“I really regret that the shark population was decimated because of the book and the movie. I really, really regret that.” It is with these words that Steven Spielberg, interviewed by BBC radio on the Desert Island Discs program this Sunday, December 18, expressed his remorse after the success of his second feature film: Jaws, and the consequences of the latter on marine fauna the day after its theatrical release 47 years ago. Because if this bloody thriller – adapted from the eponymous novel by Peter Benchley – made cinemas jump when it was released in 1975, it profoundly upset the public’s perception of sharks, thus contributing to the mass slaughter of these marine animals.
“It’s one of the things I always fear, also confides the American director, that the sharks kinda blame me for the crazy sportfisherman feeding frenzy that happened after 1975.” A legitimate concern, since according to a study published in the journal Nature last year, the world population of sharks has decreased by 71% since the 1970s due to overfishing, and according to the Shark Conservation Fund, 36% of the 1,250 species of sharks and rays identified in the world are currently threatened with extinction.
Flash-back
However, it all began in the heat of the summer of 1974. Then barely 20 years old, Steven Spielberg shot the first images of what would be his second feature film, and the greatest cinematic success before seeing himself dethroned by Star Wars: a breathtaking thriller adapted from a bestseller published a year earlier entitled Jaws (Jaws, literally “Jaws” in English). Carried by the heady – and chilling – musical theme composed by John Williams, the action unfolds on the edge of the fictional seaside resort of Amity Island, where a young bather and then a child die devoured by an animal with sharp jaws, presented like a beast hungry for human blood. A “devouring machine”, “As if God had created the Devil, and had endowed him with jaws” warns the narrator from the first seconds of the trailer. From then on, the head of the local police (Roy Scheider) intends to prohibit access to the sea, but he quickly comes up against the refusal of the mayor who fears that this will affect the arrival of tourists at the dawn of the national holiday. . The chief of police then decides to hunt the predator, with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a shark hunter (Robert Shaw).
Suspense, rise in power and pseudo-scientific arguments, the public was quickly seduced by the finesse of the scenario. However, the painting that the director erects of sharks has made a lasting impression, emptying for a short time the shores furtively deserted by frightened swimmers, before putting the lives of these animals in permanent danger. As such, beaches were sometimes surrounded by barriers, and some communities began to offer rewards and money to whoever would bring back a dead shark, which led fishermen to search for them relentlessly: “Shark fishing has started to be all the rage. Some newspapers considered it a new sport.”describes George Burgess, an ichthyologist and fisheries biologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, at the Smithsonian.
And if Benchley’s novel was inspired by a case that had hit the headlines in New Jersey in 1916, 25 years after the film’s release, the author already admitted to regret having written this novel, deploring the threat of disappearance which weighs on several species of sharks. According to a 2019 report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 11 species of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction.