This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film Jaws celebrates its 50th birthday on Friday — but its success wouldn’t have been possible without Valerie Taylor and her husband Ron, trailblazing underwater filmmakers and conservationists who filmed all the real-life great white shark scenes to go with footage of mechanical shark “Bruce”.
Valerie, 89, from Sydney, Australia, recalls the stuntman who was too scared to get in the water, the sharks that rewrote the script, and trying to restore the animal’s reputation after the film terrorised cinemagoers.
SOME FIN IN THE WATER
Spearfishing was a man’s sport, so I joined a club in Sydney in my 20s for the men — they were hunks! That’s where I met my husband Ron [he passed away in 2012]. He was very clever and made underwater housings for cameras. In the late 50s, Movietone News would buy black and white film for £25 an item. We started specialising in sharks — there was nobody else in Australia doing it at the time. When television became big, they would buy anything to do with sharks. I’ve never been afraid of them, even though I’ve been bitten four times. I’m only afraid of heights!
ACCESS HOLLYWOOD
In 1969, Ron and I were commissioned to play ourselves in a film called Blue Water, White Death. That put us in Hollywood. Soon, movie producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown sent us the galley proofs for a book called Jaws and asked us to see if we could make a movie out of it. Author Peter Benchley wrote the shark very well — though in real life, great whites don’t go around looking for people to attack.
YOU'RE GOING TO NEED A SMALLER BOAT
We filmed the live shark footage in South Australia, off Dangerous Reef, before Jaws went into production. We made two trips, and each one was a week long. The shark they wanted to use in the film was 24 feet long. Our sharks are an average of 12 to 14 feet long, so to make them look bigger, we used a half-sized shark-proof cage, a half-sized boat and a “half-sized” stuntman, Carl Rizzo, an ex-jockey who was 4ft 11in tall.
Da-dum… We baited the sharks and had three great whites swimming around. They were good performers, lifting their heads out of the water and rolling around in front of the camera. Bruce, the mechanical shark they used, was also very well done and looked good when cut into the real thing.
THE RELUCTANT STUNTMAN
Carl didn’t know how to dive. Ron and I tried to teach him, but he wouldn’t let go of the rocks. He was very reluctant to even put on his wet suit. He was terrified. I felt a bit sorry for him. The hand that comes out of the cage and touches the shark is mine, because Carl wouldn’t do it. The idea was for Carl to go down about 30 feet in the cage, standing in for Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper. Ron was in the water filming, and he looked up and thought, “Why isn’t Carl getting in the cage?” Suddenly, a shark went over the top of the cage, broke the steel bridle and was thrashing around. The winch broke off and everything came tumbling down. If Carl had been in the cage, he’d have been killed — his reluctance saved his life.
GOING SWIMMINGLY
The scene of the shark breaking up the cage was written into the film — it was better than anything they had in the script! Universal was so pleased with the footage that they flew us to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, for the rest of the shoot and we met everybody. Steven Spielberg was a very nice young man. Roy Scheider was the most curious — he never got tired of asking us about sharks.
BITING BACK
When I first saw Jaws, it was better than I expected, but I was horrified how the people in the movie theatre screamed. It demonised sharks because people seemed to think it was real — the general public were a bit stupid! We did every talk show, trying to tell people sharks don’t really behave like that. It’s a movie! You don’t go to New York expecting to see King Kong on the Empire State Building!
A JAWSOME JOURNEY
Still, it was a good job and the film was very well received. I occasionally sign posters sent from overseas — it absolutely blows my mind that people even care. Filming sharks wasn’t new to us, but we were surprised by the praise and adulation. That’s just what we did for a living!
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