Jaws officially turned 50 last week, and it’s easy to imagine that Steven Spielberg’s shark thriller—Hollywood’s first summer blockbuster—will be considered just as much of a classic in 50 more years. National Geographic’s annual “Sharkfest” programming marks the milestone with Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, a new documentary from frequent Spielberg collaborator Laurent Bouzereau (Music by John Williams).
As fans of cinema history well know, however, Jaws is already a well-documented film. In addition to the array of previous behind-the-scenes films, if you haven’t read The Jaws Log, by Jaws actor and co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb—with an introduction by Jaws novel author Peter Benchley—it’s a must for learning all the gory details about the film’s notoriously troubled production.
And Spielberg is aware that the making of his 1975 film has become the stuff of legend; early in Jaws @ 50, Bouzereau asks him if there’s anything he hasn’t already said about Jaws before, and the Oscar winner responds “Let’s find out.” As part of a recent press day ahead of Jaws @ 50 hitting National Geographic, Hulu, and Disney+, we asked Bouzereau what sets this new documentary apart from all the material that’s come before.
“I think that so far, the story of Jaws has been told through very mechanical things, the mechanical shark mainly, and technical things,” he said. “This is really the heart and soul of a creator in Steven Spielberg, telling the stories of what this really meant to him as an artist. And I think that emotional drama—that’s a viable story, something that’s been taken for granted and has been mentioned but never discussed. To me, [that] was the heart of telling the story.”
In addition, he said, “Jaws is a generational experience. I really wanted to include new filmmakers [as well as] new voices from the world of the ocean and shark conservation to really discuss the impact that storytelling can have on the world … I think those things, again, have been mentioned but never discussed in a way that is dramatic and suspenseful. We feel that this is a fresh new way of talking about the impact of Jaws.”
Bouzereau actually made a making-of doc on the occasion of Jaws’ 30th anniversary, included on the film’s laserdisc release at the time. He’s glad he made it, in part because “a lot of people from the film were still around [at the time but are no longer with us now]. So I was in a privileged position to sort of talk to those people for the first time in depth since they had made the film. That’s a very different kind—more like an [eyewitness], historical kind of approach. So this is a different story. This is a perspective at 50.”
Thanks to his earlier work surrounding the film, he was able to pull from earlier interviews he’d done with Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss, who’s notably absent from the slate of new interviews.
“He is in [Jaws @ 50] through these archival interviews that I made with him. And unfortunately, I was on a really tight, tight schedule,” Bouzerau explained. “I was reassured by the fact that I had this amazing interview [with him] that had not really been seen or used at length. So I think he’s a very strong voice in it, and I was very happy that I could at least acknowledge his incredible legacy with Jaws. But yeah, [the reason there’s not a new interview with him] was a question of timing.”
The new film’s talking heads include Spielberg, of course, as well as some celebrity superfans, including noted deep-water junkie James Cameron as well as Jordan Peele, who memorably foregrounded a Jaws t-shirt in his movie Us.
“I cast this very carefully because each of them had a different sort of take away from the Jaws experience and watching it. But I can give you the example of [how] Steven Soderbergh came into it,” Bouzereau said, relating an anecdote. During filming on the documentary, Soderbergh texted Spielberg wish him a happy anniversary—because it happened to be the 50th anniversary of the very first day of filming on Jaws.
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