Jaws film noir

The reasoning behind my storyboard was due to me recreating a scene from Jaws into a film noir setting with a film noir tone and take of the movie. In this particular scene of Jaws, I had the main character, Roy Scheider, converted from a cop to a detective. Through this, I then reworked more of the story by saying that Roy was called on a case to investigate the attack on the beach to see if the beach should be shut down for safety reasons as the city wants the beach to remain open.

The common tropes of a film noir usually involve a grayscale setting with a rainy or damp atmosphere. There is usually shady people throughout the story and information gathering by the protagonist engages in multiple questionings, along with twists in the story that the viewer may not see coming since the story may seem straightforward. The detective usually comes to a conclusion at the end which usually is very understandable but no one would think twice that it was the correct conclusion beforehand.

In my storyboard, Roy starts gathering information by investigating the raft washed up on the beach. Roy then decides to ask some locals until he stumbles upon the guy who lost his dog to the shark. The two engage in a conversation but the man is unwilling to talk until Roy asks if his dog was missing. The information Roy receives from the man then eventually leads him to the woman who lost her son to the shark. After asking her, she tells Roy, causing a flashback to occur. She tells that on the foggy day at the beach, when Alex went into the water with the other kids, things seemed alright until she noticed the commotion picking up. Everyone ran to the edge of the water and the kids all ran back to the shore. All except for Alex who never returned.

My motivation behind making Jaws a film noir is due to the incident of the shark attacks and the conflict between Roy and the city wanting to keep the beach open. I thought that in a setting like this, Jaws would be a very interesting movie to see if it was less about hunting the shark and working against closing a beach that was a danger to public safety that the city wants to remain open. If it was not just a scene and it was the whole film, Jaws would probably be able to fill in the role of film noir if directed like one. It would engage in tension between the city and a Roy where people would be unwilling to help or provide little information and the city also making an attempt to stop Roy from completing the case. I guarantee that a film like this would be an interesting take on an old time classic and I would recommend that if a remake would be in production that it could put this new style in it to make it stand out from the original.