48 years ago, the horror movie genre changed forever, and it’s all thanks to Steven Spielberg. On June 20, 1975 a new movie called Jaws hit US cinemas for the first time, directed by the then-little-known director Steven Spielberg. It became the best movie of the summer, with journalists referring to its subsequent box office takeover as ‘Jawsmania.’
But that doesn’t mean making the film was easy. In a 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the director recalled the challenges involved in filming Jaws in a giant body of water.
“I was naïve about the ocean, basically,” he explained. “I was pretty naïve about mother nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank.”
Despite the enormous success of Jaws, Spielberg notably didn’t return to direct the sequel to the thriller movie. His reasons were as follows:
“I was done, I was done with the ocean,” he explained. “I would have done the sequel if I hadn’t had such a horrible time at sea on the first film. I would have absolutely jumped at the chance to own the sequel because I knew that when I was walking away from the sequel I was walking away from a huge piece of my life that I helped to create, but it wasn’t a hard decision to walk away from it.”
Although we’d all love to see a Spielberg-led Jaws sequel, the fact he bowed out on a high helps to preserve Jaws’ legacy as one of the best Steven Spielberg movies of all time, nearly 50 years later.
You can watch Jaws on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video now. Our new on Netflix guide will tell you what else just arrived there, as well.