The classic movie Steven Spielberg refused to watch for half a century: “I liked it”
There are an infinite number of reasons why anyone would refuse to watch a movie, whether they directed or not, and Steven Spielberg had one of the most valid: lingering trauma.
Plenty of filmmakers don’t revisit their work once they’ve locked the final cut, but it’s not usually because they find it triggering. Spielberg spent half a century avoiding one of his many classic pictures for the sole reason that it dredged a tidal wave of bad memories back to the surface.
To be honest, that’s fair. Nobody wants to have the most miserable time of their personal or professional lives projected onto a gigantic screen to remind them of all the misery they endured, even if the end result in Spielberg’s case was a transformative film that shook cinema to its very foundations.
Somewhere in an alternate universe, there’s a timeline where Jaws flopped at the box office and the industry looks unrecognisable 50 years later. The seminal shark attack thriller became the highest-grossing release of all time, reinvented the release model, and set the stage for big budgets and mass escapism to dominate the marketplace, a practice Hollywood still refuses to deviate from.
For its precocious director, it was a nightmare. Spielberg was ready to quit, and even though he didn’t, he still went home the second Jaws was over to get it out of his system. The three-time Academy Award winner even admitted that the horrific shoot gave him post-traumatic stress disorder, so if he wasn’t interested in seeing the fruits of his labours, then who’d blame him?
Major anniversaries are a time for retrospection and reflection, which finally convinced the director to give it a chance. He didn’t attend any of the mass gatherings, though, instead deciding to sit all by himself in case he suffered any adverse reactions to witnessing the aquatic predator wreaking havoc on Amity Island.
“I did watch Jaws,” he confessed at long last. “I don’t watch my movies, but I was alone, nobody was with me, and I ran a really good print of Jaws. I wanted to see the movie on the day it originally opened and see if I could get through the movie, get to the end of the movie without reliving the nightmares of making the movie.”
Was it a successful experiment? Fortunately, it was. “And I have to say, by the time I got to the end, it was the first time I ever watched Jaws as an audience member, not a filmmaker.” You’d have to travel pretty far to find someone who hasn’t seen it at least once, but it took the guy who made it 50 years to get to a point where he was comfortable enough to join that number.
It’s one of the most important and influential films ever made, arguably Spielberg’s greatest, and a stone-cold classic that’s endured for generations, but what did he think? “I liked it,” was his modest appraisal, a three-word review that doesn’t quite fit the billing of a screening that was a half-century in the making.
