{"id":138135,"date":"2025-09-12T16:57:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T16:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/138135\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T16:57:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T16:57:07","slug":"steven-spielberg-reflects-on-jaws-at-50-i-thought-my-career-was-over-steven-spielberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/138135\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Spielberg reflects on Jaws at 50: \u2018I thought my career was over\u2019 | Steven Spielberg"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before Jaws became a cinematic classic, and the very first American \u201csummer blockbuster\u201d, director Steven Spielberg<\/a> thought the 1975 film would be the last one he would be allowed to make.<\/p>\n

Spielberg, who was just 26, had decided to shoot his second film, a thriller about a killer shark, on location on the east coast island of Martha\u2019s Vineyard.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hubris was that we could take a Hollywood crew, go out 12 miles into the Atlantic Ocean, and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark. I thought that was going to go swimmingly,\u201d Spielberg told an audience of journalists at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles<\/a> this week, where an exhibit marking the 50th anniversary of Jaws is opening on Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws<\/a>, because everybody was saying to me, \u2018You are never going to get hired again,\u201d Spielberg recalled.<\/p>\n

Jaws, the Academy Museum\u2019s first exhibit focused on a single film since the museum opened in 2021<\/a>, traces the film\u2019s colorful struggles, including the many mechanical failures of the titular prop shark, along with the artistic collaborations that led to its ultimate success. Film editor Verna Fields won an Oscar for her work shaping the film\u2019s legendary scenes of suspense. So did composer John Williams, whose ominous \u201cdun-dun\u201d theme song has become one of the most recognizable movie soundtracks. The $260.7m success <\/a>of the film with domestic audiences also launched Spielberg\u2019s career as one of the most influential American directors.<\/p>\n

But in 1974, as the production was filming on Martha\u2019s Vineyard, it was far from clear that the movie would secure a place in Hollywood history \u2013 or even that the film would actually be finished at all. Spielberg\u2019s attempt to shoot on the actual ocean soon put the production massively over budget and behind schedule, he said, due to constant problems with \u201cthe shark, the weather, the currents, the regattas\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never seen so much vomit in my life,\u201d Spielberg said of people\u2019s queasiness at sea, to laughter. \u201cI haven\u2019t! In the six months out to sea, I have never seen so many people getting sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spielberg himself \u201cnever got seasick\u201d, he said \u2013 \u201cand I think that is only because I had the weight of this production on my shoulders and I didn\u2019t have time to get sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sole surviving full-scale model of Bruce, the shark from the film, at the Academy Museum. Photograph: Chris Pizzello\/Invision\/AP<\/p>\n

Filming on the ocean caused non-stop challenges, many of which are highlighted in the new exhibit, which focuses on the value of artistic problem-solving. At one point, a speedboat pulling the Orca, the small boat the main characters use to hunt the great white shark, went too fast and pulled out the boat\u2019s planking, sending John Carter, the film\u2019s Academy Award-winning sound director, into the water, his recorder still in his hands.<\/p>\n

While the Amity Island Regatta is a key plot point in the film, the actual boat races around Martha\u2019s Vineyard caused endless headaches for Spielberg\u2019s wide-lens ocean shots.<\/p>\n

\u201cI cannot tell you how nerve-racking it is to get the cameras in position. The tides are slack. We don\u2019t have currents dragging our anchors. The picture boat moves away from the Orca, moves away from the electrical barge, and we\u2019re finally ready to shoot. Everybody\u2019s ready. And all of a sudden, the first white sail appears on the horizon, followed by another one, followed by 25 white sails, little regattas going through the frame,\u201d Spielberg said.<\/p>\n

Because it was 1974, there were no simple tools to erase the sails from the film post-production. \u201cSo, most of the time, we just waited,\u201d Spielberg said. \u201cPeople played cards. A lot of people vomited.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there were all the technical problems with the three animatronic sharks, which Spielberg nicknamed Bruce, after his lawyer, Bruce Ramer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A replica of the Orca fishing boat at a press preview at the Academy Museum. Photograph: Chris Pizzello\/Invision\/APA woman seen through a set of great white shark jaws used for research and set decoration. Photograph: Chris Pizzello\/Invision\/AP<\/p>\n

The sharks, which were powered by pneumatic and hydraulic systems, had to be assembled on a very rapid timeline after the film studio moved up Jaws\u2019s production schedule to better capitalize on the bestselling success of the novel on which it was based, exhibit curator Jenny He told the Guardian. Many special effects experts refused the assignment, saying the sharks would take years to create.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe special effects team who designed and constructed the shark never had a chance to test it in salt water,\u201d He said. \u201cThe first time they put it in the ocean was in Martha\u2019s Vineyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

As she noted, wryly, \u201cmechanics and salt water really didn\u2019t mix\u201d. The pressurized air systems designed to manipulate the sharks used long underwater tubes, which sometimes got unplugged, or filled with oil, or simply malfunctioned because of the distances they had to snake through the sea.<\/p>\n

As the filming dragged on, \u201cI was offered, actually, several times, a chance to gracefully bow out of the film, not to be replaced by another director, but for the film to be shut down,\u201d Spielberg said. He refused.<\/p>\n

The rest of his production team, crucially, stood by him, even as the long delay put a strain on the whole crew: \u201cEvery week, I\u2019d have five or six people come over to me to say: \u2018I haven\u2019t seen my family. I\u2019ve been here for five months. Just give me an incentive to keep working on your movie. Give me a date, a guarantee of when you\u2019re going to wrap.\u2019 And I didn\u2019t know when we were going to wrap.\u201d<\/p>\n

What got the cast and crew through it all, Spielberg said, \u201cwas being in the company of each other \u2026 the camaraderie that happens when you\u2019re just trying to survive something.\u201d<\/p>\n

A visitor looks at a wall of photographs at the museum. Photograph: Chris Pizzello\/Invision\/AP<\/p>\n

While it would probably have been easier to film the prop sharks in a controlled tank environment, the curator said, Spielberg\u2019s choice to shoot on location in Martha\u2019s Vineyard was crucial to the film\u2019s artistic power: \u201cHe made you feel that you could encounter Bruce in the ocean,\u201d she said. \u201cEven though there were challenges, without those challenges, I don\u2019t think Jaws would have been as successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spielberg, who has since been nominated for nearly two dozen Academy Awards, praised the new exhibit and said he was amazed to see the more than 200 objects the museum curators \u201chave so ingeniously assembled\u201d from a film that finished production more than a half century ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy would anybody, when we shot the opening scene of Chrissie Watkins being taken by the shark, and we had a buoy floating in the water \u2013 how did anybody know to take the buoy and take it home and sit on it for 50 years and then loan it to the Academy?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did they know? I didn\u2019t know!\u201d Spielberg said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Jaws became a cinematic classic, and the very first American \u201csummer blockbuster\u201d, director Steven Spielberg thought the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-138135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}