The prolific filmmaker, Steven Spielberg once took extreme measures to film a perfectly realistic and thrilling shot for one of his titles.
Watch ARY News live on live.arynews.tv
Known as the pioneer of modern blockbusters in Hollywood, and the most commercially successful director in history, Steven Spielberg became a household name in 1975 with his horror classic ‘Jaws’.
Regarded as the ‘watershed’ moment in the Hollywood scene, ‘Jaws’ till date remains one of the classics of Spielberg in his illustrious filmography spanning over five decades.
However, the extreme measures that the then-emerging filmmaker took to achieve his vision with merely $9 million in hand, make the film all the more fascinating to watch than it already is. One such BTS moment that created a stir in the past was the real arm that Spielberg used as a prop in the intense scene.
It was when a young woman named Chrissie Watkins was killed in a movie, he initially used a prop arm, but to avoid the fake look of it, the filmmaker buried a crew member in the sand, attached her hand to the character, to reshoot the entire scene, which undoubtedly looked more real on screen.
Moreover, he added the severed head scene after the principal production, to intensify the scare in the final outcome. Although the
film was principally shot in the ocean, he had to arrange a large swimming pool to refilm the part when a character, Matt Hooper, investigates missing fisherman Ben Gardner’s sunken boat. To make it engrossing, Spielberg used a prosthetic head which resembled the missing fisherman and pops out of the boat, terrifying the investigator.
Recalling his experience of shooting ‘Jaws’ once, Spielberg shared, “I was pretty naive about mother nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank.”
“But had I to do it all over again I would have gone back to the sea because it was the only way for the audience to feel that these three men were cast adrift with a great white shark hunting them.”
It was also shared that the mechanical sharks made for the film worked fine when tested in fresh water, but the saltwater of the Atlantic Ocean malfunctioned the sharks during the production. “The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock,” he had said.
Angelina Jolie narrowly escaped a bullet while shooting THIS film
Leave a Comment