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13-06-2025
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Behind the screams: 50 bite-sized Jaws facts as the classic movie turns 50
The theme music, the poster, the bloodcurdling screams of the opening scenes ... as Jaws turns 50, let's dive deep into the making of the original Hollywood blockbuster. Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, says it "supercharged the language of cinema". Steven Soderbergh, director of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, says watching the film at the age of 12 "started me thinking about a career in movies". Greg Nicotero, movie effects and make-up maestro for The Walking Dead, also remembers seeing Jaws when he was 12. "My mum tried to cover my eyes," he said of the climatic moment the giant shark devours Robert Shaw's salty sea captain Quint. "She didn't want me to see it because she was afraid it would traumatise me, and it did. In a good way." Fifty years ago, on June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's shark hunt thriller surfaced in cinemas for the US summer - forever changing the way movies are made, marketed and released and the way we feel about sharks. The first film to sell $100 million worth of ticket sales at the box office, Jaws created the template for the Hollywood blockbuster - those shamelessly commercial popcorn entertainments hyped by saturation advertising, released on big screens everywhere all at once and promising crowd-pleasing spectacle and thrills. By the time Jaws opened in Australia six months later, it had already surged past The Godfather to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Never before had so many people queued at the cinema to see the same movie - at least not until Star Wars in 1977. For his film's 50th anniversary, Spielberg is going back into the water with a 90-minute National Geographic documentary produced with the family of Jaws author Peter Benchley. Dropping on Disney+ on July 11, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story features never-before-seen home videos and rare outtakes from the personal archives of Spielberg and Benchley, new interviews with the cast, crew and such Spielberg contemporaries as George Lucas and James Cameron, and conversations with marine experts, including Philippe Cousteau, about the "Jaws effect" - the wave of shark fear unleashed by the film's famous frights. Like many filmmakers, Aussie horror auteur Sean Byrne regards Jaws as a masterpiece and one of his favourite films. But "it did a great disservice to the sharks," he says, "because every shark film that followed is about sharks hunting humans." "Sharks have had a bad rap over the years - they're actually beautiful creatures," the Tasmanian director of The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy said. His new film, Dangerous Animals, in cinemas from June 12, is a gory addition to the long line of movies hunting Jaws-sized chills (think Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg). But Byrne reckons it's the first film "where the shark is not the monster - the man is the monster". Starring Jai Courtney as a shark-obsessed serial killer, Dangerous Animals uses footage of real sharks blended with live-action shot off the Queensland coast. Instead of fake, "videogamey" CGI sharks, "everything that you're seeing underwater is a real shark". "In a way, it's Wolf Creek on water, but it absolutely takes its lead from Jaws in terms of suspense," Byrne said. "For me, shark fins are the definition of tension - you see them slicing the surface, never knowing when or where the attack will come." Here are 50 bite-sized facts about Jaws - the mishaps, innovations and improvisation behind the movie that changed the movies: 1. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown snapped up the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel Jaws before its February 1974 publication. 2. The first director they considered was Dick Richards but he didn't get the job after repeatedly calling the shark a "white whale". He'd later direct Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. 3. Steven Spielberg, 26, had just finished debut feature The Sugarland Express but balked at directing Jaws. He'd already done 1971 TV movie Duel, about a truck terrorising a motorist. "Who wants to be known as a shark and truck director?" he once said. 4. Richard Dreyfuss initially declined the role of brash marine biologist Matt Hooper. 5. Spielberg's first choice for shark hunter Quint was Lee Marvin, who declined because he wanted to go fishing for real. With Dr Strangleove's Sterling Hayden unavailable, hard-drinking English actor Robert Shaw - who'd worked on 1973's The Sting with producer David Brown - was cast. 6. Charlton Heston wanted the part of police chief Martin Brody, but was too big a star. Roy Scheider suggested himself to Spielberg at a Hollywood party. 7. Veteran Shaw and rising star Dreyfuss clashed on set, enhancing their onscreen friction. "I do tend to drink when totally bored," Shaw said at the time. "Roy does exercises .. and Dreyfuss talks. Dreyfuss just talks interminably." Shaw died in 1978, aged 51. 8. Real-life fisherman Craig Kingsbury was hired to help Shaw with Quint's salty lingo. He also played ill-fated fisho Ben Gardner, whose severed, one-eyed head pops out of a sunken, shark-ravaged boat hull in one of the film's best jump scares. 9. Kingsbury, who died in 2002 aged 89, was Quint-style crusty about the scene featuring a grisly prop molded from his face: "How the hell that shark spit the head back in the boat after he bit it off, I'll never know!" 10. Carl Gottlieb was working on TV sitcom The Odd Couple before helping Spielberg with the Jaws script. He shares screenwriting credit with Benchley. He also played Amity Island's toadying local newspaper publisher. His superb book The Jaws Log chronicles the making of the movie. 11. Benchley cameos as a TV reporter in the holiday weekend beach panic sequence. 12. Spielberg is the coastguard voice heard over the radio on Quint's boat. 13. Three mechanical sharks were designed by art director Joe Alves and built by special effects artist Bob Mattey (who'd created giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, the 8-metre sharks were towed by submerged sleds but often malfunctioned in the seawater, causing extensive delays. 14. The camera-shy great white doesn't appear on screen until one hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour movie. 15. The slow reveal - now regarded as masterful suspense storytelling - wasn't intentional. The original script had 12 more shark scenes than we see in the final film. Spielberg has said mishaps with Bruce gave him "no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark". So, instead of loading up on Ray Harryhausen monster effects, he went for Alfred Hitchcock suspense: "It's what we don't see which is truly frightening". 16. Spielberg wanted ocean realism instead of a Hollywood studio tank, so Massachusetts resort Martha's Vineyard doubled as fictional holiday town Amity Island. 17. Several subplots were cut from Benchley's bestseller, including an affair between Brody's wife and Hooper. Spielberg wanted a "sea-hunt movie" with less "soap opera". 18. The script wasn't finished when filming began on May 2, 1974. Dreyfuss would later famously declare: "We started without a script, without a cast and without a shark". 19. For the opening night-time shark attack sequence, stunt performer Susan Backlinie wore a special rig of underwater cables so she could be dragged with sudden force. She wasn't warned when the violent jolts would come so her thrashing was real. Spielberg himself did the final death yank. 20. Backlinie's stunts were shot in daylight but filtered to look like night. 21. Recording her bloodcurdling screams as skinnydipper Chrissie Watkins, Spielberg had Backlinie tilt her head back as he poured water over her face. "Which is now known as waterboarding," Dreyfuss noted in 2010 doco Jaws: The Inside Story. 22. Backlinie, who died last year aged 77, recalled Spielberg telling her during the filming: "When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubble gum. I think we did that". 23. When Pipit the black labrador disappears while fetching a stick from the water just before Alex Kintner is attacked on his yellow inflatable raft, the dog's owner (played by her real owner, a Martha's Vineyard local) calls out her name. Pipit kept barking off camera when she was called so the dog was moved off the beach set. 24. Jeffrey Voorhees, another Martha's Vineyard local whose first and only acting role was playing young shark victim Alex Kintner, had two crew members in scuba gear pull him under the water when his inflatable raft is hit by the shark. 25. Lee Fierro took 17 takes to get the slap right when her grieving Mrs Kintner confronts Brody over the death of son Alex. 26. The youngest Brody boy sweetly mimicking his tormented father at the dinner table was not scripted. The local child cast in the role, Jay Mello, was copying Scheider between takes so they filmed it. 27. Local fishermen couldn't catch a big enough shark for the scenes in which Amity folk wrongly think they've caught the killer. The 4-metre tiger shark strung up on the dock ("A whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?") was caught 2500 kilometres away in Florida and flown in on a private plane. By the time cameras rolled, the carcass was decomposing. Filming with the increasingly ripe fish took four days. 28. That's raw chicken flesh hanging from the shark's teeth after Quint is eaten. 29. Quint's boat The Orca is supposed to sink at the end of the movie. It wasn't supposed to sink in real life too. The mishap part-way through the shoot sent two cameras to the sea floor. The waterlogged gear was flown to a lab in New York, where technicians salvaged the film inside. 30. The 55-day shoot went more than 100 days over schedule thanks largely to Bruce breakdowns, sending the $US4 million budget ballooning to $US12 million. 31. Before shooting Quint's speech about the wartime sinking of USS Indianapolis, Shaw told Spielberg he'd have a few drinks to make his grizzled delivery authentic. The actor got so drunk he had to be carried to the set for a performance Gottlieb politely described as "passionate but not accurate". Cold sober the next morning, Shaw nailed it. 32. Quint's monologue about sharks preying on sailors adrift in the ocean for days after the sinking was conceived by an uncredited Howard Sackler. Another Spielberg friend, John Milius, is said to have contributed, though Gottlieb credits Shaw - a playwright - as the true author of the speech after pulling all the drafts together into the dark, dramatic scene. 