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.
“The man has studied the call sheets, the schedule of Jaws because this is a director who makes movies very fast and on budget,” Bouzereau said of Soderbergh. “And that’s the opposite of what happened on Jaws. So he’s obsessed with that angle.”
As for Guillermo del Toro, “[He’s] someone who’s made a career out of talking about monsters: the monsters inside, the monsters outside. And therefore I was curious about his relationship with the Jaws monster because Jaws is a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for his fears. So I was curious about that. So all of this fed my storytelling and was very carefully orchestrated.”
Another key talking head? Wendy Benchley, the wife of late Jaws author Peter Benchley. After the book became a movie and a global phenomenon, the couple became advocates for ocean conservation and a better understanding of sharks. In Jaws @ 50, Wendy Benchely recounts the first time she saw the film, and io9 asked her more about what that was like.
She watched the film with Peter and “shark experts and people who were cinematographers who actually had been in the water with sharks,” she recalled, including Ron and Valerie Taylor, Stan Waterman, and Peter Gimble, who all worked on Blue Water, White Death—the 1969 documentary that helped plant the narrative seeds for Jaws.
“We were very nervous because we wanted them to be happy with the film,” she recalled. “And they were, I mean, they thought the film was really superb. You know, they understood that this was a film that created a 25-foot shark that really didn’t exist … but that was a big relief to Peter and me, that are our shark friends and our people that we depended upon really thought it was excellent.”
After that, she and Peter attended a public screening with Dreyfuss. “We couldn’t believe it because the audience was up and cheering. And we knew that it was really a thrilling movie. And Richard, of course, who had gone through four or five months with everybody else of agony trying to get this film made, was so thrilled,” she remembered. “He was jumping up and down on the sidewalk and just screaming at the top of his lungs. ‘We did it! We did it!’ So that was exciting.”
Benchley is pleased that Jaws @ 50 is airing as part of Sharkfest, and that its focus includes shark experts as well as Hollywood types.
“That to me is why this documentary is so marvelous, because it tells the full story of Jaws, of the book and the movie, and the fact that Jaws had a positive effect,” she said. “It really jumpstarted science and interest in sharks. And that has carried on over the 50 years. I always mention this statistic because I think it’s important for people to realize that it happened right away after Jaws. At the Rosenstiel School [of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami], the increase [in applications] was 30% in marine science right after Jaws. So it didn’t take 20 years. It happened right away.”
Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story premieres July 10 on National Geographic and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu. It’s also included on the Jaws 50th Anniversary Edition available now on 4K, Blu-ray, and digital from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.