DGA Monthly

8 I D G A M O N T H L Y In a chilly suite at the De Lane Lea sound studio in central London, David Yates is reliving the day that changed his life. Steven Spielberg's Jaws is playing on a big TV screen, and as the camera drifts across partygoers around a campfire on Amity beach to settle on the girl who will become the shark's first victim, Yates is transported back to the ABC Cinema in St. Helens in the summer of 1975. "I was 12 years of age," he recalls. "I'd read about this movie coming to the U.K. It was the first time I was aware of the feeling of an event around a film. People would queue around the block. My dad was coming home for a few days from the sea, so I went to see it with him. It just blew me away. I came out of that cinema and I just turned to my dad and said, 'I'm going to make films.'" His mother bought him his first camera shortly thereafter, and he made his first film at 13. Four decades later, with four Harry Potters and two Fantastic Beasts behind him and the next in preproduction, Yates is firmly established as a leading purveyor of movie magic. But it all started with this film, whose one big special effect was a source of continual headaches. "Even at age 12, I knew it was a plastic shark," he laughs. "But the film had been so thrilling and involving up to that point, you forgave all of that and went with it, because you were fully invested." Spielberg had to use his own brand of magic when his beast proved to be not quite so fantastic. "When the shark didn't work, Spielberg realized he had to play with the audience's imagination a lot more, by not revealing it. While they were waiting for the weather, or the light, or for the shark to work, he'd improvise with the actors. A couple of months later, I read The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb, and this making a virtue out of necessity inspired me even more to become a filmmaker." For the adolescent Yates, the resonance of Jaws was personal and specific. "My father was a seaman, and he was away often. From my earliest memories, the sea was part of my life in some way; it was the reason my father wasn't always there, so I was intrigued by the portrayal of men in Jaws. Suddenly this hugely popular film arrived, and its leading character wasn't this regular hero—he felt imperfect, out of his depth, trying to keep order in this chaotic New England town. I found it fascinating that this movie, which was reaching so many people, was built around someone who felt real and fallible." Yates didn't only recognize his father in Chief Brody, played by Roy Scheider. Robert Shaw's shark-hunter Quint was just like the kind of salty seadog he saw at the swimming pool in nearby Liverpool, a great port city whose public baths seemed to attract all the old sailors. This sense of authenticity, of multi-layered realism, is what strikes Yates afresh. It's achieved, he says, by an elegant combination of casting and camerawork. "You've got several planes of story in one shot: Roy Scheider on the phone chatting with someone, in the background his wife dealing with a cut on their son's hand, having conversations at exactly the same time," he notes, "so you get this wonderful feeling of three- dimensionality to the drama. You're aware that the foreground story is surrounded by multiple stories, all with their own reality. It puts you right into that credible world." In the police station, the camera glides from the shell-shocked boyfriend of the dead girl in the foreground, to the starchy old secretary arriving 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 characters who are cast around our principals: They feel authentic in a vivid way—it feels like Spielberg walked into town and saw someone with real personality and presence and cast them in the movie." This summer marks the 50 th Anniversary release of Steven Spielberg's classic, Jaws. We look back at how the film influenced David Yates. S C R E E N I N G R O O M Blood in the Water In this reprint from DGA Quarterly, we rewind to 2019 when Director David Yates waxed nostalgic on the mix of horror, humor and ingenuity in Steven Spielberg's Jaws. by Adam Dawtrey Yates praises the fine balance between Spielberg's rigorous architecture, his carefully and elegantly constructed frames, blocking and camera moves, and the hint of the unexpected and improvised that's always there. (Credit: Everett)

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