Directors Take On Monstrous Classics

'Jaws 2,' 'Shadow Of The Vampire' Already Had Storied Histories

It's a daunting enough task for any director to make a film from scratch -- so imagine what it must be like to step into the shoes of filmmaker who has already established a vision for you.

'Jaws 2' And imagine further if those visionaries had the names of F.W. Murnau and Steven Spielberg. Do you yell "action," or do you "cut" yourself from the equation?

But that wasn't enough to stop directors E. Elias Merhige and Jeannot Szwarc from giving the characters of "Nosferatu" and "Jaws" their own creative spins. Szwarc did it with the monster sequel "Jaws 2" in 1978, and Merhige in 2000, with a unique chronicle of the making of the classic thriller "Nosferatu" with "Shadow of the Vampire" Both films are new on DVD.

What makes Szwarc's situation unique is that not only did he step into Spielberg's shoes, but he did so after the first director on the project, John Hancock, was fired. It was a daunting situation, to say the least.

"I was something like the 22nd director approached to take the job, and I think the only reason I got it was because I was the first one to say yes," Szwarc told me, musingly, in a recent interview. "I had nothing to lose."

Szwarc said Spielberg was actually interested in doing the project initially. However, his schedule on another film made it all but impossible. Oddly enough, Spielberg was already busy with "Jaws" co-star Richard Dreyfuss making another soon-to-be phenomenon, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

But even Spielberg's success with the first "Jaws" would not have likely exempted him from the attitudes towards film sequels in the 1970s.

"In those days sequels were not as accepted as they are now," Szwarc explained. "If do a sequel to 'The Godfather,' you can say you were exploring human nature. But if you do a sequel to 'Jaws,' the real reason was to make money and have a hit. We got a lot of bad press over that."

Fortunately, "Jaws 2" was not only a successful movie financially for Szwarc, it also ended up being a top-notch thriller and certainly not a knock-off of the first "Jaws."

Of course it helped that Szwarc had experience in creating a chilling atmosphere, born of the time he spent directing episodes on TV's "Night Gallery."

Szwarc had already known each other before "Jaws" and its sequel even came about.

"We had adjacent offices when we started together at Universal, and even shared a secretary for 10 months," recalled Szwarc. "Then he went on my little path and he went on his incredible highway."

But that's not to say Szwarc hasn't gone on to find his own niche. In addition to "Night Gallery" (which he directed 22 episodes of), he helmed the Christopher Reeve/Jane Seymour romantic classic "Somewhere in Time," as well as several television shows, most recently including "Ally McBeal," "J.A.G." and "The Practice."

Bringing 'The Vampire' Back To Life

The challenge for Merhige in making "Shadow of the Vampire" wasn't necessarily recreating the filming of 1922's "Nosferatu," but to lift the "shadows" of the legend and shed light on the silent classic by creating a fictional backstory.

Willem Dafoe and Director E. Elias Merhige on the set of 'Shadow of the Vampire' Masterfully played by Oscar-nominee Willem Dafoe, Max Shreck is not only portrayed as Nosferatu in the film, but as a vampire in real life.

Adding to the conflict, however, is another obsession -- that of Murnau himself (John Malkovich), who will see his film through to completion despite the obviously shocking taste of his lead player.

"I wanted to deal with the act of creation the act of obsession and the act of trying to create the most authentic film and in the desire of that, you make this Faustian bargain with nature and the darker aspects of life," said Merhige.

Of course, the biggest challenge with embellishing a real life event is to keep the purists of the genre happy. Merhige felt he had that solution from the get-go.

"It's funny, because I am one of those purists ? I loved 'Nosferatu,'" Merhige told me recently. "Murnau was a genius. And what I decided to do as purist approaching this film was to first take a lot of the camp out of the script and work along the mythological lines."

One of his approaches was to in a sense, make the camera a character in itself. And the results are stunningly effective.

"The camera is very much a character in this film," Merhige described. "So when we iris in, we drain the blood and the life out of the image and turn it into truly cinematic black and white. That kind of stuff really excited me."

While Merhige feels a connection to Murnau's obsessive behavior in the film, the obsession didn't happen when making "Vampire" itself. But while he didn't get that involved, he said did at one time in his career happen.

"When I made my first film 'Begotten' (1991) which was feature length black and white silent film, I gained personal experience as a silent film director," Merhige said. "It really was like a fever that took over me and nothing else really existed except the making of that film. Then once the film was completed, it was like the storm cloud had passed.

"To this day, when I see the film, it still feels as though I didn?t make it. It has such a power and soul inside of it that it has taken on its own life.

Because of that, Merhige said, "Shadow of the Vampire" ultimately became a way to laugh at himself.

"It shows that there is something about directing that is all consuming, and I just wanted to take a different vantage point and look at the nature of the passion of a director," he said.

Catch up with Tim Lammers on these recent @ The Movies interviews: