The Making of Jaws: Transcript

Steven Spielberg: When I first hear the word ‘Jaws’, you know, I just think of a period in my life when I was much younger than I am right now. And I think because I was much younger, I was more courageous. Or I was more stupid. I’m not sure which. So when I think about Jaws, I think of courage and stupidity. And I think about both of those things existing under water.

Peter Benchley: I had been thinking for years about a story about a shark that attacks people and what would happen if it came in and wouldn’t go away. I hadn’t done anything about it, really. In 1964, I read a story about a shark fisherman off Long Island who caught a 4,550 pound Great White Shark off the beaches of Long Island. And I thought, “Wow. What would happen if one of these things came in and wouldn’t go away.” And, again, I didn’t do anything about it until 1970 or 1971 when a publisher finally said, “That’s an interesting story. I’ll pay you a couple of dollars if you’ll put it on paper.” So that’s how the idea began.

David Brown: Both Dick Zanuck and I saw or heard about the book at identical times. I heard about it from a small card in the fiction department of Cosmopolitan edited by my wife Helen Gurley Brown which gave a brief description of this novel by Peter Benchley and then said, “Might make a good movie.”

Richard D Zanuck: We both read it overnight and got on the phone with each other the next morning and said, “Look, we don’t know how we can possibly do it but we decided we must have this. Whatever it takes, this is the most exciting thing we’ve ever read and we’ll figure out later how we can make it.David Brown: Had we read it twice, in my opinion, we never would have made Jaws. Because anyone with a modicum of production knowledge would know there was no way to get a shark to leap on the stern of a small boat and swallow a man. How were we going to do this? Were we going to do it with animation? Who was going to do this?

Steven Spielberg: Coincidentally, the producers of Jaws had just been my producers on my first feature Sugarland Express – Dick Zanuck and David Brown – I asked them if this was something I could direct next.I just remember seeing a very large, you know, block of pages that said ‘Jaws’ on it. And I didn’t know what that meant. Jaws. Was it, like, about a dentist? It was a kind of unusual word and I remember borrowing a copy to read over the weekend. I had no idea this was about to become one of the best selling books in the nation. And I read it and I suddenly said to myself, “Wow. This is just like a movie I just made about a truck and a hapless driver, called Duel. And, of course, you know, I’m young and I’m stupid. I’m saying, “Duel has four letters and Jaws has four letters and they’re both about these leviathans preying upon every man.” And I said to myself, “This is kind of the sequel to Duel, only it’s on the water. Peter Benchley did a very good adaptation of his own novel. And then, Peter kind of turned it over to me and said, “Here it is and do with it what you want.” And at that point, i didn’t quite know what to do with it because it wasn’t the movie I wanted to make next and I remember sitting down and writing the script myself and doing an entire draft myself from beginning to end. It was more an exercise for myself to become familiar with what I wanted Jaws to become. And it was an exercise that was very beneficial because I suddenly had a vision of the film, even though I didn’t possess the skills to write it. David Brown suggested, and Dick Zanuck both suggested that I go to Howard Sackler who had written The Great White Hope.

David Brown: Howard Sackler specifically asked not to have credit. He only had a limited time to give to the film and therefore he said, “I don’t want credit.”

Spielberg: Sackler really broke the back of the movie and got me to say, “Yes, I’ll make this movie next. I’m committing.”

Brown: And then came something that has not been recorded in the history of Jaws. the screen actors guild contract was about to expire at the end of that year, it could have been 1973, perhaps, whatever the year was, and the studio decreed that no movie would be started that couldn’t be finished by June 30th of that year because they didn’t want to be struck, that is photography was completed. And Steven said, “I don’t have a script yet. You’re asking me to start this movie in April…” – whenever it was, I don’t know, maybe this was February. He said, “I don’t have a script.” And I said, “Who can we get?” And he said, “There’s a man name Carl Gottlieb. I’m thinking about him in the movie.

Carl Gottlieb: I was hired first as an actor because if I was going to be on the set, I could at least help in the improvisations and the crowd scenes, and finding stuff to do in the moment. That’s how I was first on the picture, as an actor, then shortly after I was hired to do the rewrites. Peter Benchley’s novel included too much. There was just too much story for the film that we were making that had to have a very direct through line. We thought we had a chance to make a great popular movie. So toward that end, we tried to make the characters more human and believable, the tension more unbearable and the suspense more frightening.

Quint: Mr. Hooper, that’s the U.S.S. Indianapolis.

Hooper: You were on the Indianapolis?

Spielberg: The Indianapolis speech which, for me, is my favourite part of Jaws – the speech that Shaw gives about that. That was conceived by Howard Sackler, who only really wrote a short paragraph. One day I was talking to John Milius and I said, “Can you make this longer because I think it’s a speech, not just a couple of short paragraphs?”

Quint: Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour.

Spielberg: That’s when John sat down and he wrote page after page, in long hand, I believe. When Robert Shaw read it, Shaw said, “Let me have a chance at rewriting it.” And then Shaw rewrote Milius who had rewritten Sackler and the speech in the movie is basically Shaw’s version of Milius’ version of Sackler’s version.

Quint: You know the thing about a shark, he’s got… lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces.

Zanuck: We thought, to legitimatise the movie, there should be some real shark footage.

Brown: Ron and Valerie Taylor were engaged in order to shoot real shark footage off of Australia, which they were well-experienced at doing.

Ron Taylor: Universal Pictures contacted Valerie and I and I said, “Yes, I think we can do the underwater shooting of live sharks in South Australia.” So they flew me to America and I met Steven Spielberg and the production team there and I explained what I thought we could do with the real, live Great White sharks. But I explained that our sharks were only about fourteen feet long whereas Jaws was about twenty six feet long.

Speilberg: I had this idea of doing a miniature cage and putting a little person into a miniature cage. That would have effectively scaled the shark up and added another, you know, nine feet to the overall length of the shark.

Valerie Taylor: And Hollywood sent us this little man, he couldn’t dive, he had spent most of his life riding horses, doubling for children in films like National Velvet, he’d doubled for Elizabeth Taylor. And, we had to take him out and stuff him into a cage and dangle him into the cold southern ocean. And have sharks – big, huge, monstrous sharks – swimming around him. And he was very much afraid and we had a lot of difficulty getting him into the cage which is probably quite understandable. We did have two little dummies because we were supposed to have somebody in the cage when the shark broke it up. But we had Carl, and he was much better, he looked better in the cage, he moved around a bit. We’d been working for about a week and we still hadn’t got the shots of the shark attacking the cage. I mean, they don’t normally do that. They’d rather attack a bait. One of them came in – and he was a big, strong shark – and he swam around and we had the small cage – the half-size cage – hanging on a bridle attached to a winch on the deck of The Skippy. And he swam over it and got his nose caught in the bridle, tried to swim forward and became trapped, and when a White shark is trapped, it goes crazy. And Ron was filming under water and, actually, that’s how we got that footage. And they used it. They wanted someone in the cage at the time but there was nobody in the cage, so they changed the script to suit that particular sequence because it was so dramatic.

Ron Taylor: And it looked like the shark was destroying the cage, it broke it away from the small boat and the whole lot came tumbling past me and crashed down onto the bottom. The shark got out and swam away. That was the scariest thing I think I’ve ever seen under water.

Zanuck: Our philosophy was that the star was the shark. When it came to the casting of the picture we said we have our star already, we don’t need to spend a lot of money, let’s just get very good actors to play the roles.

Brody: Then why don’t we have one more drink and go down and cut that shark open.

Ellen: Martin? Can you do that?

Brody: I can do anything. I’m the chief of police.

Spielberg: Roy Scheider was interesting, the story of how I cast him. Because here’s a situation where I was going after other actors and I was having trouble finding a name that I liked and who would do it. I remember I was at a party one night -

Roy Scheider: And my agent brought me over to be introduced to him. And he was having a conversation with a writer called Tracy Keenan Wynn. And as I approached him, I heard a conversation that went something like this: “We’re going to have to have this giant shark come out of the water and land on a boat and crack the boat in half.” And then I was introduced to him, he said hello, he was very polite, very nice, very pleasant, and then, as I was walking away, they picked up this conversation again. And I remember saying to my agent as we walked away, I said, “Those people have got to be kidding. They’ve got to be kidding. A giant shark that cracks a boat in half?” I thought they were loony.