33. When boozy Quint and Hooper compare shark bites and other wounds, Brody lifts his shirt without speaking. Schieder said of his improv: "Here are these two guys showing huge scars and what've I got? There's a little tiny appendix scar". 34. The ominous Jaws theme by John Williams is as synonymous with film dread as Bernard Herrmann's Psycho. But Spielberg thought he was joking when he first heard it. "I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it's almost like Chopsticks," he said in 2024 Disney+ documentary Music by John Williams. 35. The low two-note score gets more screen time in the movie than the shark. Spielberg: "His musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark". 36. To make the real 4-metre great whites filmed in Australia by Ron and Valerie Taylor look more like the movie's 8-metre monster, jockey-sized stuntman Carl Rizzo was supposed to dive in a miniature cage as Hooper. 37. In the script, like the novel, Hooper is killed when the shark bites through the cage. Rizzo wasn't in the cage when the Taylors got some ferocious footage so the story was rejigged to let Hooper escape and make it to the end of the movie in one piece. 38. After filming wrapped, Spielberg wasn't satisfied with the severed head scare. Extra frames were shot in the backyard pool of editor Verna Fields, with milk used to replicate the murky depths of the ocean. The director said he'd pay for the re-shoot himself after Universal Pictures initially refused. 39. Scenes of the shark chomping down on Alex Kintner on his yellow raft - as well as its later lagoon attack witnessed by Brody's older son - were re-cut to reduce the violence and gore after audience members at early test screenings threw up. 40. Gottlieb and Spielberg would sneak into cinemas in LA "just to watch the sold-out audience visibly rise out of their seats with a collective shriek". 41. "You're gonna need a bigger boat", uttered in shock when the shark rises out of the water behind Brody, was a Scheider ad lib. In test screenings, audience reaction to seeing the shark drowned out the line, so the scene was re-cut to make it more audible. 42. The line ranks third among Hollywood Reporter's top 100 movie quotes (after Gone With The Wind's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and Casablanca's "Here's looking at you, kid"). 43. Scheider, who died in 2008 aged 75, once recalled the moment during filming when he realised that Jaws was going to be special: "I remember one day, they pulled the damn thing [shark] out and put it on the cables and ran it past the boat and it was as long as the boat and I said, 'Oh, my god, that looks great'. I remember that day. We all probably lit cigars!" 44. Bantam Books commissioned the now-famous image of a giant shark looming up beneath a lone swimmer for the paperback version of Benchley's novel because artist Paul Bacon's impressionistic shark for Doubleday's original hardcover looked "like a penis with teeth". So, illustrator Roger Kastel created a more lifelike and menacing shark, removed the swimmer's bikini and added the striking blue water and horizon. 45. Bantam let Universal Pictures use the image for free in its movie poster to help sell more books. The studio added the blood-red title above the waterline and obscured the swimmer's breasts with bubbles. 46. The shark painted by Kastel, who died in 2023 aged 92, is a mako not a great white. 47. Benchley became an advocate for shark protection, including campaigning against the mass production of shark fin soup. Not long before his death in 2006, aged 65, he said: "Knowing what I know now I could never write that book today. Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges". His wife Wendy remains on the board of wildlife conservation group WildAid. 48. The Jaws success helped Spielberg get backing for previously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It also gave him "final cut" on every subsequent movie. 49. Jaws won three Oscars in 1976, losing Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but winning Best Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. Spielberg wasn't a Best Director nominee for Jaws but has been nominated in the category nine times, winning for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). 50. The last link to "Bruce" is a fibreglass replica cast from the mold used for the three original prop sharks. It hangs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, displayed with Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, tablets from The Ten Commandments and a space suit from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And who lovingly restored the shark decades after Universal Studios sent its tourist showpiece to a junkyard? Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead make-up effects wizard whose mum tried to cover his eyes as they watched Jaws when he was 12. The theme music, the poster, the bloodcurdling screams of the opening scenes ... as Jaws turns 50, let's dive deep into the making of the original Hollywood blockbuster. Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, says it "supercharged the language of cinema". Steven Soderbergh, director of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, says watching the film at the age of 12 "started me thinking about a career in movies". Greg Nicotero, movie effects and make-up maestro for The Walking Dead, also remembers seeing Jaws when he was 12. "My mum tried to cover my eyes," he said of the climatic moment the giant shark devours Robert Shaw's salty sea captain Quint. "She didn't want me to see it because she was afraid it would traumatise me, and it did. In a good way." Fifty years ago, on June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's shark hunt thriller surfaced in cinemas for the US summer - forever changing the way movies are made, marketed and released and the way we feel about sharks. The first film to sell $100 million worth of ticket sales at the box office, Jaws created the template for the Hollywood blockbuster - those shamelessly commercial popcorn entertainments hyped by saturation advertising, released on big screens everywhere all at once and promising crowd-pleasing spectacle and thrills. By the time Jaws opened in Australia six months later, it had already surged past The Godfather to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Never before had so many people queued at the cinema to see the same movie - at least not until Star Wars in 1977. For his film's 50th anniversary, Spielberg is going back into the water with a 90-minute National Geographic documentary produced with the family of Jaws author Peter Benchley. Dropping on Disney+ on July 11, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story features never-before-seen home videos and rare outtakes from the personal archives of Spielberg and Benchley, new interviews with the cast, crew and such Spielberg contemporaries as George Lucas and James Cameron, and conversations with marine experts, including Philippe Cousteau, about the "Jaws effect" - the wave of shark fear unleashed by the film's famous frights. Like many filmmakers, Aussie horror auteur Sean Byrne regards Jaws as a masterpiece and one of his favourite films. But "it did a great disservice to the sharks," he says, "because every shark film that followed is about sharks hunting humans." "Sharks have had a bad rap over the years - they're actually beautiful creatures," the Tasmanian director of The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy said. His new film, Dangerous Animals, in cinemas from June 12, is a gory addition to the long line of movies hunting Jaws-sized chills (think Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg). But Byrne reckons it's the first film "where the shark is not the monster - the man is the monster". Starring Jai Courtney as a shark-obsessed serial killer, Dangerous Animals uses footage of real sharks blended with live-action shot off the Queensland coast. Instead of fake, "videogamey" CGI sharks, "everything that you're seeing underwater is a real shark". "In a way, it's Wolf Creek on water, but it absolutely takes its lead from Jaws in terms of suspense," Byrne said. "For me, shark fins are the definition of tension - you see them slicing the surface, never knowing when or where the attack will come." Here are 50 bite-sized facts about Jaws - the mishaps, innovations and improvisation behind the movie that changed the movies: 1. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown snapped up the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel Jaws before its February 1974 publication. 2. The first director they considered was Dick Richards but he didn't get the job after repeatedly calling the shark a "white whale". He'd later direct Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. 3. Steven Spielberg, 26, had just finished debut feature The Sugarland Express but balked at directing Jaws. He'd already done 1971 TV movie Duel, about a truck terrorising a motorist. "Who wants to be known as a shark and truck director?" he once said. 4. Richard Dreyfuss initially declined the role of brash marine biologist Matt Hooper. 5. Spielberg's first choice for shark hunter Quint was Lee Marvin, who declined because he wanted to go fishing for real. With Dr Strangleove's Sterling Hayden unavailable, hard-drinking English actor Robert Shaw - who'd worked on 1973's The Sting with producer David Brown - was cast. 6. Charlton Heston wanted the part of police chief Martin Brody, but was too big a star. Roy Scheider suggested himself to Spielberg at a Hollywood party. 7. Veteran Shaw and rising star Dreyfuss clashed on set, enhancing their onscreen friction. "I do tend to drink when totally bored," Shaw said at the time. "Roy does exercises .. and Dreyfuss talks. Dreyfuss just talks interminably." Shaw died in 1978, aged 51. 8. Real-life fisherman Craig Kingsbury was hired to help Shaw with Quint's salty lingo. He also played ill-fated fisho Ben Gardner, whose severed, one-eyed head pops out of a sunken, shark-ravaged boat hull in one of the film's best jump scares. 9. Kingsbury, who died in 2002 aged 89, was Quint-style crusty about the scene featuring a grisly prop molded from his face: "How the hell that shark spit the head back in the boat after he bit it off, I'll never know!" 10. Carl Gottlieb was working on TV sitcom The Odd Couple before helping Spielberg with the Jaws script. He shares screenwriting credit with Benchley. He also played Amity Island's toadying local newspaper publisher. His superb book The Jaws Log chronicles the making of the movie. 