
Show Notes
Episode 130 – Laurent Bouzereau on “Jaws at 50” In this special episode, I catch up with the legendary documentary filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau to discuss his latest project, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story, premiering Friday 11th July at 8pm on National Geographic and streaming the same day on Disney+. Laurent, whose behind-the-scenes work on Jaws, Indiana Jones, and Spielberg has inspired me for years, reflects on the challenges of revisiting Jaws 30 years after his original 1995 documentary. We talk about the new angles he explored, from Spielberg’s emotional recollections and rare 8mm footage to fresh perspectives from filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Jim Cameron, and Jordan Peele. Recorded on the fly on Martha’s Vineyard during the Jaws 50th celebrations, this short but meaningful conversation touches on the legacy of Jaws, the humanity behind the production, and how Laurent’s approach has shifted over the years. Also in this episode: An update on my Joe Alves documentary and the incredible support from GoFundMe donors A mention of my new two-part article on ILM's animation legacy: ILM Evolutions: Animation from Rotoscoping to Rango – now live on ILM.com Linktree
Support the podcast
This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning
Watch more on YouTube: Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries
All my links
More from The Filmumentaries Podcast
John Knoll is Chief Creative Officer at ILM and visual effects supervisor on The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first time Mando and Grogu have been on a cinema screen. He describes two forces pulling against each other. It had to feel like it came from the same group of people who made the series, which meant keeping the handcrafted approach — puppets, creatures in rubber masks, motion control miniatures, stop motion.
This one's a bit different. It's shorter, and it's about a film that doesn't exist yet. Christopher Jacobsen is an actor and filmmaker, and full disclosure, the brother of one of my good friends. He's trying to get a documentary made about Daragh O'Malley, who played Sergeant Patrick Harper in Sharpe.
Sean England has been at Skywalker Sound since 1993. He didn't arrive as a foley artist. He came in on the technical side, in the machine room and the transfer department, back when everything went to analog tape and film was spliced on a Kem. He calls those years his film school. He watched sound get made from one end of a picture to the other, then became a foley recordist, then a mixer, then went through the glass and became the artist.
Ep 154 — Wolf Kahler — Colonel Dietrich in Raiders of the Lost Ark
Brad Fiedel wrote one of the most recognisable pieces of music in film history, and he did it on a drum machine, a sequencer and a keyboard chained together with a computer ribbon cable, before MIDI was really a thing. The famous lurch in the rhythm is him hitting a button by hand and deciding the wobble was better than the fix. Years later Henry Mancini rang up wanting to record it with a big band, and the man writing the lead sheet couldn't work out the time signature.