When Steven Spielberg Buried A Crew Member Alive For A Dead Body Scene, Dropped A Severed Head & Other Tricks To Get Realistic Gory Scene For Jaws

Steven Spielberg is a director who goes to any lengths to achieve the vision he has for his films. He did the same while he was shooting for his horror flick, Jaws. The film was based on a novel by Peter Benchley and starrer Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody, Robert Shaw as Quint, Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper, and Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody.

While shooting for the film, Spielberg revealed what he did for the scenes to look authentic. In a scene where Chrissie’s body is found, the director shot it with a fake arm. But the prop did not give the chills he felt. So he decided to reshoot the scene with a better plan.

This time, he buried a female crew member in the sand completely, with only her hand left open to shoot for the scene. It felt real and authentic and had an impact that the fake hand could not give. Scroll down more to read what the director said about the shoot.

In an earlier interview, the director recalled filming Jaws and said, “I was pretty naive about mother nature, and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank. But had I done it all over again, I would have gone back to the sea because it was the only way for the audience to feel that these three men were cast adrift with a great white shark hunting them.”

He further revealed that the mechanical sharks did not work in water the way they did on land. Steven Spielberg recalled calling it a miracle and said, “The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock.”

After the sharks did not work, Spielberg decided to rewrite the script of Jaws, which became one of the greatest horror movies in the history of cinema. Another scene in the film had adding a severed head in a frame, even after the production ended. He had to use a large swimming pool to shoot for a scene when Matt Hooper investigates missing fisherman Ben Gardner’s sunken boat. During the scene, Spielberg used a prosthetic head to make it more engaging, terrifying the audience.

Jaws was one of the finest films coming from Spielberg. After the success of the first film, it was turned into a franchise that was commercially and creatively criticised. Even the director during a film festival said, “Making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick.”

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