Steven Spielberg’s huge regret about ‘Jaws’
The impact made by Steven Spielberg movie Jaws on cinema has seen it become enshrined as one of the most important movies ever made, but the unsavoury legacy left behind by the depiction of its terrifying oceanic predator often goes unnoticed or unmentioned.
Becoming the highest-grossing film in history and revolutionising the way the highest-profile productions were marketed and rolled out to cinemas worldwide, even the tagline of “just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” became iconic in and of itself, with Jaws being directly implicated in beach attendance dropping noticeably in the summer of 1975.
Beyond that, though, many interpreted the film’s signature logline in the opposite way, leading to a drastic increase in the number of sharks being hunted and killed for sport. In an interview with Desert Island Discs, Spielberg admitted that he’s still concerned that the sharks will never forgive him for what he’d inadvertently done: “That’s one of the things I still fear – not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975.”
On a personal level, the success found by Jaws did nothing to overcome his dismay at what happened in oceans around the world as a result: “I truly, and to this day, regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film.” The live-action adaptation may have exacerbated the issue, but it wasn’t just Spielberg who felt personally accountable for what became known as “the Jaws effect”.
Author Peter Benchley was in an identical boat – no pun intended – remarking to The Los Angeles Times: “Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today,” he said. “Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.” As a result, the writer would dedicate decades of his life to shining a light on shark conservation.
Speaking to the BBC, the Natural History Museum’s fish curator Oliver Crimmen was another who bemoaned the accidental ways in which Jaws did more harm than good to sharks: “Jaws was a turning point for great white sharks. I actually saw a big change happen in the public and scientific perception of sharks when Peter Benchley’s book Jaws was published and then subsequently made into a film.”
George Burgess, the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, lamented the devastating impact of Jaws away from the silver screen: “A collective testosterone rush certainly swept through the east coast,” he explained. “Thousands of fishers set out to catch trophy sharks after seeing Jaws.”
It might be one of the most famous films to have ever been made, but Jaws is not without its place in infamy too, with an innumerable volume of sharks being hunted and killed by those who accepted its narrative as fact and decided as many of these predators as possible need to be removed from the ocean, much to Spielberg’s chagrin.
