The actor who grew to resent Steven Spielberg: “I don’t have much respect for his talent as a friend”
Come on now, who doesn’t love Steven Spielberg?
He’s the most successful film director of all time, a master of so many forms of cinema with an appeal that spans generations and time periods. He makes stories that come from the heart, tales of underdogs and lost souls overcoming the odds and finding their place in the world against the odds.
Also, and this might be low-hanging fruit, but he’s a man of a certain age who worked in Hollywood and hasn’t been cancelled. That might be his greatest achievement of all.
Unfortunately, you can’t please everyone all the time, just as Richard Dreyfuss. The star is a key part of Spielberg’s legacy, having starred in two films that helped him make his name. He played an amateur UFO-spotter in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and, more famously, a sardonic shark expert on the original blockbuster, Jaws.
The underwater blood-fest is what made the director a household name, and it certainly didn’t do the actor’s career any harm either. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always a pleasant experience.
Much has been written about the often chaotic production history of Jaws. One of the main sources of disruption seems to have come from Dreyfuss and his co-star Robert Shaw, who played Quint. According to the man himself, however, these stories have been massively overblown. Dreyfuss personally blames both Spielberg and writer Carl Gottlieb for exaggerating his feud with Shaw, as he explained in an interview with Vanity Fair.
“I don’t think they just gave it any thought that it would hurt me, and it did,” he said. “I have to say that Carl and Steven knew better, knew that there was no feud. There was an ongoing kind of humour between us. If you only saw us on the set, then you might think that there was something – a feud that was going on – but it was never real. Never. And I hold that against Carl and Steven. I have enormous respect for Steven’s talent as a director… I guess I don’t have as much for his talent as a friend.”
Dreyfuss also took issue with the 2019 play The Shark is Broken. Co-written by and starring Ian Shaw, Robert’s son, the production tells the story of the calamitous relationship between the two warring co-stars and their fellow sufferer, Roy Schieder. Dreyfuss said he was “hurt” by his depiction, which made him out to be an annoying little twerp constantly taking shots at his older colleagues.
Unfortunately for Dreyfuss, his reputation hasn’t done him any favours. Jaws isn’t the only film on which he allegedly got on people’s nerves. He butted heads with both Bill Murray on What About Bob? and Oliver Stone on W, in which he played the late Dick Cheney.
Granted, both of those names are also somewhat notorious, so a fight was almost inevitable. Recently, he disgraced himself by making some entirely inappropriate comments during a screening of Jaws, which only made the people who hated him hate him even more.
Whoever you choose to believe in the Dreyfuss-Shaw-Spielberg debate, there’s one thing we can all agree on – Jaws is a great film, but I’m glad I didn’t have to work on it.
