Spielberg and the Closed Door

A master filmmaker's warning about digital wizardry

I recently finished watching The Shark Is Still Working, a documentary about the making of Jaws. It’s fun for a lot of reasons, but I really sat up when Steven Spielberg had this to say in a 2005 interview:

If Jaws never existed except in the year 2005, I would’ve had the digital tools to have much more of the shark in the movie. Therefore I would have ruined much more of the movie.

An anti-digital rallying cry? Sure. But more importantly, it’s a reminder of a vital principle of storytelling.

Jaws gets its power from careful editing and suggestion – we see the girl at the beginning getting pulled under and dragged around by something huge and powerful, but we don’t see what the huge and powerful thing is. We judge the shark’s size by the barrels it drags behind it, and the thought of what’s strong enough to submerge that many barrels frightens us more than a clear look at the shark would. Only at the end do we see the beast itself, and then it appears at brief intervals before vanishing back into the depths. Other than the occasional fin, we never have a fix on where it is and what it’s doing. That’s more terrifying than jagged teeth and lifeless black eyes.

Less is more. Remember nothing is so frightening as the closed door, and let the reader/viewer do the work.