Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 65 SCREENPULL: (TOP) UNIVERSAL PICTURES; PHOTO: (BOTTOM) EVERETT In the police station, the camera glides from the shell-shocked boy- friend of the dead girl in the foreground, to the starchy old secretary ar- riving in the background, and follows her smoothly into the back room where Brody is typing up the report of the shark attack. "Spielberg is very clever with the way he uses the camera to take you from one plane of focus to another," says Yates. "And there's something about the char- acters who are cast around our principals: They feel authentic in a viv- id way—it feels like Spielberg walked into town and saw someone with real personality and presence and cast them in the movie." Yates has muted the sound so that he can talk, but it doesn't mat- ter, because every word, every sound effect and music cue is etched permanently in his memory. He actually hasn't seen the film in full since his teens, but that summer of '75, he went back time and time again. After a while, he stopped watching the screen, and started watching the audience instead. "I was intrigued. I would just observe the audience at key moments," he recalls. "Look," he pauses to point as an old sailor hovers into view. "This is the chap whose disem- bodied head we see later on, that wonderful moment when Richard Dreyfuss goes swimming underwater searching for clues, and suddenly comes across a severed head. "One of the reasons I think cinema will probably last forever is when you sit in a theater and watch that moment with 400 people, everyone jumps up in one scream of terror. There's something about being in the cinema, particularly with a film like Jaws, which has a lot of humor, a lot of hor- ror, a lot of thrills, that allows you to feel a communal experi- ence. Being in the theater somehow resonates and magni- fies those moments, makes them bigger and more special." We watch as the crowded ferry arrives in Amity for the Fourth of July weekend, and even with the sound down, Yates can hear the score in his head: "This is almost like a documentary, filming people pouring into this New England seaside town, with a beautiful piece written by John Williams, which I would play over and over again in my bedroom. Yeah, I was in deep." And for all his rhapsodies over the Jaws score, it's the use of sound that moves him more. "The moments of this movie that really stay with me are those quieter sections of the film," Yates explains. "For example, where Roy Scheider is on the beach watching and waiting for the shark to pop up, and you're just hearing the flap of [a flag] or the tumble and giggle of some kids running across the sand or just some slight splash Although production on Jaws was plagued by malfunctioning mechanical sharks, David Yates praised Spielberg's ability to turn lemons into lemonade: "Spielberg realized he had to play with the audience's imagination a lot more, by not revealing it," he says.