After Nearly Killing His Actor, Spielberg Had to Go Full Hitchcock Mode to Save Jaws
After Steven Spielberg’s ambition almost resulted in the Jaws actor’s death, the director had to take after his legendary colleague and go a different route altogether.
Today, Steven Spielberg is a household name and one of the most iconic movie directors of all time, and few remember that the film that elevated him to stardom was good old Jaws. Spielberg was young and ambitious when he started shooting it, and some of his decisions almost resulted in a terrible tragedy for the cast.
The young director wanted to go all in on practical effects and realism, so he decided to shoot the movie in an actual ocean. Furthermore, to portray the terrifying shark, Spielberg ordered a sophisticated mechanical beast that was to play the part. Both the ocean and the mechanical shark were against the movie’s completion, though.
The artificial beast, that was lovingly called Bruce by the cast, kept adding problems to the table. It was sinking to the bottom, getting broken as the saltwater eroded its mechanism, and was constantly in need of repairs and repaints as without heavy daily maintenance, it was either malfunctioning or looking straight-up ugly.
The ocean, too, was always messing with the crew. While filming in the open waters is already hard and stressful on its own, there were accidents happening all over the place, and one of them almost had an actor killed. Carl Gottlieb, who portrayed Ben Meadows in the movie, was nearly torn to shreds by a boat’s working propeller!
Things were looking grim for Steven Spielberg’s presumably breakthrough project, and he had to find a way to eliminate the issues. He came to the conclusion that Bruce the Mechanical Shark won’t do…so he had to find a way to make a movie about a deadly predator without showing that deadly predator on the screen.
“I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark. So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock. ‘What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this?’ It’s what we don’t see which is truly frightening,” the director later recalled.
This strategy proved to be more than fruitful. After implementing Hitchcock’s strategy, Steven Spielberg finished Jaws with a budget of just $9M, and this instant-classic suspense-driven movie went on to earn a staggering $476M worldwide. The director received three Academy Awards — and became Hollywood’s new superstar.