The Shark That Would Not Work

In 1974 Steven Spielberg, then in his twenties and with one theatrical feature behind him, took a film crew out to sea off Martha's Vineyard to shoot Jaws. He had insisted on the real ocean rather than a tank, because he wanted the horizon to be empty. The ocean responded by attacking his equipment.

The mechanical sharks, built to work in fresh water, did not cope with salt. They sank, jammed and corroded. The crew called the shark Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer according to the usual account, and Bruce spent a good deal of the shoot being repaired. The schedule, planned for a matter of weeks, ran on for months, and the budget went with it. Spielberg has spoken of fearing his career was over.

So he cut the shark out of the film. Not entirely, but far more than anyone intended. The audience sees yellow barrels that the harpooned shark drags under the water and cannot keep down. It sees a swimmer's legs from below. It hears John Williams's two-note theme, which became the shark in its absence. When the animal finally appears properly, deep into the film, Roy Scheider backs away from the chum line and says, in a line widely reported as his own ad-lib, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." The fear has been building for an hour on almost nothing.

Spielberg has been quoted many times saying that the shark not working was a godsend, and that it pushed him towards Hitchcock rather than towards monster films. Whatever his exact words on any one occasion, the point is sound. Suspense lives in what you do not see. A rubber shark on screen for ninety minutes would have become funny. A shark that is mostly an idea never does.

Seven years later Spielberg had another accident, smaller and funnier. In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones is cornered in a Cairo market by a swordsman in black who performs an elaborate display with his blade. A long fight, whip against sword, had been planned. The film was being shot in Tunisia, where many of the cast and crew fell ill, and Harrison Ford's illness is widely reported as dysentery. The usual story is that Ford suggested he simply shoot the man, and Spielberg agreed. Indy looks tired, draws his revolver and fires. It is one of the biggest laughs in the film, and it tells you more about the character in two seconds than the planned fight could have done in three minutes.

Notice what the two cases have in common. In each, the accident only became a happy one because a director recognised it and kept it. Bad weather and illness happen on every film. Mostly they produce delays and compromises that nobody admires. The skill is in seeing that the compromise is better than the plan.

The later accidents in this lore are more uncomfortable, because they involve real injury. In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), Aragorn finds what he believes are the remains of his hobbit friends and kicks an orc helmet in grief. Viggo Mortensen has said he broke toes on the kick, and the cry he lets out is genuine pain. Peter Jackson kept it. In Django Unchained (2012), Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the plantation owner Calvin Candie, slams his hand down on a dinner table, breaks a glass and cuts his palm. He went on with the scene, blood and all, and Quentin Tarantino used the take.

Both stories are told as proof of dedication, and both actors deserve the credit for staying in the scene. But it is worth noticing which stories the industry likes. An injury that ends up on screen becomes a legend and a marketing point. An injury that ends up in an accident report becomes nothing at all, or a lawsuit. A culture that celebrates the first kind of story is gently encouraging people to get hurt.

The happy accident, then, is never just luck. It is luck plus judgement, and sometimes luck plus somebody's foot. The judgement is the part worth learning, and the foot is the part worth not repeating.