11. Benchley cameos as a TV reporter in the holiday weekend beach panic sequence. 12. Spielberg is the coastguard voice heard over the radio on Quint's boat. 13. Three mechanical sharks were designed by art director Joe Alves and built by special effects artist Bob Mattey (who'd created giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, the 8-metre sharks were towed by submerged sleds but often malfunctioned in the seawater, causing extensive delays. 14. The camera-shy great white doesn't appear on screen until one hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour movie. 15. The slow reveal - now regarded as masterful suspense storytelling - wasn't intentional. The original script had 12 more shark scenes than we see in the final film. Spielberg has said mishaps with Bruce gave him "no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark". So, instead of loading up on Ray Harryhausen monster effects, he went for Alfred Hitchcock suspense: "It's what we don't see which is truly frightening". 16. Spielberg wanted ocean realism instead of a Hollywood studio tank, so Massachusetts resort Martha's Vineyard doubled as fictional holiday town Amity Island. 17. Several subplots were cut from Benchley's bestseller, including an affair between Brody's wife and Hooper. Spielberg wanted a "sea-hunt movie" with less "soap opera". 18. The script wasn't finished when filming began on May 2, 1974. Dreyfuss would later famously declare: "We started without a script, without a cast and without a shark". 19. For the opening night-time shark attack sequence, stunt performer Susan Backlinie wore a special rig of underwater cables so she could be dragged with sudden force. She wasn't warned when the violent jolts would come so her thrashing was real. Spielberg himself did the final death yank. 20. Backlinie's stunts were shot in daylight but filtered to look like night. 21. Recording her bloodcurdling screams as skinnydipper Chrissie Watkins, Spielberg had Backlinie tilt her head back as he poured water over her face. "Which is now known as waterboarding," Dreyfuss noted in 2010 doco Jaws: The Inside Story. 22. Backlinie, who died last year aged 77, recalled Spielberg telling her during the filming: "When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubble gum. I think we did that". 23. When Pipit the black labrador disappears while fetching a stick from the water just before Alex Kintner is attacked on his yellow inflatable raft, the dog's owner (played by her real owner, a Martha's Vineyard local) calls out her name. Pipit kept barking off camera when she was called so the dog was moved off the beach set. 24. Jeffrey Voorhees, another Martha's Vineyard local whose first and only acting role was playing young shark victim Alex Kintner, had two crew members in scuba gear pull him under the water when his inflatable raft is hit by the shark. 25. Lee Fierro took 17 takes to get the slap right when her grieving Mrs Kintner confronts Brody over the death of son Alex. 26. The youngest Brody boy sweetly mimicking his tormented father at the dinner table was not scripted. The local child cast in the role, Jay Mello, was copying Scheider between takes so they filmed it. 27. Local fishermen couldn't catch a big enough shark for the scenes in which Amity folk wrongly think they've caught the killer. The 4-metre tiger shark strung up on the dock ("A whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?") was caught 2500 kilometres away in Florida and flown in on a private plane. By the time cameras rolled, the carcass was decomposing. Filming with the increasingly ripe fish took four days. 28. That's raw chicken flesh hanging from the shark's teeth after Quint is eaten. 29. Quint's boat The Orca is supposed to sink at the end of the movie. It wasn't supposed to sink in real life too. The mishap part-way through the shoot sent two cameras to the sea floor. The waterlogged gear was flown to a lab in New York, where technicians salvaged the film inside. 30. The 55-day shoot went more than 100 days over schedule thanks largely to Bruce breakdowns, sending the $US4 million budget ballooning to $US12 million. 31. Before shooting Quint's speech about the wartime sinking of USS Indianapolis, Shaw told Spielberg he'd have a few drinks to make his grizzled delivery authentic. The actor got so drunk he had to be carried to the set for a performance Gottlieb politely described as "passionate but not accurate". Cold sober the next morning, Shaw nailed it. 32. Quint's monologue about sharks preying on sailors adrift in the ocean for days after the sinking was conceived by an uncredited Howard Sackler. Another Spielberg friend, John Milius, is said to have contributed, though Gottlieb credits Shaw - a playwright - as the true author of the speech after pulling all the drafts together into the dark, dramatic scene. 33. When boozy Quint and Hooper compare shark bites and other wounds, Brody lifts his shirt without speaking. Schieder said of his improv: "Here are these two guys showing huge scars and what've I got? There's a little tiny appendix scar". 34. The ominous Jaws theme by John Williams is as synonymous with film dread as Bernard Herrmann's Psycho. But Spielberg thought he was joking when he first heard it. "I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it's almost like Chopsticks," he said in 2024 Disney+ documentary Music by John Williams. 35. The low two-note score gets more screen time in the movie than the shark. Spielberg: "His musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark". 36. To make the real 4-metre great whites filmed in Australia by Ron and Valerie Taylor look more like the movie's 8-metre monster, jockey-sized stuntman Carl Rizzo was supposed to dive in a miniature cage as Hooper. 37. In the script, like the novel, Hooper is killed when the shark bites through the cage. Rizzo wasn't in the cage when the Taylors got some ferocious footage so the story was rejigged to let Hooper escape and make it to the end of the movie in one piece. 38. After filming wrapped, Spielberg wasn't satisfied with the severed head scare. Extra frames were shot in the backyard pool of editor Verna Fields, with milk used to replicate the murky depths of the ocean. The director said he'd pay for the re-shoot himself after Universal Pictures initially refused. 39. Scenes of the shark chomping down on Alex Kintner on his yellow raft - as well as its later lagoon attack witnessed by Brody's older son - were re-cut to reduce the violence and gore after audience members at early test screenings threw up. 40. Gottlieb and Spielberg would sneak into cinemas in LA "just to watch the sold-out audience visibly rise out of their seats with a collective shriek". 41. "You're gonna need a bigger boat", uttered in shock when the shark rises out of the water behind Brody, was a Scheider ad lib. In test screenings, audience reaction to seeing the shark drowned out the line, so the scene was re-cut to make it more audible. 42. The line ranks third among Hollywood Reporter's top 100 movie quotes (after Gone With The Wind's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and Casablanca's "Here's looking at you, kid"). 43. Scheider, who died in 2008 aged 75, once recalled the moment during filming when he realised that Jaws was going to be special: "I remember one day, they pulled the damn thing [shark] out and put it on the cables and ran it past the boat and it was as long as the boat and I said, 'Oh, my god, that looks great'. I remember that day. We all probably lit cigars!" 44. Bantam Books commissioned the now-famous image of a giant shark looming up beneath a lone swimmer for the paperback version of Benchley's novel because artist Paul Bacon's impressionistic shark for Doubleday's original hardcover looked "like a penis with teeth". So, illustrator Roger Kastel created a more lifelike and menacing shark, removed the swimmer's bikini and added the striking blue water and horizon. 45. Bantam let Universal Pictures use the image for free in its movie poster to help sell more books. The studio added the blood-red title above the waterline and obscured the swimmer's breasts with bubbles. 46. The shark painted by Kastel, who died in 2023 aged 92, is a mako not a great white. 47. Benchley became an advocate for shark protection, including campaigning against the mass production of shark fin soup. Not long before his death in 2006, aged 65, he said: "Knowing what I know now I could never write that book today. Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges". His wife Wendy remains on the board of wildlife conservation group WildAid. 48. The Jaws success helped Spielberg get backing for previously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It also gave him "final cut" on every subsequent movie. 49. Jaws won three Oscars in 1976, losing Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but winning Best Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. Spielberg wasn't a Best Director nominee for Jaws but has been nominated in the category nine times, winning for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). 50. The last link to "Bruce" is a fibreglass replica cast from the mold used for the three original prop sharks. It hangs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, displayed with Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, tablets from The Ten Commandments and a space suit from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And who lovingly restored the shark decades after Universal Studios sent its tourist showpiece to a junkyard? Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead make-up effects wizard whose mum tried to cover his eyes as they watched Jaws when he was 12. The theme music, the poster, the bloodcurdling screams of the opening scenes ... as Jaws turns 50, let's dive deep into the making of the original Hollywood blockbuster. Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, says it "supercharged the language of cinema". Steven Soderbergh, director of Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, says watching the film at the age of 12 "started me thinking about a career in movies". Greg Nicotero, movie effects and make-up maestro for The Walking Dead, also remembers seeing Jaws when he was 12. "My mum tried to cover my eyes," he said of the climatic moment the giant shark devours Robert Shaw's salty sea captain Quint. "She didn't want me to see it because she was afraid it would traumatise me, and it did. In a good way." Fifty years ago, on June 20, 1975, Steven Spielberg's shark hunt thriller surfaced in cinemas for the US summer - forever changing the way movies are made, marketed and released and the way we feel about sharks. The first film to sell $100 million worth of ticket sales at the box office, Jaws created the template for the Hollywood blockbuster - those shamelessly commercial popcorn entertainments hyped by saturation advertising, released on big screens everywhere all at once and promising crowd-pleasing spectacle and thrills. By the time Jaws opened in Australia six months later, it had already surged past The Godfather to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Never before had so many people queued at the cinema to see the same movie - at least not until Star Wars in 1977. For his film's 50th anniversary, Spielberg is going back into the water with a 90-minute National Geographic documentary produced with the family of Jaws author Peter Benchley. Dropping on Disney+ on July 11, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story features never-before-seen home videos and rare outtakes from the personal archives of Spielberg and Benchley, new interviews with the cast, crew and such Spielberg contemporaries as George Lucas and James Cameron, and conversations with marine experts, including Philippe Cousteau, about the "Jaws effect" - the wave of shark fear unleashed by the film's famous frights. Like many filmmakers, Aussie horror auteur Sean Byrne regards Jaws as a masterpiece and one of his favourite films. But "it did a great disservice to the sharks," he says, "because every shark film that followed is about sharks hunting humans." "Sharks have had a bad rap over the years - they're actually beautiful creatures," the Tasmanian director of The Loved Ones and The Devil's Candy said. His new film, Dangerous Animals, in cinemas from June 12, is a gory addition to the long line of movies hunting Jaws-sized chills (think Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg). But Byrne reckons it's the first film "where the shark is not the monster - the man is the monster". Starring Jai Courtney as a shark-obsessed serial killer, Dangerous Animals uses footage of real sharks blended with live-action shot off the Queensland coast. Instead of fake, "videogamey" CGI sharks, "everything that you're seeing underwater is a real shark". "In a way, it's Wolf Creek on water, but it absolutely takes its lead from Jaws in terms of suspense," Byrne said. "For me, shark fins are the definition of tension - you see them slicing the surface, never knowing when or where the attack will come." Here are 50 bite-sized facts about Jaws - the mishaps, innovations and improvisation behind the movie that changed the movies: 1. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown snapped up the film rights to Peter Benchley's novel Jaws before its February 1974 publication. 2. The first director they considered was Dick Richards but he didn't get the job after repeatedly calling the shark a "white whale". He'd later direct Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. 3. Steven Spielberg, 26, had just finished debut feature The Sugarland Express but balked at directing Jaws. He'd already done 1971 TV movie Duel, about a truck terrorising a motorist. "Who wants to be known as a shark and truck director?" he once said. 4. Richard Dreyfuss initially declined the role of brash marine biologist Matt Hooper. 5. Spielberg's first choice for shark hunter Quint was Lee Marvin, who declined because he wanted to go fishing for real. With Dr Strangleove's Sterling Hayden unavailable, hard-drinking English actor Robert Shaw - who'd worked on 1973's The Sting with producer David Brown - was cast. 6. Charlton Heston wanted the part of police chief Martin Brody, but was too big a star. Roy Scheider suggested himself to Spielberg at a Hollywood party. 7. Veteran Shaw and rising star Dreyfuss clashed on set, enhancing their onscreen friction. "I do tend to drink when totally bored," Shaw said at the time. "Roy does exercises .. and Dreyfuss talks. Dreyfuss just talks interminably." Shaw died in 1978, aged 51. 8. Real-life fisherman Craig Kingsbury was hired to help Shaw with Quint's salty lingo. He also played ill-fated fisho Ben Gardner, whose severed, one-eyed head pops out of a sunken, shark-ravaged boat hull in one of the film's best jump scares. 9. Kingsbury, who died in 2002 aged 89, was Quint-style crusty about the scene featuring a grisly prop molded from his face: "How the hell that shark spit the head back in the boat after he bit it off, I'll never know!" 10. Carl Gottlieb was working on TV sitcom The Odd Couple before helping Spielberg with the Jaws script. He shares screenwriting credit with Benchley. He also played Amity Island's toadying local newspaper publisher. His superb book The Jaws Log chronicles the making of the movie. 11. Benchley cameos as a TV reporter in the holiday weekend beach panic sequence. 12. Spielberg is the coastguard voice heard over the radio on Quint's boat. 13. Three mechanical sharks were designed by art director Joe Alves and built by special effects artist Bob Mattey (who'd created giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). Nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer, the 8-metre sharks were towed by submerged sleds but often malfunctioned in the seawater, causing extensive delays. 14. The camera-shy great white doesn't appear on screen until one hour and 21 minutes into the two-hour movie. 15. The slow reveal - now regarded as masterful suspense storytelling - wasn't intentional. The original script had 12 more shark scenes than we see in the final film. Spielberg has said mishaps with Bruce gave him "no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark". So, instead of loading up on Ray Harryhausen monster effects, he went for Alfred Hitchcock suspense: "It's what we don't see which is truly frightening". 16. Spielberg wanted ocean realism instead of a Hollywood studio tank, so Massachusetts resort Martha's Vineyard doubled as fictional holiday town Amity Island. 17. Several subplots were cut from Benchley's bestseller, including an affair between Brody's wife and Hooper. Spielberg wanted a "sea-hunt movie" with less "soap opera". 18. The script wasn't finished when filming began on May 2, 1974. Dreyfuss would later famously declare: "We started without a script, without a cast and without a shark". 19. For the opening night-time shark attack sequence, stunt performer Susan Backlinie wore a special rig of underwater cables so she could be dragged with sudden force. She wasn't warned when the violent jolts would come so her thrashing was real. Spielberg himself did the final death yank. 20. Backlinie's stunts were shot in daylight but filtered to look like night. 21. Recording her bloodcurdling screams as skinnydipper Chrissie Watkins, Spielberg had Backlinie tilt her head back as he poured water over her face. "Which is now known as waterboarding," Dreyfuss noted in 2010 doco Jaws: The Inside Story. 22. Backlinie, who died last year aged 77, recalled Spielberg telling her during the filming: "When your scene is done, I want everyone under the seats with the popcorn and bubble gum. I think we did that". 23. When Pipit the black labrador disappears while fetching a stick from the water just before Alex Kintner is attacked on his yellow inflatable raft, the dog's owner (played by her real owner, a Martha's Vineyard local) calls out her name. Pipit kept barking off camera when she was called so the dog was moved off the beach set. 24. Jeffrey Voorhees, another Martha's Vineyard local whose first and only acting role was playing young shark victim Alex Kintner, had two crew members in scuba gear pull him under the water when his inflatable raft is hit by the shark. 25. Lee Fierro took 17 takes to get the slap right when her grieving Mrs Kintner confronts Brody over the death of son Alex. 26. The youngest Brody boy sweetly mimicking his tormented father at the dinner table was not scripted. The local child cast in the role, Jay Mello, was copying Scheider between takes so they filmed it. 27. Local fishermen couldn't catch a big enough shark for the scenes in which Amity folk wrongly think they've caught the killer. The 4-metre tiger shark strung up on the dock ("A whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?") was caught 2500 kilometres away in Florida and flown in on a private plane. By the time cameras rolled, the carcass was decomposing. Filming with the increasingly ripe fish took four days. 28. That's raw chicken flesh hanging from the shark's teeth after Quint is eaten. 29. Quint's boat The Orca is supposed to sink at the end of the movie. It wasn't supposed to sink in real life too. The mishap part-way through the shoot sent two cameras to the sea floor. The waterlogged gear was flown to a lab in New York, where technicians salvaged the film inside. 30. The 55-day shoot went more than 100 days over schedule thanks largely to Bruce breakdowns, sending the $US4 million budget ballooning to $US12 million. 31. Before shooting Quint's speech about the wartime sinking of USS Indianapolis, Shaw told Spielberg he'd have a few drinks to make his grizzled delivery authentic. The actor got so drunk he had to be carried to the set for a performance Gottlieb politely described as "passionate but not accurate". Cold sober the next morning, Shaw nailed it. 32. Quint's monologue about sharks preying on sailors adrift in the ocean for days after the sinking was conceived by an uncredited Howard Sackler. Another Spielberg friend, John Milius, is said to have contributed, though Gottlieb credits Shaw - a playwright - as the true author of the speech after pulling all the drafts together into the dark, dramatic scene. 33. When boozy Quint and Hooper compare shark bites and other wounds, Brody lifts his shirt without speaking. Schieder said of his improv: "Here are these two guys showing huge scars and what've I got? There's a little tiny appendix scar". 34. The ominous Jaws theme by John Williams is as synonymous with film dread as Bernard Herrmann's Psycho. But Spielberg thought he was joking when he first heard it. "I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it's almost like Chopsticks," he said in 2024 Disney+ documentary Music by John Williams. 35. The low two-note score gets more screen time in the movie than the shark. Spielberg: "His musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark". 