The gory ‘Jaws’ scene Steven Spielberg cut out: “Much more horrible than anything else”
Steven Spielberg has been through his fair share of tumultuous creative experiences, with the director becoming infamous for his challenging productions that nearly ended his filmmaking career entirely. From the fabled disturbances that plagued his sea shoot or the demanding opening sequence of his harrowing war epic, Spielberg has truly been through it all, perhaps viewing his own time in the industry as an intensive boot camp and form of resilience training as he continuously rises to ridiculous challenges.
However, while he has spoken at length about the intricate processes behind many of his projects, with in-depth discussions about the underlying meaning behind his framing and mise-en-scene, he has also revealed the particular scenes that were most tricky to shoot, and one that he regrets entirely.
When Spielberg insisted on shooting his 1975 film Jaws at sea instead of in a water tank, the 27 year-old was nearly laughed out of the studio, with the executives responding incredulously at his outlandish and never-before-achieved suggestion. However, the young director seemed to have a fierce sense of vision and gumption, insisting on shooting at sea to maintain authenticity and immerse audiences in the fear of this setting.
While this later cemented Jaws as one of the most iconic horror films of all time, Spielberg began to regret his insistence over this setting, with the ocean proving to be a very unpredictable collaborator that severely hindered the production process. Once shooting began, the crew shortly began to resent this young hot-shot who had swooped into Hollywood and inflicted his demanding dream on everyone else, with the camera team struggling to use their equipment in the water and sometimes taking a full day to get one shot due to the impact of the water.
With a revolving crew, cast members who hated each other and a failing shark, the experience quickly became one of the most stressful and awful experiences of Spielberg’s life; vowing never to make a film and was assured in the prediction that his career would be in the gutter.
However, he carried on with his flailing vision, with the director shooting one scene that he was convinced would be the end for him. During one of the shark attacks, Spielberg shot a more graphic version of someone being chewed up that was later cut from the film, with the director saying, “I cut the scene down because it was too bloody, too gory. Stuntman Teddy Grossman played the victim — and Teddy is a very funny guy, by the way — but originally, he was riding in the mouth of the shark like a maidenhead of a ship, toward the kid in the water, vomiting blood. That was much more horrible than anything else that came in the first third of the movie, so I took it out.”
With many odds already stacked against the director, perhaps the inclusion of another bloody death would be the final straw in the coffin, and it is understandable why the director would have cut this out at the time. During post-production, everyone predicted that the film would be a flop, and Spielberg most likely wanted to appease the studio executives and try to resurrect what everyone thought would be a divisive project, leading him to cut a scene that probably would have gone down as smoothly as Quint did.