Spielberg: I told him the entire story. At the end of the story, he said, “Wow, that’s a great story. What about me?” I looked at Roy and I said, “Yeah…you know, you’d be a great Chief Brody.” ‘Cause I’d loved Roy from The French Connection. And that’s how that came about.

Brody: What are you doing out there? These are your people, go and talk to them!

Hendricks: Those aren’t my people! They’re from all over the place! What happened to the extra help we were supposed to be get?

Brody: That’s not until the fourth of July! Between now and then it’s you and me!

Hooper: Ah, you know those eight guys in the fan-tail launch out there?

Brody: Yeah?

Hooper: Well none of them are going to get out of the harbour alive.

Spielberg: I cast Dreyfuss because basically I loved American Graffiti and I had seen him in that and George Lucas was the person who sort of said to me, “Why don’t you cast Ricky? Ricky Dreyfuss. He’d be great.

Dreyfuss: And he told me this movie he wanted to make. It was really a shocker. Even as he was telling it to me as a tale, it was a great, exciting story. And I said, “Well, this sounds like it’s going to be a great movie. I’d rather watch this movie than shoot it because it’s going to be a bitch to shoot. Then a few months later I went to see the opening of a film that I had done in Canada called The Appreticeship of Duddy Kravitz. And I saw myself, really, for the first time and I had a heart attack. I had a total nervous collapse. I thought I was awful. And I figured I’d better get a job really soon. So I called Steven and I said, “If you still want me to offer that job, I’ll take it.” And he said yes. So in essence, I came crawling to Martha’s Vineyard.

Quint: Gamin’ fish eh? Marlin? Stingray? Bit through this piano wire? Don’t you tell me my business again!

Spielberg: My first choice to play Quint was Lee Marvin but Lee Marvin wasn’t interested. My second choice was Sterling Hayden who I thought would make an amazing Quint. He couldn’t do it, either – actually I forgot the reason he couldn’t do it. And then, Dick Zanuck and David Brown suggested Robert Shaw. He was their idea.

Quint: — Son of a bitch! Goddamn women today, they can’t handle nothin’. Young girls just quite as smart, like their grandmother’s…[Continues his ranting]

Ellen: That’s got to be Quint.

Brody: Colourful ain’t he.

Ellen: He scares me.

Brody: Don’t use the fireplace in the den because I haven’t fixed the flu yet.

Ellen: What am I going to tell the kids?

Spielberg: The first person I cast for the movie, in fact, was Lorraine who I’d loved in a TV movie I’d seen her do called The Marcus-Nelson Murders starring Telly Savalas and herself, I believe as Telly’s wife in that and thought she was a very natural actress, almost improvisational in her style and she brought a realism to the movie, a real realism to that family which I wanted in the film.

Lorraine Gary: Roy was wonderful in that scene. He just brings tears to your eyes. And, uh, seeing Roy work the child and Steven allow the child and Roy to flow as organically as they did, that added so much to this movie. It was an extraordinary touch.

Brody: Come here. Give us a kiss.

Sean: Why?

Brody: `Cause I need it. Get outta here.

Gary: Ellen is very clear to me and always has been. Roy Scheider’s character feels guilt because of the children. I’m a mother, I’m a wife and I’m Jewish. You know, what could be clearer to me than to make somebody feel guilty? This is something I’ve done in my sleep, that I’ve trained for and I have two sons just like Ellen Brody.

Brody: Do you want to take him home?

Ellen: Back to New York?

Brody: No. Home here.

Spielberg: Murray Hamilton I’d just been a big fan of from The FBI Story with James Stewart. And, I always just wanted to work with him, I don’t know, I was just a big fan of his and saw him instantly as the mayor of Amity. So, for me, I didn’t have to go through nine actors, he was the first choice for that part and I was lucky enough to get him.

Vaughn: But as you see it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time. Amity as you know means friendship.

Zanuck: When it came down to where we would shoot this film, we sent Joe Alves, our production designer out with a team to give us some ideas and some photographs and pictures of where this town should be shot. And, one of the places, was the island of Martha’s Vineyard which, believe it or not, had never been photographed by a feature film before. They had very strict rules and regulations there.

Brown: Martha’s Vineyard didn’t particularly care for a movie invasion. They didn’t like to see an artificial shark parked in a channel where their homes faced it.

Spielberg: The real attraction of Martha’s Vineyard, you couldn’t see with the naked eye. It was the fact it was the only place on the east coast where I could go twelve miles out to sea and still have a sandy bottom only thirty feet below the surface of the water for the shark sled so the mechanical shark could function. It was very important that no matter what direction my cameras turned, I didn’t want to see land. My fear was, the minute the audience saw land, they’d say, “Look, this is getting pretty intense out here, just turn the boat around and go towards that land that we keep seeing in your movie. I wanted the audience to feel very cut off, like they couldn’t just run back to shore because there was no shore to run back to.

Quint: Get me right up along side of him!

Hooper: I can’t rev it up that high! It’s not gonna take it!

Spielberg: A lot of things, you know, forced me to make certain decisions that did not involve the shark because the shark was not working for a long time while we were on Martha’s Vineyard in production. But that particular scene was conceived, because even in the book, the book does describe the shark before you see the attack. I thought that what would really be scary was to not see the shark, just seeing the water because we are all familiar with the water, very few of us have been in the water with a shark. But we’ve all gone swimming. And the idea of this girl going swimming and the audience going swimming with her , it would have been too extraordinary if like a leviathan, the shark had come out of the water with its jaws agape and come down on her. It would have been a spectacular opening sequence to the film but there would have been nothing primal about it, it would just have been a monster moment we’ve all seen. And, I really wanted to do it without seeing the shark in that case and I wanted to violent jerking motions to just start to trigger our imaginations into either thinking about what’s happening below the surface of the waterline or blocking what was happening below the surface.

Susan Backlinie: The first jerk down, Steven did. He had a cable that came to the front of my stomach and went to an anchor that was laying on the bottom of the ocean and then, he just sat and when he wanted that pulled, he just would pull. He wanted to put me on an electric winch and I wanted to have more control so we used man power. They put cut-off Levis on and had cables running from me out to the side to two pilings and then all the way into the beach. And, what they would do is, we put marks on the beach and the guys – we’d have five or six guys on each line – and they would run back and forth from mark to mark. So, I didn’t have the hard work to do. I just kind of sat there and got pulled around. The guys were running back and forth on the beach. Any time during the scene, if I got in trouble, I could pull one of those strings and I was clear and free and could come to the surface because, how would anyone know if I was hurt or I needed anything, I’m out there screamin’ like a fool.

Carl Gottlieb: In 1975, no one had seen a big shark like that in a movie – ever. And we could hold it back and show the evidence of his strength and the blood and the death that he caused.

Alex Kintner: Mom, can I get my raft and go back out in the water?

Mrs. Kintner: Lemme see your fingers. Alex Kintner they are beginning to prune.

Alex: Just lemme go out a little longer?

Mrs. Kintner: Just ten more minutes.

Alex: Thanks.

Spielberg: The death of the Kintner boy and all of the paranoia and the tension and the suspense leading up to the attack when he’s out on the raft, I – in my mind – wanted to do it in one shot. And, in trying to figure out, you know, in a perfect world how could i have done that in one sustained shot, I came up with the idea to have bathers, with different coloured bathing suits, walking in front of the camera that would wipe off Roy Scheider and the same colour in the reverse, moving – certainly in the other direction – would wipe on what he’s looking at which, even though it wouldn’t be one shot, would give more of a seamless feeling and much more of a clear point of view, that you knew who was looking at who, that all of this must be happening from the police chief’s point-of-view. The scene’s about him, it’s about his reaction, it’s not about the Kintner boy being killed, it’s about the chief of police, his fear of the water, his chief responsibility to protect the public, his fear that there is a shark out there and he knows it’s out there and these people are going swimming anyway.

Brown: Filming the beach scene on The Vineyard – called Amity in the picture – was difficult. The waters of the North Atlantic are extremely cold and people, as a rule, do not go into the ocean even in the summer, until very late in the summer. And this beach panic scene was very difficult to film, all of the children and everything else was extremely well orchestrated, took a lot of time and a lot of doing.

Spielberg: Right, there’s a shark in the water, he’s been killing people, legs have been bitten off and there’s blood all over the place. ACTION!

Brown: This is when, being in the height of summer, helped us. Because there were a lot of locals there from all parts of the country. I shouldn’t call them locals, I should call them civilians.

Ted Grossman: I was going to be a victim in the estuary. I’m in a boat, in a little row boat, and the way they shot it the first time, where I’m in the shark’s mouth, with a blood pack in my mouth, going under water, on top of the water, and then I see Roy’s son staring at me and as a last ditch effort, I make a move to grab him and then I let him go and I go under the water and disappear. What would happen in that scene is, it was so violent and so horrendous, they couldn’t use it, it was just too violent, period. I was in this little bucket seat, strapped into it and the shark fin was behind me on a sled. I had the kid in my arms and I was going to take him under water, and then I let him go and the sled went underwater.

Spielberg: That’s much more horrible than what I had done, you know, in the first third of Jaws. I just didn’t like it, it was too bloody and I thought it was in bad taste, so I cut it out.

Gottleib: You didn’t see the shark until the movie was half over. And, when you do, it’s a stunning reveal and – even better, for a screenwriter – it happens on a joke. There’s a laugh that precedes the shark’s appearance. And it’s that laugh that relaxes the audience to a point that, when the shark’s head appears out of the water and takes a bite of the chum, it’s triply startling.

Brody: Slow ahead! I can go slow ahead! C’mon down and chum some of this shit! You’re gonna need a bigger boat!

Gottlieb: One of the most remembered and oft-quoted lines in the movie, is Roy Scheider saying, “We gotta get a bigger boat” which he improvised on the set and, I acknowledge that as a writer, I’m pleased that he said that.

Schieder: The line “We’re going to need a bigger boat” which has become part of the language for people who are faced with an insurmountable problem.

Hooper: That’s a twenty footer!

Quint: Twenty five! And three tons of him!

Joe Alves: I wasn’t having any luck. Everyone was telling me it can’t be done, you know, it’d take three years of development. And, I heard about this guy that had been retired for some time who did the giant squid for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And, his name was Bob Matty. And so, when I met Bob, I didn’t get the usual pessimistic attitude that you can’t do this, you know, you can’t make this full sized shark and shoot it in the real life ocean. And, instead, I got this very enthusiastic yes we could do anything. We assembled this team and they started on the frame of the shark. So we were working, like, from the outside in and the inside out. We were separately modelling the shark and, at the same time, they were making the skeleton and we hoped they would all fit together.

Spielberg; We had a number of different shark components. We had the full shark which I called the Great White Turd which, kind of, you know, we pulled along in the water and it was often on this huge gantry like a crane arm. When the crane arm was tucked all the way at the thirty foot bottom, you couldn’t see the shark. As quickly as they could blow the ballast, and force the arm out of the water, the shark would rise out of the water, the shark could be gimballed separately on the arm to have an attitude change at the top of it. We had just a fin that was pulled through the water. We had a left-to-right shar and a right-to-left shark. And the left-to-right shark, of course, had no left side, it was all scooped out and vice-versa for the other shark.

Alves: We built and tested the shark dry. And it worked fine dry. So we said, “Ship it back to New England and we’ll do the water testing there.” That’s where we ran into the problems.

Scheider: The ocean was brutal on the mechanics, all the pneumatic tubes, all of that special equipment was being dashed and brutalised by the ocean every day.

Spielberg: That’s a much maligned shark and I’m kind of responsible for creating a lot of the bad mouthing about the shark, because the shark was frustrating, it didn’t really work all the time, it didn’t work hardly at all.

Brown: I remember in particular, being on our barge, watching the first shark test at which time the shark simply sank to the bottom of Nantucket Sound and we felt that our careers in motion pictures had gone with it. Frogmen were delegated to recover it and bring it back to the surface. Everything that could go wrong with the shark, went wrong with the shark.

Dreyfuss: Where ever you were on the island, you could hear the radio mics and they were always say, “The shark is not working. The shark is not working. Repeat. The shark is not working.” No matter where you were and for months.

Scheider: We just waited around. We just waited and waited and waited.

Spielberg: And I remember every day, about the fiftieth or sixtieth day of shooting, the crew would come over to me and they’d all ask me during the day, “When are we going to be done with this movie?” And I would honestly say to them, with complete sympathy for the question, “I don’t know. I don’t know when we’re going to finish this movie. We could finish it if I get fired and dragged off the movie, then somebody else could come in and finish it quickly. Maybe they’ll shut us down.

Brown: Dick and I, battle scarred veterans of the movie wars, knew that you never take the film out of the camera because they may never let you put it back in, particularly with a movie like this. Even if we got one sixteenth of a page of script a day, you kept moving.

Zanuck: That whole system with the barrels kept the shark alive. When those barrels came up, the shark was there. And, that really saved us. It saved us, or we’d still be there waiting for the shark to work, really.

Alves: Finally, after all of this – it was, maybe, September – we got the shark to raise out of the water and that was the one shot with Roy Scheider. And it just barely worked.

Dreyfuss: And, then, one day, you heard this: “The shark is working. Repeat. The shark is working.”

Spielberg: The shark worked well enough that, for a while there, we had the biggest hit of all time. So, I really owe the shark a lot more than I want to take away from it right now. And I owe Bob Matty and his team a lot as well.

Dreyfuss: We were shooting about, I don’t know, seventy five yards of the coast of Chapaquitic Island. Robert, Roy, myself and Freddy Zendar, the boat wrangler and an ancient sound man with a Nagra.

Spielberg: What happened was, we were pulling one of the barrels away from the boat. They had put a little eye hook into one of the boards just below the surface, just below the waterline, like shiv so the rope would go through the shiv and it would seem to pull the barrels towards the Orca, as if the shark was heading towards the Orca. The problem was, the motorboat went so fast that it pulled the shive and the planking out from the hull of the Orca and, of course, the water rushed in.

Dreyfuss: And, we started to sink. water started to rush into the boat, Freddy Zendar jumps up from the hold, cursing and screaming in Austrian and starts to power the boat as fast as he could towards the beach of Chapaquitic Island hoping to be able to ground the boat before it sinks and we have no Orca. In the meantime, we’re in six foot swells and Steven Speilberg is trying to send safety boats to get us transferred off the boat. “Get the actors off the boat! Get the actors off the boat!”

Spielberg: I remember John Carter, who won an Academy Award by the way for Best Sound for Jaws, he picked up the Nagra, he was on the boat, and held it over his head and said, “Fuck the actors, save the sound department!” And I have this image to this day of John sinking, holding the Nagra over his head, the water up to John’s ankles, up to his knees, boats scrambling to pull everybody off the sinking Orca and John with his Nagra going under.

Dreyfuss: There was a certain level of executive indifference to the sound department’s life span. “Get the actors off the boat!” Ahh, it was funny. We lived.

Spielberg: We had lost the camera, the camera was on the boat, too. It went under water and Bill Butler said, “You know, the developing solution we use is a saline solution. And I think this film is going to be okay if we can rush it to the lab.

Bill Butler: We got on an airplane with a bucket of water and the film in it and took it to New York and developed it. And, didn’t lose a foot.

Spielberg: Bill Butler created equipment just to make Jaws. He made a camera platform that according to the tides, or where you wanted to be with your lens, could go just below the surface of the water or way above the surface of the water. He reconfigured the water box so it was easy, so you could get your hand in there to pull focus, and still have the water lapping the lens.

Butler: When it came time to do Jaws, I chose to handhold the camera. And, when Steven heard about this he was rather shocked because he didn’t really want a handheld picture. But he didn’t realise I didn’t really mean to do a handheld film in the terms they then used or thought about handheld on land but rather to use the knees and the body to take the roll out of the film. So we gave that a try and it worked very well and, after he saw a demonstration, he decided that was the way to do it. And, as a matter of fact, Jaws became a film shot mostly handheld.

Brody: You’re gonna need a bigger boat, right?

Quint: Gotta get to work.

Brody: How do we handle this? How do we handle this?

Hooper: Martin, I need you. He’s circling the boat! The size of him!

Gottlieb: In both the book and the early versions of the script, Quint is harpooning the shark, his leg gets caught in the rope, he gets dragged over the side to his death where he drowns and it probably bitten, too. He dies the way Ahab dies in Moby Dick. It always seemed to us that if Quint is going to die, he should be bitten. The best thing would be if he could go mano-e-mano and stab the shark, which he does, and his formidable human talents are no match for the formidable shark talents of the fish. So we chose the ending which we have in the movie which is, he slides into the great jaws of the fish and gets chomped. And, Scheider sees it and is terrified.

Spielberg: The second Orca that was constructed was build just to sink, and then pump air back in the ballast and it would come up for take two and then sink a second time or as many times as we had to sink it. And that was, of course, for the shot where the boat starts to sink and Roy Scheider has to climb out the flipping window and climb the mast as the boat goes down and he only has one final opportunity to succeed.

Benchley: The most interesting conflict as far as I am concerned happened between me and Steven when it came to a discussion of the ending because he said to me, “The ending of the book is a downer. The shark gets stabbed with a harpoon, can’t hold the barrels and eventually drowns, spins slowly to the bottom and the story ends, if you will, the characters are saved. That is not a big, rousing ending and I need a big, rousing ending.” So he said, “Here is what I propose to do.” And he told me the ending he had in mind. And I said, “Steven, that is completely unbelievable. It can’t happen. A shark does not bite down on a scuba tank and explode like an oil refinery.” He said, “I don’t care.” He said, “If I have got them for two hours, they will believe whatever I do for the next three minutes because I’ve got them in my hands and I want them on their feet screaming at the end, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! This is what should happen to this animal.’”

Brody: Smile you son-of-a-bitch!

Spielberg: In Duel, you hear the sound – in fact, it was a dinosaur growling from an old B dinosaur picture – when the truck went over the cliff, ’cause I had always imagined the truck to be a bit like a T-Rex, chasing a car. And I used the very same sound effect in Jaws, almost as a bit of a reminder that there was a kinship between both stories. After the shark is sinking to the bottom of the ocean, after it’s been exploded by the compressed air.

Zanuck: There was a million ways to put the film together. Verna Fields made an incredible contribution with the editing of the picture.

Spielberg: Verna was great. We used to call her, our affectionate nickname for Verna Fields was ‘Mother Cutter’. It was frustrating for Verna, she never had enough film to cut because I was only getting, on a good day, I’d get give shots. On a good day at sea, five shots. Verna didn’t have the film until we finished the movie. That’s when Verna’s work got started and Verna and I worked every day on the picture at her house, in her little cutting room by the pool. And, she did a great job.

Brown: My recollection is that we showed the cut version of the film with one big sequence missing, without Johnny William’s music in a projection room at Universal Studios. And, when the lights went on, there was no reaction at all, as I recall. Well, of course there was no reaction. It didn’t have Johnny William’s music, it didn’t have some major underwater stuff that we shot in the tank at MGM Studios, in order to get very close angles underwater. So the reaction was, “Go get the rest of the movie.”

Richard Warlock: Well, when they came back from Martha’s Vineyard, they realised they didn’t have the footage – as I understood it – that they needed of Hooper and the shark together in the cage. So I was called in and we went down to Culver City to MGM Studios and shot it in a tank down there.

