Steven Spielberg has delivered some amazing classics that contributed a lot to the making of the new Hollywood era. But, he had to face several obstacles to hone his directorial skills. Having made his theatrical debut with the 1974 film, The Sugarland Express, he made a household name for himself by the next year with his thriller film, Jaws.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Key Technique Helped Steven Spielberg in Making Jaws
Alfred Hitchcock’s name has permanently been imprinted in the history of cinema due to his impeccable contribution thanks to his key technique of thrillers, thus donning the title, Master of Suspense.
He was the one who helped Steven Spielberg come up with an idea to create suspense rather than visually representing the gigantic mechanical shark. Even in the film, viewers were able to feel the presence of bone-chilling suspense surrounding the vast ocean even when the predator was not visible.
There were lots of issues with the production process especially involving the mechanical shark. As per Robson Green’s 2013 book, Extreme Fishing, using the shark would often cause technical problems and whatnot leading to drowning the budget even more. It led the director to chop off many scenes featuring the shark.
“I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark.”
It was when he decided to follow the legendary filmmaker’s technique.
“It’s what we don’t see that is truly frightening.”
This technique eventually saved the film, which sunk deep into critics and moviegoers’s hearts. However, the legendary director was not very interested in meeting the latter who once humiliated him.
Alfred Hitchcock Refused to Meet Steven Spielberg
After the success of Jaws, Spielberg tried his best to meet his idol but Hitchcock was least interested in that idea.
But this failure to get together was not from want of trying on Spielberg’s behalf. In the audiobook, Tales of Hollywood, narrator, Stephen Schochet shared an incident when the Master of Suspense was “upset by an uninvited young man hovering around the movie set” during the filming of his last film, Family Plot. He eventually asked a crew member to kick that young man which was none other than The Fabelmans director.
Later on, actor, Bruce Dern, who had worked with Hitchcock in two films once tried to persuade him to meet with the latter.
“I said, ‘You’re his idol. He just [wants] to sit at your feet for five minutes and chat with you’.”
However, he didn’t budge a bit and refused to meet him.
“He said, ‘Isn’t that the boy who made the fish movie?… I could never sit down and talk to him… because I look at him and feel like such a whore […] I can’t sit down and talk to the boy who did the fish movie… I couldn’t even touch his hand.”
Spielberg’s very movie that made him a household director in Hollywood became the reason for getting in the negative light in his idol’s mind.
Source: Extreme Fishing
