It’s been 30 years since we first heard the iconic bass drift up from the deep. Filmink’s Drew Turney talks to original production designer Joe Alves about the hands-on production of the first blockbuster that almost never was.
We don’t often consider the movie that levelled Old Hollywood and changed everything an independent project. Even though it was bankrolled by Universal however, veteran production designer Joe Alves remembers a distinctly hands-on production.
‘I did a little bit of everything,’ he says. ‘I did early sketches from the book before we had the script, researched the shark with marine biologists and did the initial clay model. We had no real art department so I found the engineer and draftsmen to work on the details and a sculptor to do a full-sized model. I even went off and scouted locations by myself. It was a pretty small operation and Steven wasn’t even sure if he was going to do the movie at first.’
Click here to read the rest of this story.