36. To make the real 4-metre great whites filmed in Australia by Ron and Valerie Taylor look more like the movie's 8-metre monster, jockey-sized stuntman Carl Rizzo was supposed to dive in a miniature cage as Hooper. 37. In the script, like the novel, Hooper is killed when the shark bites through the cage. Rizzo wasn't in the cage when the Taylors got some ferocious footage so the story was rejigged to let Hooper escape and make it to the end of the movie in one piece. 38. After filming wrapped, Spielberg wasn't satisfied with the severed head scare. Extra frames were shot in the backyard pool of editor Verna Fields, with milk used to replicate the murky depths of the ocean. The director said he'd pay for the re-shoot himself after Universal Pictures initially refused. 39. Scenes of the shark chomping down on Alex Kintner on his yellow raft - as well as its later lagoon attack witnessed by Brody's older son - were re-cut to reduce the violence and gore after audience members at early test screenings threw up. 40. Gottlieb and Spielberg would sneak into cinemas in LA "just to watch the sold-out audience visibly rise out of their seats with a collective shriek". 41. "You're gonna need a bigger boat", uttered in shock when the shark rises out of the water behind Brody, was a Scheider ad lib. In test screenings, audience reaction to seeing the shark drowned out the line, so the scene was re-cut to make it more audible. 42. The line ranks third among Hollywood Reporter's top 100 movie quotes (after Gone With The Wind's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and Casablanca's "Here's looking at you, kid"). 43. Scheider, who died in 2008 aged 75, once recalled the moment during filming when he realised that Jaws was going to be special: "I remember one day, they pulled the damn thing [shark] out and put it on the cables and ran it past the boat and it was as long as the boat and I said, 'Oh, my god, that looks great'. I remember that day. We all probably lit cigars!" 44. Bantam Books commissioned the now-famous image of a giant shark looming up beneath a lone swimmer for the paperback version of Benchley's novel because artist Paul Bacon's impressionistic shark for Doubleday's original hardcover looked "like a penis with teeth". So, illustrator Roger Kastel created a more lifelike and menacing shark, removed the swimmer's bikini and added the striking blue water and horizon. 45. Bantam let Universal Pictures use the image for free in its movie poster to help sell more books. The studio added the blood-red title above the waterline and obscured the swimmer's breasts with bubbles. 46. The shark painted by Kastel, who died in 2023 aged 92, is a mako not a great white. 47. Benchley became an advocate for shark protection, including campaigning against the mass production of shark fin soup. Not long before his death in 2006, aged 65, he said: "Knowing what I know now I could never write that book today. Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges". His wife Wendy remains on the board of wildlife conservation group WildAid. 48. The Jaws success helped Spielberg get backing for previously rejected Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It also gave him "final cut" on every subsequent movie. 49. Jaws won three Oscars in 1976, losing Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but winning Best Editing, Best Score and Best Sound. Spielberg wasn't a Best Director nominee for Jaws but has been nominated in the category nine times, winning for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). 50. The last link to "Bruce" is a fibreglass replica cast from the mold used for the three original prop sharks. It hangs at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA, displayed with Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, tablets from The Ten Commandments and a space suit from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And who lovingly restored the shark decades after Universal Studios sent its tourist showpiece to a junkyard? Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead make-up effects wizard whose mum tried to cover his eyes as they watched Jaws when he was 12.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Steven Soderbergh made a near-perfect spy movie. Why hasn't anybody seen it?
Steven Soderbergh has spent his career making movies that go against the grain. He's made indie gems ("Sex, Lies, and Videotape," "The Girlfriend Experience"), off-kilter crime thrillers ("Out of Sight," "The Limey), movies that bring nuance to real-life issues ("Erin Brockovich," the Oscar-winning "Traffic,") and too-real disaster movies that have become even more relevant in retrospect ("Contagion"). When he did play the studio game, as he did with the "Ocean's Eleven" and "Magic Mike" franchises, his movies were made with such originality that you'd wonder why Hollywood hasn't made more like them. (Answer: there's only one Soderbergh.) Few can match Soderbergh's career in terms of diversity and volume: 2025 marks the ninth time in his career that he's released two movies in the same year. Still, Soderbergh has hit a snag lately. While his last two movies, "Presence" and "Black Bag," garnered positive to downright glowing reviews from critics, a lackluster performance at the box office resulted in both leaving theaters quickly. It happened even as "Black Bag," tied with his feature debut "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" as his best-reviewed movie ever, has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Both were right in Soderbergh's sweet spot, combining a high-end concept (a twisty ghost story, a twisty spy story) with name actors (Lucy Liu, Cate Blanchett, and Michael Fassbender) on a small or relatively economical budget ($2 million and $44 million, respectively). This kind of movie has historically been a winning formula for Soderbergh. Everyone recoups their investments, allowing him to make another one (or two) the next year. But as audiences have stopped flocking to movie theaters in droves and big-budget franchises have become the draw when they do, it's increasingly difficult for a mid-budget movie to succeed. And Soderbergh's latest batting average has shown that even he might struggle to revive the genre. Seeing "Black Bag" disappear from most theaters in just three weeks (it's now available on Video on Demand and hits Peacock on May 2) has Soderbergh questioning his future as a storyteller. "It's not fun to spend a lot of time and effort on something that just occupies zero cultural real estate," Soderbergh told Business Insider. "That's not why any filmmaker wants to make movies. You want as many people to see them as possible. I've really got to think deeply about what kind of material I can find that I'm excited by and has the potential to draw a bigger audience than the last two movies." One thing's for certain: the prolific filmmaker will keep going against the grain to find it. In Business Insider's latest Director's Chair interview, Soderbergh has a frank discussion about the future of movie theaters, his never-made "Logan Lucky" prequel, and why he's not surprised David Fincher is making a sequel to Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood." Business Insider: Before we get into the movie's specifics, give me your Monday morning quarterbacking of what the theatrical run of "Black Bag" was like. You made it for $44 million, taking in $36 million worldwide. Steven Soderbergh: It was frustrating. The people we needed to come out didn't come out. And unfortunately, it's impossible to really know why. My concern is that the rest of the industry looks at that result and just goes, "This is why we don't make movies in that budget range for that audience because they don't show up." And that's unfortunate, because that's the kind of movie I've made my whole career. That middle ground, which we all don't want to admit is disappearing, seems to be really disappearing. I mean, it's the best-reviewed movie I've ever made in my career, and we've got six beautiful people in it, and they all did every piece of publicity that we asked them to do and, you know, this is the result. So it's frustrating. I think it was on 2,000-plus screens for three weeks. In your eyes, did you want more runway, or did Focus Features do what it had to do? No. I think they did everything right. Going any wider wasn't going to solve the problem, obviously. They spent the money. I liked the campaign. They were incredibly supportive. I had a good experience with them making the movie. Everything went right except that people just didn't show up. The way the theatrical window has been shortened since COVID is Hollywood programming audiences to stay at home? I don't know. Again, how do you tease out the kind of data that you need to answer that question? Obviously, the topic that never goes away and never will go away is windowing. How do you determine — if people that were aware of "Black Bag" and had some interest in it, if they knew it was going to be 45 or 60 days before it showed up anywhere else, would they have gone? Or did it not matter? We don't know. That's the problem. And that becomes the $100 million question. People know it's out because of the marketing, so are they saying, "Well, I'm going to wait to see that at home?" But here's the thing, Steven: Then they're watching on PVOD, and they would pay as much at home as they did in the theater. Well, all I can tell you is Focus told me they will break even on this movie. I was worried. I don't like losing people's money. Especially when you want to work with them again. Yeah. But when I talked to [Focus Features chairman] Peter Kujawski the Monday after we opened he said, "We'll get out." Unfortunately, the people who write about the movie business aren't privy to how all of that downstream revenue works precisely, and that's why things are perceived as not turning a profit when actually they turn out to be profitable. He told me, "We're fine." But I won't know if any of that is true until I start getting statements, and then I'll be able to see how that world looks. I'll see exactly what they spent on P&A and as the PVOD numbers come in. So by the end of the year, I'll be able to tell if the movie turned a profit, and if so, how. And that's good information. Right. Because that's going to dictate how you want to move forward regarding the kind of movies you want to make. Yeah. It's really not fun when someone asks you, "What are you working on?" and you go, "Oh, I just made this thing," and they go, "Oh, did that come out?" You get tired of that. Let's talk a little about what actually happens in "Black Bag." The ending of George and Katherine embracing in bed confirmed for me that the events in the movie are very much a twisted foreplay for them. Was that how it was always written? It went through a couple of variations of the same idea. It was written initially to be in the bedroom. Then, while we were shooting it, I thought I wanted to do a version where he's making a meal for her because this cooking thing is also very intimate and very much part of their ritual. And then I saw that and it was okay. And I said, I want to go back to the version in the bedroom, but I said to [screenwriter] David [Koepp], I think the reason that I was moving it out of the bedroom was because it was missing just a tiny bit of a button and I couldn't articulate exactly what it was. David said, "I think I know what you mean." He sent me back a variation of the original version in the bedroom, but it had Katherine asking about the money, and that was the little thing, because it's a quiet runner through the movie that she's money-obsessed. That's when I was like, "That's it." After "The Christophers," do you know what you want to make next? What has the release of "Black Bag" made you feel? I don't know. We're finishing "The Christophers" now. Nobody has seen it. It's a single-source, independently financed movie. So I think the most likely course is it will premiere at a festival. Which one? I don't know. But beyond that, I don't know. I've got to figure that out. I'm agnostic in terms of where it shows up, theatrical versus streaming. But you can't keep making the same mistake over and over again. Do you have to go back to the epic route? Do you have the endurance, the heart, the willpower to do something like "Che" again? Physically, I do. Psychologically, though, it's really got to be something that deserves that kind of treatment and doesn't feel like Oscar bait. Is there anything you're developing currently that would have the potential like that at all? No. It does require an aspect of the grandiosity gene, you've got to think about yourself a certain way to want to go out and do those things. That is not my default mode. I have to work myself up to that because I don't have that kind of sense of my place. If I hadn't made "Che," I don't think I would have made "The Knick," which I think is the last epic thing that I've done. "Che" was good for me in that sense. But knowing what goes into that, it has got to be something that I feel really electrified by, and those are just hard to come by. Then you've got to cast Timothée Chalamet. Your wife, Jules Asner, wrote the screenplay for your 2017 movie, "Logan Lucky." When are you two going to stop messing around and give us a sequel? Oh, she's working on stuff. But is she working on another "Logan Lucky"? Well, we talked about it, but when that movie didn't perform well we had to put it away. We had it all set up. We had everybody willing. We were going to do the story of how Daniel Craig's character Joe Bang got into prison. We were going to do that whole story of how things got all fucked up. But you've got to have a hit movie if you want to make a sequel. So you had the cast attached? Everybody wanted to do it. The story was pretty funny. But can you admit that since that movie opened, it has had a second life through streaming? Yeah, and this is why I'm desperate for Warner Bros. to license "The Knick" to Netflix, because I think "The Knick" on Netflix would really go over well. Would that mean you've thrown your hat back in with doing another season of "The Knick"? No. I don't think there's any going back to that. What else is your wife working on? Rebecca Blunt [Jules Asner's pen name] and I have a very professional relationship, and you're never supposed to ask a writer how it's going. Are you as surprised as we are that David Fincher is going to do a "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" sequel? No, because of Brad [Pitt]. I think they're always on the lookout for something to do together, and so this was, it sounds like, an unusual set of circumstances where Quentin decided he didn't want to do it and Brad asked him, "Can I show it to David?" and he said sure, and David read it and said let's do it. That seems to be what happened. That's not surprising at all. What's surprising is Quentin's agreeability. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. "Black Bag" is available On Demand and digital rental. It will be available to stream on Peacock starting May 2. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Steven Soderbergh will keep innovating
Steven Soderbergh has spent his career making movies that go against the grain. He's made indie gems ("Sex, Lies, and Videotape," "The Girlfriend Experience"), off-kilter crime thrillers ("Out of Sight," "The Limey), movies that bring nuance to real-life issues ("Erin Brockovich," the Oscar-winning "Traffic,") and too-real disaster movies that have become even more relevant in retrospect (" Contagion"). When he did play the studio game, as he did with the "Ocean's Eleven" and "Magic Mike" franchises, his movies were made with such originality that you'd wonder why Hollywood hasn't made more like them. (Answer: there's only one Soderbergh.) It's a career that few can match when it comes to diversity and volume: 2025 marks the ninth time in Soderbergh's career that he's had two movies released in the same year. But Soderbergh has hit a snag lately. While both of his last two movies, "Presence" and "Black Bag," garnered positive to downright glowing reviews from critics —"Black Bag" is tied with his feature debut "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" as his best-reviewed movie ever, with a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes — lackluster performance at the box office resulted in both leaving theaters quickly. Both were right in Soderbergh's sweet spot, combining a high-end concept (a twisty ghost story, a twisty spy story) with name actors (Lucy Liu, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender) on a small or relatively economical budget ($2 million and $44 million, respectively). This kind of movie has historically been a winning formula for Soderbergh, one in which everyone recoups on their investments, allowing him to go make another one (or two) the next year. But as audiences have stopped showing up to movie theaters in droves and big-budget franchises have became the draw when they do, it's become increasingly difficult for a mid-budget movie to succeed. And Soderbergh's latest batting average has shown that even he might struggle to revive the genre. Seeing "Black Bag" disappear from most theaters in just three weeks (it's now available on Video on Demand and hits Peacock on May 2) has Soderbergh questioning his future as a storyteller. "It's not fun to spend a lot of time and effort on something that just occupies zero cultural real estate," Soderbergh told Business Insider. "That's not why any filmmaker wants to make movies. You want as many people to see them as possible. I've really got to think deeply about what kind of material I can find that I'm excited by and has the potential to draw a bigger audience than the last two movies." One thing's for certain: the prolific filmmaker will keep going against the grain to find it. In Business Insider's latest Director's Chair interview, Soderbergh has a frank discussion about the future of movie theaters, his never-made "Logan Lucky" prequel, and why he's not surprised David Fincher is making a sequel to Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood." Business Insider: Before we get into the specifics of the movie itself, give me your Monday morning quarterbacking of what the theatrical run of "Black Bag" was like. You made it for $44 million and it took in $36 million worldwide. Steven Soderbergh: It was frustrating. The people we needed to come out didn't come out. And unfortunately, it's impossible to really know why. My concern is that the rest of the industry looks at that result and just goes, "This is why we don't make movies in that budget range for that audience because they don't show up." And that's unfortunate, because that's the kind of movie I've made my whole career. That middle ground, which we all don't want to admit is disappearing, seems to be really disappearing. I mean, it's the best-reviewed movie I've ever made in my career, and we've got six beautiful people in it, and they all did every piece of publicity that we asked them to do and, you know, this is the result. So it's frustrating. I think it was on 2,000-plus screens for three weeks. In your eyes, did you want more runway, or did Focus Features do what it had to do? No. I think they did everything right. Going any wider wasn't going to solve the problem, obviously. They spent the money. I liked the campaign. They were incredibly supportive. I had a good experience with them making the movie. Everything went right except that people just didn't show up. The way the theatrical window has been shortened since COVID, is Hollywood programming audiences to stay at home? I don't know. Again, how do you tease out the kind of data that you need to answer that question? Obviously, the topic that never goes away and never will go away is windowing. How do you determine — if people that were aware of "Black Bag" and had some interest in it, if they knew it was going to be 45 or 60 days before it showed up anywhere else, would they have gone? Or did it not matter? We don't know. That's the problem. And that becomes the $100 million question. People know it's out because of the marketing, so are they saying to themselves, "Well, I'm going to wait to see that at home?" But here's the thing, Steven: Then they're watching on PVOD, and they would be paying as much at home as they did in the theater in that case. Well, all I can tell you is Focus told me they will break even on this movie. I was worried. I don't like losing people's money. Especially when you want to work with them again. Yeah. But when I talked to [Focus Features chairman] Peter Kujawski the Monday after we opened he said, "We'll get out." Unfortunately, the people who write about the movie business aren't privy to how all of that downstream revenue works precisely, and that's why things are perceived as not turning a profit when actually they turn out to be profitable. He told me, "We're fine." But I won't know if any of that is true until I start getting statements, and then I'll be able to