When Steven Spielberg regretted letting his actors go method on the set of ‘Jaws’: “He was just too far gone”
You would imagine that if you were Steven Spielberg in 1975, and you’re yet to have a big hit movie, and you are pinning your hopes on a shark attack film with an animatronic fish that won’t behave properly, the last thing you want is your lead actors to disappear all day getting hammered.
That’s exactly what the up-and-coming Spielberg had to put up with on the set of Jaws, as the veteran actor Robert Shaw took advantage of his reputation in order to get a bit of daytime ‘socialising’ done.
To be fair to the British actor, he had struggled with alcoholism for much of his life, and the then 48-year-old had to deal with long days of filming without too much to do. His role as the shark hunter Quint required the definite air of a grizzled older sailor who was fond of plenty to drink, something that Spielberg eventually realised would be best accomplished if he simply let Shaw have a few glasses before recording began.
But the actor was such a seasoned drinker that those few drinks required mixing scotch, vodka and gin and he added to the mayhem by repeatedly falling out with his co-star Richard Dreyfuss. As Shaw once said: “Drink? Can you imagine being a movie star and having to take it seriously without a drink?”
Shaw’s most famous moment in Jaws unarguably comes when he delivers the semi-improvised monologue detailing the attack on the USS Indianapolis, in which sailors were left to the mercy of sharks after a bombing. But the first time they attempted to film the scene, the actor was paralytic.
As Spielberg recalled to Aint it Cool News: “He went into the Whitefoot, which was a big sort of support boat that we always took our lunch breaks on and all the bathrooms were on that boat, it was a big tug boat, and he went into the hold with my script girl Charlsie Bryant and I guess he had more than a few drinks because two crew members actually had to carry him onto the Orca and help him into his chair… We never got through the scene; he was just too far gone. So, I wrapped the company at about 11 o’clock in the morning, and Robert was taken back to his house on Martha’s Vineyard.”
After being carried home by the crew and sobering up, Shaw quickly came to his senses and realised what he had done. The scene was pivotal to the film, providing relief from the action sequences and providing a brief, important moment of bonding between the three terrified lead characters, almost marooned on the ocean and being hunted by a monster.
Of the ordeal, Spielberg added that Robert called him up at two in the morning, lamenting a blackout and complete loss of memory: “He was very sweet, but he was panic-stricken. He said, ‘Steven, please tell me I didn’t embarrass you. What happened? Are you going to give me a chance to do it again?’ I said, ‘Yes, the second you’re ready, we’ll do it again’.”
As movie fans know well, the scene was completed and has gone down as one of the finest monologues in cinematic history, Shaw’s delivery as intense and as captivating as any scene involving Bruce the giant shark. It would stand as the actor’s epitaph for just three years after completing the film, he was dead from a heart attack at just 51.
