold a moment? hit my ears I won?t lie? my nerves were on end. Could I somehow not be Chris Farley in this scenario? Was that even possible?
But, like my brief encounter with the man on the set of War of the Worlds, once the conversation began the nerves went away and I was just excited to have the opportunity to talk with Steven Spielberg about Jaws.
Now, we cover a few other things as well. The conversation occasionally splinters off to his other films, including Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, E.T. and Close Encounters, but Jaws is the focus.
Let?s dive into this thing, shall we? Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride!
Quint: How?s it going, sir?
Steven Spielberg: Hey, Eric. How ya? doing?
Quint: It?s going well. How?re you?
Steven Spielberg: Good! So, what?s up? Well, I know what?s up with you. I read all your stuff.
Quint: Well, I watch all your movies, so we?re even.
Steven Spielberg: Last time we talked was a long time ago, it was on the (War of the Worlds) set (You can read about that visit here and here). You did the Indy thing, too. I remember that. (Referring to this not-quite set visit gathering of geeks during the filming of Indiana Jones 4).
Quint: Yeah, the War of the Worlds set visit was the big one for me. That?s where I had my big geek out.
Steven Spielberg: (laughs) Well, I geek out, too. So don?t think it?s just you!
Quint: Of course you do. I loved that when we met on the set the first things we talked about were Ray Harryhausen and Willis O?Brien. Their influence can be felt in your films and your movies were almost gateway drugs to discovering more about their work for me.
Steven Spielberg: Well, I?m glad you?re amongst us, making us remember that every decade there?s a new trend and one trend owes legions to its predecessors.
Quint: Especially now it must be hitting you dead center seeing how your very specific visual style is being replicated by the next generation of filmmakers. I mean, JJ Abrams? Super 8 is obviously a loving tribute to your films, down to a very specific look.
Steven Spielberg: JJ was raised in those decades of movies that all of my colleagues made and continue to make. So, JJ (was brought up in) the same way I was raised, by a decade of filmmakers who I am beholden to. So, it all comes out in the laundry.
Quint: I really appreciate you taking the time to look back at Jaws with me?.
Steven Spielberg: Sure, sure.
Quint: Obviously the movie means a lot to me and going through that new making of book, Jaws: Memories From Martha?s Vineyard, it really did strike me just how important it was that you made the personality Amity that of Martha?s Vineyard. It makes Amity feel like a real town. So, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about how you pulled so many locals into the movie and how much of that was a creative choice and how much of that was political to help you ease the troubled waters of filming on location.
Steven Spielberg: Well, I didn?t know anything about politics in those days. I was just trying to find as much naturalism to play against the basic size of the shark. I didn?t want this film to be a mythological tale and if everybody played as big as the shark weighed and measured nobody would have believed the shark was real if the people hadn?t been as real.
So, I looked to the community of Martha?s Vineyard, and also off into the Boston area, to find local people that would make the audience feel that the story was truly happening not in Hollywood, but on a fictitious island called Amity.
Quint: That was also your reasoning for wanting to actually shoot on the ocean as well, right?
Steven Spielberg: Right, exactly, because 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.
Quint: Or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. When you see Kirk Douglas fighting a giant squid, as awesome as that is, you know they shot that on a backlot somewhere.
Steven Spielberg: Yeah, exactly. I was naïve about the ocean, basically. 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.
Quint: I think the real key to the fear that you put into the world populace, the fear of swimming, is the fact that it?s so obviously not just in a pool somewhere. Those creatures actually live and hunt in those waters and almost everybody has been swimming in the ocean, so there?s an easy access to that base fear.
Steven Spielberg: Right, right.
Quint: Even if the average filmgoer doesn?t know how movies are made, there?s something in their brain that clicks, that registers when something is real and sees the difference.
Steven Spielberg: That?s so true.
Quint: I know it was a headache, but I would hope looking back on it now you could say all the aggravation and stress was worth it.
Steven Spielberg: It was worth it because, for number one, Close Encounters, which was a film I had written and a film nobody seemed to want to make, everybody seemed to want it right after Jaws was a hit. So, the first thing Jaws did for me was it allowed a studio, namely Columbia, to greenlight Close Encounters. For number two, it gave me final cut for the rest of my career. But what I really owe to Jaws was creating in me a great deal of humility, about tempering my imagination with just sort of the facts of life.
That movie was more than just a filmmaking and eventually a filmgoers experience, that movie was all about human relationships both in front of and behind the scenes because people started to lose their noodles as we spent weeks and then many months on Martha?s Vineyard and then, later, in the Pacific Ocean around Catalina. It took its toll. 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!?
What was going down was not human error, it was just the conditions at sea that made it untenable to really be doing what we were somehow doing. Everything on land went normal! Everything I shot on any form of land went like a normal movie. I actually was on schedule for the first part of the picture. I mistakenly blew all my cover; the scenes I could have held back in case there was a mechanical problem with the shark, in case there was a bad day at sea and we couldn?t shoot because of the height of the waves or the strength of the wind. I foolishly didn?t have enough cover to be able to go back to the shore to keep shooting the shore portions of Jaws and that was completely my fault and no one else?s.
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.
Quint: Correct me if I?m wrong here, but you also used that time to come up with some creative workarounds and to flesh out the script, right.
Steven Spielberg: Yeah, it?s true. The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen in the sense that Ray Harryhausen in his day could do anything he wanted because he had control of his art. When I didn?t have control of my shark it made me kind of rewrite the whole script without the shark. Therefore, in many people?s opinions the film was more effective than the way the script actually offered up the shark in at least a dozen more scenes that today is history.