13 Facts That Will Forever Change How You See 'Jaws'

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Director Steven Spielberg got hold of an advanced copy of the 1974 novel Jaws by Peter Benchley before it was published and knew right away that he wanted to shoot it for the screen. But there was a problem. A pair of producers already owned the film rights and had a different director in mind. Then, one day, Spielberg got a call that Benchley wanted to meet with him.
In an interview from the book Spielberg: The First Ten Years, the director explained, "They sat me down and announced, 'We want you to direct Jaws.' I said, 'Whatever happened to the director?' And they explained, 'We had the meeting with him, but he kept referring to the shark in front of Peter Benchley as "the white whale." And Peter became very disinterested in having his shark called a whale.' And that's how the project finally came to me."
The film version of Jaws cut out several subplots from the novel, including one where Ellen Brody has an affair with Matt Hooper. In the book, Ellen dated Matt's older brother when they were younger and, when they met again as adults, succumbed to the rugged marine biologist's charms. Martin Brody finds out about their liaison, but instead of wrapping up the plot with a confrontation or closure, he just stews in his bitterness, leading to a much less happy ending.
The book also features a subplot about Mayor Larry Vaughn being under the mafia's thumb, as if his character could be any sleazier. Both subplots were cut because they took focus away from the real heart of the movie, the hunt for the deadly shark.
Jaws author Peter Benchley appears briefly in the movie as a TV news reporter giving updates from the beach. Benchley had previously worked as an actual TV news reporter, so the role was a natural fit.
After Jaws, Benchley became a shark expert and conservationist. He said, "Knowing what I know today, I couldn't write the same book. ... I couldn't possibly demonize an animal the way I did."
Richard Dreyfuss, who played Matt Hooper, wasn't Spielberg's first choice for the part. The director first went to Jon Voight, Timothy Bottoms, and Jeff Bridges before George Lucas suggested Dreyfuss, having just worked with him on American Graffiti. Dreyfuss wasn't initially interested in doing the movie, but after meeting with Spielberg a second time, he agreed to join the cast.
Before his breakout role in American Graffiti, Dreyfuss had played small parts in various TV shows like Gunsmoke and That Girl. He would go on to work with Spielberg again in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Always.
Before he started shooting Jaws, Spielberg hired the Australian filmmakers Ron and Valerie Taylor to shoot some underwater film with a real great white shark. The Taylors shot footage of a stuntman confronting the shark from within a cage, which was used in the tense scene in the movie where Hooper comes face to jaws with the shark. But despite the Taylors' experience working in the water, it didn't go as planned.
The stuntman wasn't a trained diver, so he became overwhelmed with fear at the point of being submerged. During a take when he wasn't in the cage, the shark down below got caught in the wires attached to the cage. In its struggle to break free, the shark severed the wires and the cage sank into the sea. Spielberg had originally intended to have Dreyfuss's character killed by the shark during the cage scene, but he loved the happy accident of the Taylors' footage so much that he rewrote the script to have Hooper escape. Valerie Taylor went on to work as a conservationist and advocate for sharks, and the subject of the National Geographic documentary Playing with Sharks. She believes that sharks have distinct personalities and has said, "Some are shy, some are bullies, some are brave."
Martha's Vineyard stood in for the town of Amity, but Spielberg chose the location for more than its quaint New England charm. To capture shots of the shark hunters out on the open ocean, Spielberg needed a location with shallow enough water to install and run the mechanical shark. He said, "It was the only place on the East Coast where I could go twelve miles out to sea and avoid any sighting of land but still have a sandy ocean bottom only thirty feet below the surface, where we could install our shark sled."
Spielberg felt that shooting on the water without any land visible made these scenes more suspenseful. "I wanted the audience to think the boat couldn't just simply turn around and go back to shore. I literally needed a 360-degree stage at sea."
Three mechanical sharks were built for the movie and were nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg's lawyer. They were constructed by special effects wizard Bob Mattey, who also built the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The sharks cost $250,000 to build and were even more expensive to use in the water.
Working with Bruce in the open ocean turned out to be a filmmaker's nightmare. The water rusted its machinery, and it frequently malfunctioned or refused to work at all. The movie had been scheduled to shoot in 55 days, but the trouble with Bruce and the unpredictable nature of shooting in the ocean inflated the shoot to 159 days. Ultimately, Spielberg ended up finding creative ways to shoot around Bruce's limitations. The movie also shows the shark sparingly, with its first appearance coming an hour and 21 minutes into the film.
Production designer Joe Alves worried that Bruce wouldn't be frightening enough for audiences. "I thought people would laugh at the shark because it would make all of these funny noises before the music was added and the crew would laugh."
He went on to say, "But when I saw the first screening, nobody laughed. They started screaming. Then I realized, 'Oh, I think we've got a big success here.'"
Composer John Williams wrote the iconic "Jaws Theme" on the piano, using low, rhythmic notes to build a primal sense of dread. But when Spielberg first heard the composition, he thought it was "too simple." Williams would later recall that when he first played it for the director, Spielberg said, "You can't be serious."
"At that time, I had no idea that it would have that kind of impact on people," Williams said. "Steven and I had a little laugh about it." Williams's score for Jaws won his second Academy Award. He has scored 26 films for Spielberg, including the Indiana Jones trilogy, E.T., and Jurassic Park.
The grizzled seaman Quint's mannerisms and lines were partly inspired by a Martha's Vineyard selectman named Craig Kingsbury, who showed up to an open audition. Spielberg ended up casting Kingsbury as Ben Gardner after nearly choosing him for the role of Quint, which went to Robert Shaw.
Kingsbury ad-libbed lines like, "They'll wish their fathers had never met their mothers, when they start takin' their bottoms out and slammin' into them rocks, boy." Spielberg loved the local color Kingsbury brought to the movie so much that he kept making his part bigger.
A scene was cut from Jaws because of actor Gregory Peck. Originally, the movie introduced Quint disrupting a screening of Moby Dick in an Amity cinema. However, Peck owned the rights to the 1956 movie and didn't allow it to be shown in Jaws.
Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss didn't get along on set. Shaw thought Dreyfuss was arrogant and inexperienced, and in turn, Dreyfuss was frustrated with the older actor's habit of drinking to excess. One day, Shaw reportedly asked Dreyfuss to help him out, and Dreyfuss responded by grabbing and throwing his costar's glass of bourbon out the window. Later that day, Dreyfuss said that Shaw sprayed him with a fire extinguisher mid-take.
In later years, Dreyfuss would speak fondly of his costar, saying, "In private, he was the kindest, gentlest, funniest guy you ever met."
Finally, the line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," is probably the most famous bit of dialogue in Jaws, and it was ad-libbed by actor Roy Scheider. The line came from an inside joke among the crew who were often frustrated by the difficulties of loading all the equipment and amenities of a working film set onto a boat.
Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb explained, "It became a catchphrase for any time anything went wrong—if lunch was late or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.'"Scheider had a habit of slipping the line into his scenes, and the moment when he deadpans it after the movie's first shark sighting was just too good to cut.