We're Gonna Need A Bigger Fright.... How The Scariest Moment In JAWS Almost Never Happened
It just needs one more. Just one more scare to get them screaming.
More or less those were the words Steven Spielberg muttered to himself as he left the theatre after watching an early cut of Jaws.
He liked what he saw, was pleased that people were running out to throw up - and then coming back in to eye the rest of it. He enjoyed the fact that he was stopping people from taking baths - let alone ever going swimming in the ocean again - but dammit, it wasn’t enough, he wanted more.
It’s official, Steven Spielberg is a greedy man.
And so, plans were drawn up, wheels were set in motion and the conception of cinema’s most famous jump scare was initiated.
First off, Spielberg needed a location and, not surprisingly, he didn’t want to head out to the middle of the ocean either - so he got the next best thing, his editor’s swimming pool.
Verna Fields (affectionately known on set as Mother Cutter) was unusual in her working methods as editor as she was there on location, splicing together whatever tiny bits of footage the director had managed to scrape together on that day.
This was Verna Field's home where she and Steven Spielberg cut JAWS. This pool is where they shot Ben Gardner's head popping out of his boat.
When photography was over, she continued editing but this time her base of operations was her pool house in the San Fernando Valley. A few years back a couple bought the Californian home - without knowing who had owned it previously. When they opened up the pool house, there was her Moviola editing equipment still sitting there as though Verna would be back any minute.
Steven Spielberg talked the idea over with various people and in the end went to Verna with his idea.
But Verna had a nice clean pool, no silt, no seaweed - it was terrible! So Spielberg dumped powdered milk into the water, swooshed it around a bit and, hey presto! Instant ocean.
A cast was made of Craig Kingsbury’s head, fixed inside a mock up of the side of his boat and then the shots were done.
Unless you knew before you saw the movie that this standout scary scene was shot not in the Atlantic, nor in a professional studio tank on the Universal backlot, but in a suburban swimming pool, slap bang in the middle of 260 square miles of pretty anonymous America (could there be a more perfect Spielberg location?), you’d never really know.
But that’s the thing that people keep coming back to with Jaws. For all the (eventual) scenes with Bruce eating people and smashing up the Orca, the film wasn’t really about flashy special visuals of effects, it was just four things:
First off, you need your Story. Can’t do anything without that, gotta have a great idea.
Second, have really solid, rounded, believable and relatable Characters.
Next up - you need to be resilient in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. That doesn’t mean you just keep chugging away, doing exactly what you’ve been doing up to that point hoping that it’ll all just work out ok. If something (like a big rubber shark, for instance) doesn’t work, you’ve gotta think your way out of a problem. You need to be imaginative.
Finally - always look for ways to make what you have even better. I said at the start that Steven Spielberg got greedy. Well of course he didn’t, he was just eager to find an even better way of telling his story. He knew if he could get one more terrifying scene into that movie, it would be a talking point, it’d bring people back again and again.
And it worked.
Words by Tim Armitage
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