Steven Spielberg says he believed his directing career was over halfway through the production of Jaws, recalling how he was warned that the film was so far overschedule and overbudget that he would “never get hired again”.
Speaking at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Wednesday morning during the preview of its new Jaws exhibition, Spielberg looked back at the 1975 film, joking that he hadn’t come prepared with a speech because he “didn’t come prepared in 1974 to make Jaws, or not prepare very well enough, I decided to risk it again”.
“I’m empty-handed except for the collection of memories stimulated just in the last hour and a half of walking through the exhibition that they have so ingeniously assembled from the archives of collectors all over the world,” Spielberg, 78, was quoted as saying by The Hollywood Reporter.
“I thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws because everybody was saying to me, ‘You are never going to get hired again.’ ‘This film is way over budget, way over schedule and you are a real liability as a director.’ I really thought that I better give this my all because I’m not working in the industry again after they see the movie. Fortunately, fortune smiled on us.”
Spielberg was 26 at the time and Jaws was only his second feature film. What began as a modest production quickly turned into an ordeal: bad weather, technical failures, and the decision to shoot on the open ocean combined to push the film 100 days over schedule.
“We shot 158 days but nobody wanted to quit. Nobody wanted to stop,” he said. “My hubris was that I thought we could take a Hollywood crew, go out 12 miles into the Atlantic Ocean and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark. I thought that was going to go swimmingly. Spoiler alert: it didn’t go swimmingly.”
Spielberg added that he was offered opportunities to walk away. “Several times I was offered a chance to gracefully bow out – not to be replaced by another director, but for the film to be shut down.”
The Jurassic Park director credited the cast and crew’s resilience and camaraderie with seeing the project through.
“I’ve never been closer to a crew or a cast until many years later. But this was the ultimate example that when you work as a team, you can actually get the ball across the finish line,” he said. “The film certainly cost me a pound of flesh, but gave me a ton of career.”
The exhibition is being held in the Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery and showcases Spielberg’s annotated script, Joe Alves’s original shark illustrations, behind-the-scenes pictures, John Williams’s sheet music, and props such as the original clapperboard and a shark cage.
Spielberg did not elaborate further on the physical or psychological toll of making Jaws during the preview, but he has previously described having panic attacks after the shoot ended.
In June, Spielberg talked about suffering what he believed to be a heart attack after the film had wrapped.
“I couldn’t breathe, I thought I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t get a full breath of air,” he said. “I kept going to the bathroom and splashing water on my face. I was shaking. I was out of it – completely out of it.”
Jaws went on to earn over $475m at the box office, becoming the first true summer blockbuster. It won three Academy Awards and went on to become part of filmmaking lore but the experience left Spielberg with “consistent nightmares” for years.
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