see how that world looks. I'll see exactly what they spent on P&A and as the PVOD numbers come in. So by the end of the year, I'll be able to tell if the movie turned a profit, and if so, how. And that's good information. Right. Because that's going to dictate how you want to move forward in regards to the kind of movies you want to make. Yeah. It's really not fun when someone asks you, "What are you working on?" and you go, "Oh, I just made this thing," and they go, "Oh, did that come out?" You get tired of that. Let's talk a little about what actually happens in "Black Bag." The ending of George and Katherine embracing in bed confirmed for me that the events in the movie are very much a twisted foreplay for them. Was that how it was always written? It went through a couple of variations of the same idea. It was written initially to be in the bedroom. Then, while we were shooting it, I thought I wanted to do a version where he's making a meal for her because this cooking thing is also very intimate and very much part of their ritual. And then I saw that and it was okay. And I said, I want to go back to the version in the bedroom, but I said to [screenwriter] David [Koepp], I think the reason that I was moving it out of the bedroom was because it was missing just a tiny bit of a button and I couldn't articulate exactly what it was. David said, "I think I know what you mean." He sent me back a variation of the original version in the bedroom, but it had Katherine asking about the money, and that was the little thing, because it's a quiet runner through the movie that she's money-obsessed. That's when I was like, "That's it." After " The Christophers" do you know what you want to make next? What has the release of "Black Bag" made you feel? I don't know. We're finishing "The Christophers" now. Nobody has seen it. It's a single-source, independently financed movie. So I think the most likely course is it will premiere at a festival. Which one? I don't know. But beyond that, I don't know. I've got to figure that out. I'm agnostic in terms of where it shows up, theatrical versus streaming. But you can't keep making the same mistake over and over again. Do you have to go back to the epic route? Do you have the endurance, the heart, the willpower to do something like "Che" again? Physically, I do. Psychologically, though, it's really got to be something that deserves that kind of treatment and doesn't feel like Oscar bait. Is there anything you're developing currently that would have the potential like that at all? No. It does require an aspect of the grandiosity gene, you've got to think about yourself a certain way to want to go out and do those things. That is not my default mode. I have to work myself up to that because I don't have that kind of sense of my place. If I hadn't made "Che," I don't think I would have made "The Knick," which I think is the last epic thing that I've done. "Che" was good for me in that sense. But knowing what goes into that, it has got to be something that I feel really electrified by, and those are just hard to come by. Then you've got to cast Timothée Chalamet. Oh, she's working on stuff. But is she working on another "Logan Lucky"? Well, we talked about it, but when that movie didn't perform well we had to put it away. We had it all set up. We had everybody willing. We were going to do the story of how Daniel Craig's character Joe Bang got into prison. We were going to do that whole story of how things got all fucked up. But you've got to have a hit movie if you want to make a sequel. Everybody wanted to do it. The story was pretty funny. But can you admit that since that movie opened, it has had a second life through streaming? Yeah, and this is why I'm desperate for Warner Bros. to license "The Knick" to Netflix, because I think "The Knick" on Netflix would really go over well. No. I don't think there's any going back to that. What else is your wife working on? Rebecca Blunt [Jules Asner's pen name] and I have a very professional relationship, and you're never supposed to ask a writer how it's going. No, because of Brad [Pitt]. I think they're always on the lookout for something to do together, and so this was, it sounds like, an unusual set of circumstances where Quentin decided he didn't want to do it and Brad asked him, "Can I show it to David?" and he said sure, and David read it and said let's do it. That seems to be what happened. That's not surprising at all. What's surprising is Quentin's agreeability. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. "Black Bag" is available On Demand and digital rental. It will be available to stream on Peacock starting May 2.
The Independent
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Steven Soderbergh: ‘Erin Brockovich wouldn't get made today… unless you get Timothée Chalamet'
I don't think audiences are even aware of who I am,' Steven Soderbergh tells me, with nary a hint of self-deprecation. And perhaps he's right. Soderbergh has been making feature films for more than 35 years, and very famous ones at that, but it's debatable whether the average person on the street could pick him out of a line-up. Many of the directors he came up alongside – Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, the Coen brothers – are now brands unto themselves. Soderbergh, with his slippery CV full of pop culture touchstones, strange tangents and admirable failures, is more of a question mark. Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Magic Mike, Ocean's Eleven, Out of Sight? You know 'em. The man behind them? Likely not. Since 1989's Sex, Lies, and Videotape made him the youngest solo filmmaker to win the Palme D'or at the Cannes Film Festival (he was, to your probable horror, just 26), he has danced between roles in and outside of Hollywood. He's been an Oscar darling (Traffic and Erin Brockovich both earned Best Picture nods in 2001, with Soderbergh taking home the Best Director prize for the former), a renegade experimentalist (Mosaic, a seven-hour murder mystery starring Sharon Stone, was released as an interactive mobile app in 2017), and cinema's shortest-lived retiree (he flashily announced in 2013 that the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra would be his final film – he's since directed 11 more.) But despite rebelling against expectations throughout his career, he's also a realist. 'Practically speaking,' the 62-year-old says, 'if you make a lot of movies that people don't go see, you don't get to make a lot of movies. And right now I really need to think about what kinds of movies I'll make going forward. I'm not interested in continually working on things where, if it comes up in conversation, people go… 'oh, did that come out?'' Soderbergh is in London, where he's editing his new film The Christophers, a black comedy about art forgery starring Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel. If all goes to plan, it'll be out later this year, making it the third Soderbergh film to be released within 12 months. Presence, a haunted house horror shot from the perspective of the ghost, arrived in January; Black Bag, a star-studded espionage thriller with Cate Blanchett, was released in March. Such a busy run would typically be cause for celebration, but the Soderbergh I meet today is anxious and slightly crestfallen. Despite sterling reviews ('immensely pleasurable,' went our critic Clarisse Loughrey; 'it's renewed my faith in modern cinema,' went Vulture 's Angelica Jade Bastién), Black Bag collapsed at the box office, and has grossed just $35m to date on a budget of at least $50m. Soderbergh, wearing thick black spectacles and dressed in a grey suit jacket over a fire alarm-red T-shirt, admits to being heartbroken. 'This is the kind of film I made my career on,' he explains. 'And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can't seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theatres – if that's truly a dead zone – then that's not a good thing for movies. What's gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?' Once the dust had settled on Black Bag 's opening weekend last month, its gross became a hot topic within the industry, he says. 'I know for a fact, having talked to somebody who works at another studio, that the Monday after Black Bag opened, the conversation in the morning meeting was: 'What does this mean when you can't get a movie like this to perform?'. And that's frustrating.' Today, Soderbergh is promoting Black Bag 's home video release – it's available on-demand now – not only because he believes in the film but because data has shown it'll make the bulk of its money outside of cinemas. 'Everybody at Focus Features [the film's distributor] has assured me that ultimately Black Bag will be fine and will turn a profit,' he says, 'but the bottom line is that we need to figure out a way to cultivate this audience for movies that are in this mid-range, that aren't fantasy spectacles or low-budget horror movies.' He sighs. 'They're movies for grown-ups, and those can't just go away.' I've made a lot of things where people don't see them when they come out, or they're not happy with them when they come out, then time goes on and they've gone, like… oh, actually… People even like Ocean's Twelve now! Punctuating all of this is that Black Bag is Soderbergh's best film in years. It's a tight, twisty 90-minute thriller in which Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play married spies Kathryn and George, one of whom may be a traitor involved in the theft of a dangerous malware device. The plot unfurls during two heated dinner-party set pieces, the pair inviting a collection of vaguely untrustworthy guests (among them a magnificently sly secret agent played by Tom Burke and a shifty psychiatrist played by Naomie Harris) to spill their guts about the theft. Surveillance cameras are hacked. Lie detectors are deployed. Everyone is ludicrously beautiful and outfitted in expensive leather. It's sexy, punchy, classic filmmaking. That few were convinced to leave their houses to actually see Black Bag feels depressingly significant. That said, Soderbergh has been here before. Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a psychological drama about a married man who records women discussing their sex lives, was made for just over a million dollars and transformed the then-unknown freelance film editor into a superstar. But his follow-ups – the offbeat biopic Kafka and the treacly coming-of-age tale King of the Hill – were bombs, and Soderbergh spent much of the Nineties in a tailspin. He describes The Underneath, a confused 1995 thriller starring Peter Gallagher, as a 'wake-up call'. The Underneath was traditionally told and directorially anonymous. He's since called it 'dead on arrival'. Moving forward, he'd emphasise sleek edits, chilly interiors and unconventional structures, albeit disguised by the presence of capital-M movie stars. Out of Sight (1998), his post-fallow period breakthrough, starred George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez as a thief and an investigator entangled in a romantic cat-and-mouse game. It didn't set the box office alight, but it earned enough industry goodwill to put him back on top. His subsequent run was creatively if not always commercially dizzying, though it contained some major box-office successes: the sharp and brutal Terence Stamp hitman movie The Limey (1999); ensemble drug tale Traffic (2000); the sunny legal drama Erin Brockovich (2000), which won Julia Roberts an Oscar; Ocean's Eleven (2001); his elegant remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (2002); the divisive, self-referential caper Ocean's Twelve (2004). Few of them, he thinks, would exist today. ' Erin Brockovich wouldn't get made today; Traffic wouldn't get made. Unless you get Timothée Chalamet who, god bless him, seems to be interested in doing different kinds of movies. But that window is getting smaller and smaller for filmmakers to climb through.' Since the early 2010s, Soderbergh has primarily worked within genre film, following a bad experience on a two-part, nearly three-hour-long biopic about Che Guevara starring Benicio del Toro. 'I watched people on that movie turn into zombies and roadkill because it was so stressful and physically difficult to get through,' he says with a rueful laugh. 'It cured me of wanting to make anything that you could label as 'important'.' He'd go on to make Magic Mike (2012), inspired by Channing Tatum's brief time working as a stripper, along with the eerily prescient pandemic film Contagion (2011) that everyone went back to during Covid, the pulpy thriller Side Effects (2013) and the frothy comedy Logan Lucky (2017), starring Tatum, Adam Driver and Daniel Craig. 'Genre films are the best and most efficient delivery system for any idea, because the audience shows up going, 'Oh, I'm going to see a comedy, or a horror, or a thriller', and you can pack it below the surface with all the things that you're really interested in talking about. Everybody wins.' This, though, has become trickier lately. Several of Soderbergh's recent projects – notably the crime drama No Sudden Move starring Don Cheadle, Jon Hamm and Julia Fox – have flown under the radar, others you may not realise exist. One of my recent favourites of his was Let Them All Talk, a spiky comedy in which a novelist (Meryl Streep) sets sail on the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner with two friends she's written about (Dianne Wiest and Candice Bergen). Released on the US streaming platform HBO Max in December 2020, it has – bizarrely – never come out in Britain. 'This is one of the results of this weird world we live in now,' he says. 'If you're in the UK, you can't see Let Them All Talk.' He says the explanation is boring – something about distribution deals between HBO and Sky – but that he is baffled by it. 'They paid good money for a film that isn't available to be seen in a market that seems really tailor made to see it,' he says, exasperated. 'That doesn't seem to me like a good business model.' His hope, with Black Bag at least, is that people will discover it over time. 'I've made a lot of things where people don't see them when they come out, or they're not happy with them when they come out, then time goes on and they've gone, like… oh, actually …' He smirks. 'People even like Ocean's Twelve now!' He thinks back to Out of Sight, which was by no means a big money-maker and briefly had many questioning whether Clooney and Lopez were going to make it as movie stars. 'Very quickly it was looked upon kindly and imbued with the qualities of being a hit when it actually wasn't a hit,' he remembers. 'So maybe two years from now people will go, 'Oh, Black Bag – that was a hit!' Soderbergh has always had a healthy cynicism when it comes to the film industry, and has often talked about walking away from filmmaking entirely even after he returned to directing following his brief quasi-retirement. So it's somewhat jarring to see him on the defensive today, and worried about whether there's a space for him in the future, or the films he likes to make. 'I've got a lot to think about,' he says, softly. 'I think The Christophers is going to be fine, but after that… I can't go make another movie whose target audience is the same as Black Bag 's. That's just not an option.' He says he's not angry, that the job of an artist is to adapt to the world around them, but that he has been destabilised. 'I don't need any more indie cred, you know what I mean?' he says. 'I need to make things that people go see.' After we say our goodbyes, I start to feel destabilised, too. If one of our greatest living filmmakers, who's always seemed so cocksure about his vision, is suddenly feeling professionally adrift… well, it can't be good for those of us who love movies.
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Inside George Clooney's ‘Good Night, and Good Luck' Broadway Opening Night With Jennifer Lopez and an ‘ER' Reunion
Sit seven rows from the stage at 'Good Night, and Good Luck' on Broadway, and you're bound to catch a whiff of prop cigarette smoke. Cigarettes — and the fading pulse of the Fourth Estate — took top billing during Thursday night's premiere at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York. For every celebrity with a vape in hand, journalists in the crowd absorbed George Clooney's call to arms under a sobering haze of scrutiny. More from Variety 'Good Night, and Good Luck' Review: George Clooney Makes an Impressive Broadway Bow in Taut Film-to-Stage Transfer 'Agatha All Along,' 'Baby Reindeer' and Cynthia Erivo Win Top Prizes at 2025 GLAAD Media Awards Springtime for Broadway: 2024-25 Season Readies to Close With High Hopes, High Prices and Huge Stars Among those in the room were Jake Tapper, George Stephanopoulos, Lesley Stahl, Chris Wallace, Rachel Maddow and CBS chief George Cheeks, seated alongside A-listers Drew Barrymore, Uma Thurman and Lorne Michaels. The red carpet, staged across from the theater's towering marquee, had its own spectacle. Thousands of fans lined the street as Jennifer Lopez, Clooney's 'Out of Sight' co-star, turned heads in a black gown paired with a billowing white cape. 'Good Night, and Good Luck' is a near-verbatim adaptation of the 2005 film of the same name, which chronicles Edward R. Murrow's televised takedown of Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare. Yet, a handful of pointed additions draw a clear line to the woes facing modern journalism. 'The play is more emotional than the film,' Grant Heslov, Clooney's longtime producing partner and co-writer, told Variety. 'And the ending takes a very different direction.' In a key exchange, CBS president William Paley delivers the familiar line: 'We don't make the news, we report the news.' But Paul Gross' Paley goes a step further than his film counterpart (played by Frank Langella), questioning the precedent Murrow's actions have set for the journalists who will one day sit in his chair. That tension foreshadows the show's 'Babylon'-esque finale: a rapid-fire montage of broadcast news' defining moments that flickered across the box TVs flanking both sides of the stage. It began with touchstones like the Moon Landing and Reagan's 'Tear Down This Wall' speech, but as it edged closer to the present, the footage grew louder, more chaotic, more sensationalized. 'It's not just journalism. It's a problem we're confronting in a capitalistic society, which I believe in, but at some point you have to figure out what the overall objective is,' said Clark Gregg, who plays Pinko-branded journalist Don Hollenbeck. 'Is it always profit? Is the truth always profitable? And shouldn't the truth be number one?' Clooney's play arrives at a critical juncture for traditional journalism. As the Trump administration vows to slash federal funding for PBS and NPR, legacy programs like 'CBS Evening News' battle for viewership in a fractured media ecosystem. 'We forget that when Murrow was broadcasting, there were like 40 million people watching,' castmate Andrew Polk noted. 'There were only a couple of channels, and he was the guy. That's unheard of today. So maybe that's part of the answer. Everything is so dispersed, people really don't know where to get the truth.' According to Gallup, 68% of Americans said they had a 'great deal' or 'fair amount' of trust in the media in 1972. In 2024, that number hit a record low of 31%. One could point to the systemic issue Murrow faces in the play: the erosion of the firewall between corporate and editorial. 'I'm lucky because CNN is owned by David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery, and they've been pretty great in terms of backing our ability to report the facts and the truth, even if it upsets whoever,' Tapper said. 'But there are other places right now that seem to be acquiescing and buckling. It's very concerning.' One of the night's most resonant moments came as Clooney's Murrow, in one of the actor's long, commanding monologues, debunked accusations of communist sympathies tied to a book dedication from British Socialist Harold Laski. 'He did not insist upon agreement with his political principles as a precondition for conversation or friendship,' he says in character. The crowd responded with a low, approving murmur. The line clearly hit a nerve. 'The best thing you can do is read both sides,' guest Richard Kind said. 'I hate Fox News, but I listen to it constantly. Go out and find the truth.' After the curtain fell on his Broadway debut, Clooney made a brief pass down the carpet, his pepper-black hair still neatly in place. When asked about his wife Amal Clooney's absence, he flashed a crooked smile and said, 'She's with the kids.' Inside the elegant afterparty held at the New York Public Library, Clooney celebrated his big night with well-wishers and friends, including 'ER' castmates Julianna Margulies, Anthony Edwards and Noah Wyle. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Noah Wyle (@therealnoahwyle) Scroll for more photos from the event: Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025 The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
