SHOT-FOR-SHOT

In January of 2012 the legendary production designer Joe Alves did a publicity tour for an anniversary release of JAWS. Bart Oosterhoorn got 15 minutes to talk to the man who had worked on his favorite film of all time. So little time, so many questions. When their talk was cut off by a British PR woman, the line stayed open for a few seconds and Bart could hear Alves say to her how much he enjoyed talking to a real fan, “with millions of questions.”

We're you involved in the restoration process for the Blu-ray release of JAWS?

No, not at all because that's all really postproduction. Designers don't get involved with that. From what I understand they pretty much went off the negative. It was sort of a frame-by-frame based-on-the-negative reconstruction and as you probably know, it's so difficult to shoot around water because you have such different color change from one side of the boat to the other. So film correction on the original was difficult, and I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure Steven was happy with it - that it's gonna have even much more clarity than when we originally shot it.

JAWS started out as a blockbuster, but over the years it has also gained critical praise as well. Now it's status as a classic is unquestioned. What in your opinion are its main qualities? What makes JAWS a classic?

[pauses] I think it's become a classic because if you look at all of the action movies or horror movies, it's the simplicity of it. I can compare it to PSYCHO: a very simplistic movie and a big success as a frightening movie. JAWS is frightening because it's credible. In other words, the shark is just larger than most sharks and the shark is more persistent in going after these guys, which I don't think sharks do. But the idea that it could happen to you… You could be out in the water and this huge shark – maybe not 25 feet but 16 feet – comes along… You'd be lunch! So I think that's it and I think the direction, the simplicity of it, the three guys. Also, I think the editing was excellent. So, if anything, I think it lives longer because it doesn't have a lot of gimmicks in it.

I was 15 when JAWS premiered and I saw it twelve times that year. I've been a fan ever since. I consider JAWS a flawless string of perfect scenes.

It's amazing how well organized we were planning it, because we had to. When Steven and I sat down, when he had a lunch break, I did all the storyboards shot-for-shot. Every scene that we needed a shark, we had to know which shark to use - left to right, right to left. So it was sketched and Steven was extremely conscientious about doing that, which a lot of directors aren't. You do sketches and then they get on the set and they do whatever they want, but here we had to have control. It was a very disciplined shoot and for a young director I think that was very commendable.

In recent years I've put together an animatic, which you couldn't have done 30 or 40 years ago. I take the last few minutes and I do a shot-for-shot with the sketches. I show the movie and give lectures and stuff.

The many problems with the production are well documented. I've read Matt Taylor's Memories from Martha's Vineyard.

Oh yes! Is that good?

Yes, beautiful. I got the de-luxe edition.

Oh, you did - the hard cover? When I'll see you sometime I'll sign it because I was pretty involved in that book.

Martha's Vineyard. You discovered the island…

[chuckles] Somebody had already discovered it about 1600 or something. It's funny because my parents were born in Portugal, so when I came to the island – well, the Portuguese came ten minutes after the English. But I did discover it as a location. I scouted pretty much the whole East Coast because Peter Benchley didn't have a specific place in mind. He had never been to the Vineyard. I ended up on the Vineyard and it was wintertime. It just worked so perfectly: the beautiful Edgartown village with the white picket fences and then Menemsha where I took Quint's shack. Just perfect. I've told people before: I thought of David Lean when I saw Menemsha for the first time and I said: This is a David Lean set. He would have built the set because it had all of this character. So it worked out well.  

Unfortunately, although the water was perfect, in the summertime we had a density of boats. It took a lot of time to wait for the boats to get out of the way because Steven didn't want to see anything out there. He wanted them to be totally alone. So today, with CGI we could have blipped out the boats… That's why in JAWS 2 [as associate producer] I took all the water and shark stuff out to Florida where we had more visibility without boats, but the Vineyard was just absolutely perfect for the atmosphere.

Did I understand correctly that you did a final shoot in the swimming pool of [editor] Verna Fields?

Yes. I left the island and Steven had me direct a couple of things before I left. We got back here and we had some stuff to do and Steven said: You know, we could get another scream here. So we got somebody - nobody at the studio knew - to steal the head out of the make-up department. I had somebody build the boat in my back yard and we took it to Verna's swimming pool. We also shot something in my back yard, my driveway, with the shark hitting the boat when they are singing Show me the way to go home-boom-BOOM,  where you see the shark breaking the hull of the boat. This was an extremely small movie. Towards the end it was just a handful of people doing these things.

3D is a huge success at the moment and this is the third wave of 3D cinema. After the golden age of the early fifties there was a second 3D craze in the early eighties in which you directed JAWS 3-D. How would you compare techniques then and now?

We worked with very old technology. Today it would be a lot cleaner and a lot easier to do. I did that to take the onus off the third movie. I had no idea at the time what I was gonna be up against technically, but it was a nightmare [sighs].

What do you think now - with the state of the art technology. Would JAWS be a 3D movie? Do you think it adds much?

I had a discussion last year with a lot of 3D people. The only thing is: you could never get the shark out into the audience because it has a dorsal fin and you'd get the head out but you can't get it past the dorsal fin. The dorsal fin would hit the aperture, the frame, and that would send the shark back again. So you can only bring snakes or spears or things like that… I don't know - you can get a lot of visual effects and that's what I wanted out of JAWS 3. I wanted the depth of the water, the depth behind, but the studio kept forcing me to try and throw things out at the audience and I didn't have that much control. But I think 3D is fine for some films… I don't think JAWS needs it and I hope they don't decide to make a new one anyway.

It is mentioned on the internet that, compared to movies like STAR WARS, JAWS doesn't have a fan following, that meets at conventions and such - the reason being: JAWS has no recognizable characters. I don't believe that's true. What is your view?

Well they make a lot of shark stuff, but Lucas is very clever because he owned all the rights to all the toys and so you've got a ton of things that you can make toys of. I think that's where the fan base is. The kids want all these STAR WARS toys and that would make it a more commercial thing. In JAWS you have a shark and you know a shark's a shark. I think probably that's one of the factors.

The Jawsfest at Martha’s Vineyard. Is that a small thing?

I understand it's gonna be huge. I'm leaving next week, I'll be there next Wednesday. It's in connection with Universal, they’re having their 100th anniversary and [the launch of] the Blu-ray. So [screenwriter] Carl Gottlieb is going to be there and some of the actors. But unfortunately a lot of people are gone: [producer] Richard Zanuck just died, Shari Rhodes [location casting] is gone, [producer] David Brown died some time ago, [editor] Verna Fields is dead, the two main actors other than Dreyfuss are gone, so [sighs] it's just Carl Gottlieb, myself and a couple of other people talking about it.

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This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.