Steven Soderbergh has spent four decades treating the container of a movie as seriously as its contents — financing his own films, shooting features on an iPhone, slipping releases onto platforms that did not exist when he started. His latest experiment turns that restlessness on film criticism itself, arguing that the deepest way to understand a movie is not to be told how it works but to be walked, image by image, through the act of making it.

As Deadline first reported, the project is called Production 02074, an app built around a single film: Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws, the picture that sent a young Soderbergh back to the theater 31 times and pointed him toward directing. Rather than a video essay, it presents a still image from each of the shoot’s 143 production days, paired with Spielberg’s own notes from the production logs and Soderbergh’s running analysis of the choices on screen. You scroll through the film in the order it was shot, reconstructing scenes in your head as you go.

The format is pure Soderbergh: show, don’t tell. He lingers on the unglamorous exposition — Mayor Vaughn’s denials, the Brody family dinner table — to demonstrate how Spielberg smuggles information into behavior rather than dialogue. The model is partly borrowed from the lavish Taschen volumes on Kubrick that treat a single production as a text worth close reading, but Soderbergh’s version is interactive, sequential and, by design, cheap. ‘This is 51 years of study and experience, so that’s 50 cents a year,’ he says of the price. ‘Look at it that way.’

What gives the app its charge is that it is also an argument about endurance. Soderbergh dwells on the legendarily cursed shoot — the mechanical shark that kept dying, the six weeks Spielberg spent doubting the movie was physically possible — and sets it beside other directors who bet everything on a vision the system did not yet trust: George Lucas wrestling Universal over American Graffiti, Francis Ford Coppola self-financing Megalopolis, James Cameron paying out of pocket to finish The Terminator. Spielberg took part himself, supplying context about his state of mind and, in an epilogue, calling the experience of revisiting it ‘strangely cathartic.’

Production 02074 went live on June 20, exactly 51 years to the day after Jaws reached theaters, priced at $24.99 with proceeds going to an animal charity; it is on the Apple store now, with an Android version due later in the week.

There is a quiet symmetry in who is doing the telling. Disney once shut down Soderbergh’s own would-be blockbuster, an unmade Star Wars film with Adam Driver, before it could shoot — and now the director the studio waved off has built, on his own terms and his own dime, the definitive study of the blockbuster that started the modern industry.

Tags: Steven Spielberg, steven soderbergh, film-criticism, Jaws, Production 02074, self-distribution