Yet in addition to the past, Jaws @ 50 is a doc that begins to evaluate one of these formative “modern” blockbusters with the reverence of hallowed myth. Plenty of younger filmmakers, from Steven Soderbergh to Guillermo del Toro, Cameron Crowe, and Emily Blunt are only too happy to offer their own glowing memories of growing up in Jaws’ crimson wake as talking heads. But the documentary itself intriguingly feels the need to contextualize when Jaws ruled pop culture, and when that culture could likewise be defined by an original movie.
“A lot of young people don’t know that,” Bouzereau explains. “And I think that if you tell someone, ‘Listen, you got to have this meal because it’s really amazing,’ as opposed to just ‘eat this,’ I think you’ll have two very polar opposite reactions.” So he leans into both Jaws’ importance and also how the world has changed since then.
“The thing that was also incredible about that time, and I’m a witness to that, is you would go into the movies without really knowing anything,” the filmmaker remembers. “There may have been a trailer, but that was the extent of it. There was no chat about it. When I saw Jaws, The Exorcist, Alien, I went in not knowing what those movies really were beyond just a shark and the poster, and the lobby cards. So there was an element of discovery that was really amazing.” Today it’s an open question whether folks still want to discover something new based purely on the artist making it or the concept—or whether that experience is itself becoming a history piece.
When we catch up with Bouzereau, it’s the week of Jaws’ 50th anniversary and we are at the culmination of what feels like a new cycle of romanticization for a movie that more than one of its stars assumed was never going to be remembered. In fact, only a few years ago Shaw’s son, Ian Shaw, wrote and starred in the Broadway production of The Shark Is Broken, the aforementioned comedy wherein Ian does a remarkable impersonation of his father and taps into how this movie’s creation has transcended movie nerd trivia. Nowadays, it’s a grand topic for fiction and speculation, akin to what (or who) really killed Mozart, or what truly motivated Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet?
“When I did my first doc on Jaws, a lot of the people who made the film were still around and that was the first time since they had made the movie that they were actually talking about it,” Bouzereau considers. “And I found myself across from David Brown, who with Richard Zanuck produced the film, and he said to me, ‘Listen, you are going to ask all of us the same questions, and we’re all gonna come to you with a different answer. This is going to be Rashomon.’”
By this Brown, and by extension Bouzereau, meant there will never cease to be new stories and prisms through which to examine the making of a film that became a landmark part of our culture. For the 50th, however, Bouzereau is seeking to elevate Spielberg’s version.