Steven Spielberg’s biggest regret about ‘Jaws’
Steven Spielberg has announced his biggest regret over the success of his Academy Award-winning film Jaws. The iconic director has said that he profoundly regrets the culling of the shark population following the film’s release in 1975.
Spielberg recently appeared on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 and claimed that he worries that the shark population might be “mad” at him after “the feeding frenzy of crazy sword fishermen that happened after 1975”.
The film had previously drawn criticism for heightening the sense of trophy hunting in the United States and misrepresenting the great white shark. Spielberg added that the sea is “one of the things I still fear”. So there may be better places for the director to be washed up than the desert island.
Jaws told of a great white shark that attacked a coastal town in the United States, and the movie’s horror increased the level of sport fishing in the country. Research was conducted and suggested that the level of the big shark population on the east coast of North America plummeted in the years after 1975.
In addition to discussing his regrets about Jaws, Spielberg also mentioned his new film: a semi-autobiographical feature entitled The Fabelmans, which explores the director’s childhood and early desire to become a filmmaker. However, like the sea, opening up on his own life was a deep fear to Spielberg.
He said: “I’m a private person that’s going public about, and I can’t hide behind somebody else’s authorship or a book or a genre or American history.” He added that the project was the “most self-indulgent thing I’ve ever asked people to accompany me through”, and it felt like “$40 million worth of therapy”.
However, Spielberg also admitted that he thought that the film “needed” to be made, and he was answering a deep call within himself.
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