Steven Spielberg’s jaw-dropping horror classic Jaw still possesses the ability to freak out many. The movie is filled with classic horror suspense and engrossing thrill as Spielberg’s version of gore intensifies more towards the climax of the film.
Based on a novel of the same name by Peter Benchley, the 1975 film does have some intense behind the scene moments to recall. From shooting the film with an unfinished script to Spielberg naming the Shark, The Great White Turd, makes up the film’s recollection even more mesmerizing.
Also read: Steven Spielberg Refused Making Sequel to Cult-Classic $603M Movie after Clashing With Tom Cruise
Steven Spielberg Went Extreme
Steven Spielberg had to go to extreme lengths for the movie to meet his vision. And he did it with just $9 million in hand which later earned him $476.5 million. There are several behind the scene stories that popped out creating buzz over time, but it was fascinating when Speilberg went extreme.
As per earlier reports, the director used a real arm when a young woman named Chrissie Watkins was dead in a scene. He did use a prop arm, but it was not up to his taste as it looked fake. So he buried a crew member in the sand, attached her hand to Chrissie’s, and refilmed the entire scene. It surely looked real on screen.
Further, even after wrapping up the principal production, Spielberg added a severed head scene to intensify the jump scare. While the film was shot in the ocean during the principal production, the director had to use a large swimming pool to reshoot a scene when a character, Matt Hooper, investigates missing fisherman Ben Gardner’s sunken boat. In an attempt to make a shocking scene more engrossing, Spielberg used a prosthetic head that looked like the missing fisherman and it pops out of the boat terrifying the investigator and audiences alike.
Steven Spielberg Recalled Making Jaws
It was struggling for the director, there is no doubt about that, but it also gave him more room to improvise and experiment. Recalling the making of the film, Speilberg recalled that he demanded filming Jaws out in the ocean instead of the studio space, but the ocean had a different picture altogether. “I was naive about the ocean, basically,” Spielberg told ET once.
“I was pretty naive 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.”
The mechanical sharks created for the film was working fine when tested in freshwater but during production in the Atlantic Ocean, the saltwater malfunctioned the sharks. But it turned out to be a good thing for the director. “The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock,” the director said.
When the sharks were not working as they did on land, Spielberg decided to rewrite the script and filmed accordingly, which turned out to be one of the greatest horror movies in history.
Source: Twitter
