Steven Spielberg may now be hailed as one of the greatest living filmmakers, but in the summer of 1974, he was convinced his career was already finished. Speaking at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles this week, ahead of a new exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Spielberg admitted that halfway through production he thought the film would sink him.
“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,’” Spielberg recalled.
The director, then just 26 years old and making his second feature film, had decided to shoot on the waters off Martha’s Vineyard. It was a bold choice, but one that came with endless challenges. “My hubris was that 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,” he joked.
Instead, the production was plagued by breakdowns, delays, and seasickness. “I’ve never seen so much vomit in my life,” Spielberg said, laughing. “In the six months out to sea, I have never seen so many people getting sick.” He added that he avoided seasickness himself, but only because “I had the weight of this production on my shoulders and I didn’t have time to get sick.”
The film’s three animatronic sharks, nicknamed “Bruce” after Spielberg’s lawyer, failed so often that the crew was forced to improvise. That necessity, Spielberg now acknowledges, gave birth to the movie’s legendary suspense—where the shark is more often implied than seen.
The new exhibit, the Academy Museum’s first dedicated to a single film, highlights those creative problem-solving moments. It showcases everything from editor Verna Fields’s Oscar-winning contributions to John Williams’s unforgettable score, whose simple “dun-dun” motif became shorthand for impending danger.
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Still, the daily grind was brutal. Spielberg recalled boat races ruining his wide shots of the ocean. “Because it was 1974, there were no simple tools to erase the sails from the film post-production. So most of the time, we just waited. People played cards. A lot of people vomited.” At one point, a speedboat accidentally tore planks from the Orca, the film’s central fishing boat, tossing sound director John Carter into the water—recorder still in hand.
Looking back now, Spielberg sees Jaws not as a disaster narrowly averted but as the turning point that launched him. The film grossed $260.7 million domestically, set the template for the modern summer blockbuster, and turned its once-doubtful director into a Hollywood powerhouse.
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