Steven Soderbergh Launches ‘Jaws’ Tribute App ‘Production 02074’, Creates Inventive Format For Spielberg’s Making-Of Shark Tale

EXCLUSIVE: Steven Soderbergh was determined to publish his inventive work Production 02074 exactly 51 years after the launch of its subject, Steven Spielberg‘s 1975 classic Jaws. To do justice to the making of the movie that swung him toward an Oscar-winning filmmaking career, Soderbergh had to build out an app specifically to accomplish what is an inventive compilation of still images from the film along with Spielberg’s observations written in the production log and Soderbergh’s analysis of why Jaws is a singular cinematic accomplishment that moved him so much as a youth that he saw it 31 times in a theater and probably threefold that many times since.

It was touch-and-go, but Soderbergh got the app up in the Apple Store late on June 20, with an app for Android tablets he expects will be later this week. Relieved, Soderbergh and his wife relaxed and watched a movie — Jaws, yet again.

Soderbergh is an unassuming genius maverick who patently dismisses the suggestion that his 1989 Sundance sensation sex, lies, & videotape did for indie film what Jaws did to usher in the mainstream blockbuster. With Production 02074, Soderbergh has created a formula to dissect great films that shows us instead of tells us. Readers scroll through the images in scenes as Spielberg shot them on each of the staggering 143 production days. If you’ve seen Jaws as often as I have, you find the dialogue playing itself inside your head as you eyeball the photos. There are observations and anecdotes provided by Spielberg along the way, many of which were new to me.

The app costs $24.99, with all the proceeds going to an animal charity. It’s a true labor of love, considering what Soderbergh paid to have the app designed and built, as well as all the hours he spent dissecting Spielberg’s production logs and getting the images. Soderbergh also devotes the conclusion of the app to the lessons he learned from Jaws, and there is an epilogue written by Spielberg as he relived his stint as moviemaking’s Job, making a movie where everything that could possibly go wrong did and still turned out a movie that, along with Star Wars, ushered in the movie blockbuster. It is a primer for any aspiring moviemaker or film buff.

“There was a lot of discussion about how to do this and what I decided was if it was a book put out by a university press, it would cost twice that,” Soderbergh said. “This is 51 years of study and experience, so that’s 50 cents a year. Look at it that way. It’s a film school and an app.”

DEADLINE: At Cannes you paid tribute to John Lennon with your documentary based on his final interview and aided by AI. Now you have published Production 02074, your tribute to Steven Spielberg’s game-changing film Jaws. There have been numerous books written about the difficulties making of that classic. With Production 02074, you have created a lane for yourself by focusing on the production logs and doing it as an app and not a traditional book. The images of each shooting day flicker by, and the dialogue is so ingrained in my brain that it played back in a most satisfying way. What compelled you to tell Spielberg’s journey this way, where you don’t tell us as much as show us with all these visuals?

STEVEN SODERBERGH: I probably inherited the idea from my father, a college professor whose specialization was education and who taught teachers. The idea of passing along knowledge was something he believed in strongly. I must have swallowed that. I learned not only from watching things but from reading books about movies — whether they be about filmmakers or by filmmakers. When I was growing up, there wasn’t as much material to access about how things were made as there is now, but clearly that’s what led to me saying yes to the first quote-unquote lecture I ever gave about directing. That was at NYU in 2007. And over the next few years, I gave various versions of this lecture. As I say in the introduction, I stopped because it wasn’t really evolving.

I felt a compulsion to memorialize this film somehow, but it needed a hook and I didn’t have one. It didn’t have a spine. I thought, “Well, the best hook I can think of is the movie that made me want to make movies.” I started slowly working on an analysis of Jaws, but that didn’t feel complete. And then I read Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the making-of book that Taschen published. I thought it was stunning. It was extremely granular in a way that I enjoy, and what my thought while I was reading it was that it would be cool to be able to see what he’s describing as they shot that day. It would be cool to be able to see it when he says, “This was the shot that we did 15 takes of.” I had some discussions with people that make those kinds of books, and the cost was prohibitive, say, for somebody who’s an aspiring filmmaker. The whole idea is to pass my experience, my analysis along to people in a way that’s really accessible. Making a giant coffee table book that costs $2,500 felt counter to the impulse that made me want to do it in the first place. I want anybody to be able to buy this and get whatever they are going to get from it. So that’s when it shifted from a traditional book to an app, where you can scroll through the images and get a sense of what [Spielberg] had to go through to put this movie on screen.

DEADLINE: There are many accomplishments in Jaws. What to you are the most memorable?

SODERBERGH: An interesting thing to me is that despite all of its bravura filmmaking technique, what makes the film resonate for people to this day is the character work. Other than the pure staging aspects, what I continue to marvel at are the scenes that to me are the model of how to present exposition. The two scenes with Mayor Vaughn [Murray Hamilton], the first one on the ferry and the second one in front of the defaced billboard. Those are just clinics in how you get information across to an audience. They feel utterly real, and you don’t feel like you’re being fed information.

He stages them each in largely one shot, with characters and movement that allows you to do some editing of your own while you’re watching the scene, instead of trying to point you toward something. I talk about that in the learning section of [this app]. How, if you’ve got expositional scenes, I always feel like the fewer cuts the better, to try and undercut the idea that the audience is being fed information by taking a less-choppy approach to covering the scene. You mask the fact that you’re feeding them exposition. Take the scene with Brody and his son at the dinner table, which is just spectacular. So simple and utterly real and funny and heartfelt. Those are the things that I marvel at. That in the midst of this mayhem and chaos of the production, that Spielberg is still focused on the characters and the story. Because he knows we can do all the technical stuff in the world, but if you don’t get the story and the characters correct, nobody cares.

DEADLINE: That is also evident in the scene where Hooper, Brody and wife Ellen are at the dinner table when they decide to cut open the shark to see if it ate the Kintner boy. They’re drinking, and there’s a lot of information about the predatory nature of sharks and Hooper’s reverence for them. We were not walloped over the head with exposition, but it leads us to what Hooper and Brody do with Quint that prompts the latter’s monologue about floating in the water after the USS Indianapolis sank, as hundreds of sharks tore his fellow sailors to pieces. That monologue is the knockout punch you didn’t see coming. People have criticized the animatronic shark, that it looked fake. I never cared as I watched Jaws, over and over. My payoff was always getting to those three guys on the boat. You write that teaching what you’ve  learned is different than attempting to teach you something by showing it, allowing for you to filter your own taste and talent as a filmmaker because that can’t be taught. It fits in the way you present how every shooting day unfolds. This formula you created, this app, could lend itself to a different study of classics from The Godfather on down. Was realizing that your lightbulb moment on this project?

SODERBERGH: Yeah, it was. But also, it was a really positive thing to do. Spending time to put yourself inside of a piece of art that you love and that inspired you. I loved doing it. Once I started thinking about, “OK, this is how I’m going to do it” … though there was no shortcut, it never felt like you’re grinding your way through it.