DGA Monthly

A U G U S T 2 0 2 5 I 9 Yates has muted the sound so that he can talk, but it doesn't matter, 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 disembodied 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 horror, a lot of thrills, that allows you to feel a communal experience. Being in the theater somehow resonates and magnifies 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 in the water," he adds. "It's very lo-fi. There's a tendency nowadays to overproduce sound, in big movies particularly." Yates pauses to murmur an appreciative "yeeaah" as the shark bites off a dangling leg—"something wonderfully evocative about how the movie uses sound in the simplest way." Again and again, it's Spielberg's meticulous, elegant attention to realism, to building a multi-layered, three-dimensional sense of Although production on Jaws was plagued by malfunctioning mechanical sharks, David Yates marveled at Spielberg's ability to turn lemons into lemonade. (Credit: Everett) — continued on page 10 authenticity, that Yates comments upon. On re-viewing Jaws 44 years after it became the first summer blockbuster, Yates is struck by just how unlike today's VFX-heavy studio behemoths it is. "That's fascinating," Yates comments, as Brody, Quint and Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss) set sail for the third act's climactic encounter with the shark, and the action shrinks to a chamber piece. "It's literally just these three men on this small boat, and their tensions. It makes you wonder, would this film get made today? I mean, of course if Spielberg was directing it, but in no way does it perform to the mathematics of a big conventional blockbuster today, where things have to expand outwards and outwards evermore." "This is why I wanted to make films," he explains. "What's really encouraging, coming back to Jaws after many, many years, is that it really isn't about the special effects, it's about a very primal human story. What is it that draws audiences and compels them to come back again and again to view the work that we do? It starts and finishes with strong primary emotional arcs of characters whom we feel we can believe in. That's it, and all the rest is sparkle. We lose that at our peril, I think, as storytellers, especially in a world that gets evermore competitive, as movies become bigger and bigger and we're all trying to outdo each other. We'll lose our way if we lose the fact that it's fundamentally about characters that we care about, and a sense of reality." It's a lesson he has carried through to his own work. In a way, Yates has had two careers—first, as the Director of urgent, award- winning TV dramas, such as Sex Traffic, State of Play and The Way We Live Now, and then as the helmsman of J.K. Rowling's extravagant wizarding world. The bridge between the two is built upon the meticulous, immersive attention to the authentic human experience— that of the characters, and that of the audience—which he first learned from Spielberg. "There is a reality to this world in Jaws," observes Yates, "in the little things like the casting of the background world, and in the mixture of humor and pathos and horror. Those elements coexist quite closely together in the real world —quite scary moments are often attached to gallows humor. Of course, this is all wrapped up in a stirring adventure as well, with John Williams' beautiful music. But at heart, the social realism aesthetic is what I love, and if you can heighten things and make them feel more immersive, then all the better."

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