Award winning film director Steven Spielberg He told a BBC radio host that “Really regretThe extermination of sharks resulted in part from his horrific portrayal of fish in his 1975 film “Jaws.”
The sport of fishing rose after the hit movie that tells the story of a vengeful great white shark that attacks a coastal town in New York and the fishermen who come to kill it. Spielberg used a mechanical shark in the film.
Spielberg was asked by host Lauren Laverne BBC Radio 4‘s “Desert Island DiscsSunday’s podcast If he’d be afraid of sharks if he lived on a desert island.
“One of the things I’m still afraid of [is] “Don’t get eaten by a shark,” Spielberg said, “but these sharks are somewhat pissed at me for the rampage of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975.”
“I am truly and to this day sorry for the sharks that perished because of it [‘Jaws’] The book and the movie. I really am sorry about that.”
Peter Benchley, who wrote the 1974 book on which Spielberg’s film was based, has publicly apologized for his role in the sharp decline in shark numbers.
George Burgess, director of the Florida Shark Research Program in Gainesville, he told the BBC Years ago, the book and movie sparked a “mass testosterone rush” among fishermen who “swept across the East Coast of the United States.”
Thousands of fishermen set out to catch sharks after seeing them ′Jaws“,” Burgess.
“Jaws were a turning point for great white sharks,” Oliver Kremmmen, who has been curator of fish at the Natural History Museum in London for more than 40 years, told the BBC.
“I actually saw Big change is happening in the public and scientific perception of sharks when Peter Benchley’s book Jaws was published and later made into a movie.”
Burgess estimates the number of large sharks decreased by 50% along the East Coast of the United States in the years since Jaws was released.
Research by biologist Dr. Julia Baum found that between 1986 and 2000, there was a population decline of 89% in hammerhead sharks, 79% in great white sharks and 65% in tiger sharks in the northwest. Atlantic Ocean. This was due to both sport and commercial hunting.
Consequently, Benchley spent some time after the publication of his book campaigning to save sharks.
“Jaws was a complete fantasy,” said Benchley. London Daily Express in 2006. “Knowing what I know now, I could never have written this book today.”
Sharks “don’t target humans, and they certainly don’t hold grudges,” said Benchley, which is depicted in his book and movie.
“There is no such thing as a rogue shark with a taste for human flesh,” Benchley added.
Spielberg’s latest movie, “The Fabelmans,” focuses on humans. It is mostly the true story of his childhood and his introduction to filmmaking.
Spielberg called the critically acclaimed film a “40 million dollar treat,” adding, “I didn’t know, really, what I was doing, except that I was responding to a need that I had.”
Spielberg said he struggled with making the film because it brought together vivid memories of his youth. “It was a tightrope for a while,” he said of filmmaking.
When asked by Laverne if he got emotional during filming, he replied, “Yes, I did. I did. Oh, my God, I did.”
Check out the trailer for “Jaws” — which stars sharks as “the devil” — here: