LASTING EFFECTS

The realism of the practical shark effects led to a marked decrease in beachgoer numbers across the US over the next few years.

There are a lot of things that didn’t make it. I wanted a closer relationship between the husband and wife in the story. The day I realised I couldn’t make a three-hour movie and I couldn’t take 45 minutes to show this man in his home life, I compromised by dreaming up the scene where the police chief and the little boy make faces at one another. There are also a number of things I wanted to do in the third act that I felt would achieve more tension. I wanted to add things that were more terrifying and more spectacular, but our shark was a prima-donna and only performed on certain days. I had to cut a lot of my shots and a lot of my ideas. There was one point where I wanted the shark to knock a hole in the bottom of the boat and stick his whole head through. This was in the first draft that I had [writer] Peter Benchley write. Then the boat begins to sink very quickly. They’re stuffing mattresses into the hole. They’re trying to seal the hole in a race against time before the boat sinks. What is in the movie now is a very small scene where the shark is ramming the hole and he breaks the seal on the starboard side and some water comes in. Beyond that, nothing developed.

Were you able to rehearse any of the underwater scenes?

We didn’t. It’s very hard to direct underwater. What I did was I planned every shot and I had a sketch artist paint the shot in black-and-white and colour. Then [cinematographer] Ron Taylor would look at the angle and the focal length lens that was to be used. They would go out and they would match the different sketches with the

What personal mementos did you take home from the movie?

In my office, I have a pair of tiger-shark jaws – but the only memento I have from the movie are some very bad tick bites on my leg that won’t go away.

I got them from living on the island. I was attacked by ticks over the six months I was living in a house there. The other memento I brought back with me is my life.

Is it true that you have a six-foot plastic chicken in your office?

Did you give the shark a screen test before you made the movie?

We gave him four screen tests and he failed three of them. True.

Jaws,

Since the release of there have been a lot of shark killings. This weekend, there were reports of a group of people going out to kill sharks in a shooting contest. Do you feel responsible for this?

No. There is a man on the East Coast who has been taking people out on shark charters for 20 years. There are also shark charters up and down the West Coast where weekend Americans go to shoot sharks. This has been going on since Ernest Hemingway killed sharks off the pulpit of his boat with a Thompson submachine gun. Ernest Hemingway is one of the most notorious shark killers in American history. There’s a fascination about destroying something that we cannot understand. In a way, sharks are nature’s equaliser. It’s nature getting back at man for screwing up his environment. Man is attacking sharks for the same reason, but there were a number of charters that did go out after Jaws came out. Charters that were in existence made more money. People went out looking for the great white shark more than for a thresher shark, blue shark, lemon shark or tiger shark. They went after the great white. The great white became number one on the ‘10 Most Wanted’ list and this was sad but inevitable. I predicted this would happen as the film began doing well. I said, “Sharks, you’d better go out to sea right now. They’ll be coming after you.”