The movie that gave Steven Spielberg freedom: “Making it up as we went along”
One of the biggest risks that any director can have is absolute freedom. After all, creative people can be devious, and it only takes a handful of restrictions around them to create their best work as they try to work around whatever they’re told not to do. Although Steven Spielberg has earned the right to shoot whatever he wants to whenever he turns on a camera, the director admitted that the first time he seemed to get everything he wanted was on the set of Jaws.
Then again, Spielberg already had the odds stacked against him before the cameras had even started rolling. Yes, he had already cut his teeth making films like Sugarland Express, but this would be one of the first major movies to reach a massive audience, and he had a script that was barely a rough sketch.
The idea of a shark attack happening and one man’s quest to keep the beach safe seems like a simple enough idea in practice, but looking at the amount of effort needed to go into every shot, Spielberg needed to get the entire scene right in his head before he even thought about saying ‘Action’. Most artists would crack under pressure and get their own jobs, but something magical happened once Spielberg cracked the code.
Outside of the key shark attack scenes, Spielberg put the one thing in his film that no one else could duplicate: his heart. As much as the scenes with the shark are incredibly graphic for the time, it’s always focused on the characters before anything else. No matter how many times people’s insides get chewed off, what we’re focusing on is Martin Brody trying his best to protect the beach and his family from harm.
Aside from being one of the first true blockbusters, Spielberg credited Jaws with giving him his career, telling DGA, “I credit Jaws with everything, being a movie director, having final cut. Jaws gave me freedom, and I’ve never lost my freedom. But the experience of making Jaws was horrendous for me. And it was partially because the script was unfinished and we were all making it up as we went along, not unlike the whole experience with Casablanca.”
Although that kind of production sounds like total amateur hour, a lot of that spontaneity is the reason why the film works so well. Just the scene of Brody saying, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat’, is iconic, but even that wasn’t set in stone when they started rolling, making up most of it on the fly and Roy Scheider suggesting the line on the spot.
In fact, most of the most entertaining movies of all time tend to have the exact same setup. George Lucas didn’t necessarily have the same kind of production value that he would have liked when making Star Wars, and Jon Favreau wasn’t even close to making something as big as the MCU with the first Iron Man, but it’s all about working with what you have.
Because the mark of any director isn’t always about having a discernible thumbprint on every one of your movies. It’s about how you can take the bare minimum of resources to work with and spread them out to the point where it can become a true work of art.
