Steven Spielberg regrets his role in shark hunting following Jaws

Just when he thought it was safe to come out of the water, Jaws director Steven Spielberg is expressing remorse over his role in the declining shark population globally.

In a new interview with BBC’s radio program Desert Island Discs, Steven Spielberg discussed what he feels was his–and Jaws author Peter Benchley’s–role. “I truly and to this day regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that.” According to one study, the world population of sharks has fallen more than 70% since the 1970s, the same decade Jaws swam up and bit audiences in the ass.

“That’s one of the things I still fear,” said Spielberg. “Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sports fishermen that happened after 1975.”

Paul Cox, a chief executive of the Shark Trust in Plymouth, however, assures Steven Spielberg that it’s the fishermen that sharks would be more upset with. “The cases of shark population decline are very clearly fisheries overfishing” and not a blockbuster movie.

Still, Cox is grateful for Steven Spielberg bringing attention to the issue of the shark population. “For someone with his celebrity to be addressing the challenge of communicating about sharks in a more positive way is very welcome.”

Nearly 50 years after its 1975 release, Jaws is still scaring audiences both into theaters and away from the water. To date, Jaws has grossed over $475 million worldwide, including through an IMAX re-release just this year.

The American Film Institute named it the #2 most thrilling movie ever made, just behind Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Some of the movie’s biggest thrills come in what Steven Spielberg refers to as manipulation. Also in the interview, he said, “A film-maker must never manipulate the audience unless every single scene has a jack-in-the-box kind of scare. That’s manipulation…I did that a couple of times in Poltergeist and I certainly did it once in Jaws, where the head comes out of the hole. That’s OK, I confess that.”

Steven Spielberg currently has his latest, The Fabelmans–which our own Chris Bumbray called “an invaluable look at how one of the greatest artists of our time came to be”–in theaters.

Did Jaws keep you out of the water when you first saw it?