Spielberg: There were three intercuts for the sequence where the shark attacks the cage. One, of course, was Dick Warlock who was the stunt person inside the cage subbing for Richard Dreyfuss. The second was the shoot with Ron and Val in Australia. And there was Frank Sparks whose eyes I actually used to sub for Richard Dreyfuss’ eyes because Richard was unavailable upon shooting the inserts, so when you see the Richard Dreyfuss scream, that’s not Richard’s face, those aren’t Richard’s eyes, that’s the guy named Sparks.

Warlock: Down in the tank was a metal apparatus that the shark was attached to where it could move forward and backward, sideways, up and down. So it had pretty good movement. Mr Spielberg was around the other side, looking at it from another perspective, he was looking at the shark coming directly towards the cage.

Spielberg: I had always wanted to be in business with John Williams. All my life. And, when he said yes to Sugarland and we became friends and, obviously, I wanted him to do every picture I ever made. Jaws came second. When he finally played the music for me on the piano, he previewed, the main Jaws theme, I expected to hear something kind of weird and melodic, you know, kind of tonal but eerie, of another world, almost a bit like outer space inside inner space, under the water. And, what he played me instead, with two fingers on the lower keys was dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. And, at first, I began to laugh. He has a great sense of humour, I thought he was putting me on. And he said, “No! That’s the theme to Jaws.” And I said, “Play it again.” He played it again, and he played it again and it suddenly seemed right. And John found a signature for the entire movie.

John Williams: One could alter the speed of this ostanato…it could be note-note, note-note. Any kind of alteration to speed, from very slow to very fast, very soft, very loud,

Spielberg: Part of the genius of John Williams is how he spots music and how he places music in a movie. John did not want music to celebrate a red herring, he only wanted the music to signal the actual arrival of the shark.

Williams: There were opportunities in the movie to advertise the presence of the shark with the music. There were also opportunities where we don’t have the music and the audience has a sense of an absence. They sense the absence of the shark because they don’t hear the thump-thump, because we’ve conditioned them to do that. But then you may go one step further and we know now that the shark really is there but we haven’t advertised it with music, so his attack comes out of silence. Now because you’ve been conditioned to have the music every time and you don’t, when the shark arrives it’s even more terrifying. It’s one of the beauties of the film medium that it’s the combination of the visual, this being the shark or the knifing scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho combined with the notes, that combination of sound and image forming a memory.

Spielberg: I think the score was clearly responsible for half the success of that movie.

Brown: The first test of Jaws took place in Dallas in a shopping centre. Dick Zanuck and I were extremely nervous. Would the shark get laughs? Everybody knew, had read in the newspaper, it was not a real shark. And so, we went and had a very stiff drink, we went into the theatre and the screams started and they never stopped. And we were pinching each other, it was incredible.

Spielberg: And it made me greedy. I got so greedy because earlier in the movie, when they find Ben Gardner’s head in the boat, I hadn’t timed it right and Richard turns around, this is where the head is already there and there was no reaction from the audience there at all. I said, “There’s one more scream we can get in this movie if I can figure out this thing with Ben Gardner’s head.”

Brown: Part of that scene was the famous reshoot which, now it can be told, was done in Verna Field’s swimming pool.

Spielberg: It was simply a matter of timing. And the moment that works the best, which is the moment in the movie, is the moment where he gets to the hull, and then the head comes out, there’s just a bit of a pause.

Zanuck: Jaws went on to become the biggest picture of all time, at that time, surpassing the hundred million dollar mark which had never been done before.

Steven Spielberg: Every time I fell asleep, I dreamt I was on the third or fourth day of shooting, I’d wake up with an electrical explosion in my brain, my heart beating, can’t catch my breath, looking around the room, “Where am I?”, disoriented. I calm down, get a glass of water, go back to sleep again. Same dream, I’m on the fourth day of shooting. And I know I’ve got a, you know, hundred and forty-six days left. And I wake up again, same thing. And this thing was haunting me all night long, until I didn’t get any sleep. So, you know, Jaws was a fun movie to watch, not a fun movie to make. Under the worst of conditions and, sometimes, very sweet conditions, but most of the time under the worst conditions.