After Hooper's comment, "He's working his way up to us," Quint rushes to the stern and shoots another line into the shark. In a very tight close-up of the shark's gills it is very apparent that they are just wide carved ridges, with no slits whatsoever, to even attempt to give the illusion that they are real, like in other great shots of Bruce. See more...
Directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Carl Gottlieb, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider (add more)
Genres: Thriller
In the novel, Quint dies differently. He is stabbing the shark with a harpoon. He then gets tangled in the harpoon rope and is yelling to Chief Brody to give him the knife. Quint then gets dragged underwater by the shark and drowns. This is similar to the death of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.
The reporter on the beach is Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel "Jaws," and also co-wrote the film's screenplay.
The guy who is the voice on Quint's radio is Steven Spielberg.
Matt Hooper was originally supposed to die. After the infamous incident where the real shark was caught in the wires above the miniature cage, the midget actor refused to go back in the water with it, meaning the filmmakers had to rewrite the script for Hooper to survive.
Quint's boat is named Orca. The orca is the only natural predator the great white shark has (besides humans).
Quint's monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, now a classic film scene, is not in the novel, and is not in the original screenplay. Robert Shaw wrote the speech himself and insisted on including it.
In the scene when the three guys are out on the boat in the dark looking for the shark, a meteor shoots past Roy's right shoulder - this meteor was a real one. In the next few frames another meteor shoots across the top of the frame - this meteor is CG, added in post-production, which is Spielberg's trademark.
The shark in the film was nicknamed Bruce - after Spielberg's attorney.
Steven Spielberg has referred to Bruce as being a "floating turd" in interviews. You can see his point when you see the shark in full length for the first time.
The name Ben Gardner comes up in the film when Brody asks if Ben caught the Tiger shark, and when Brody and Hooper find Ben's battered boat (which leads to Hooper seeing his severed head), though Ben is never introduced in the film. Ben does make two unidentified appearances while alive. When Hooper arrives in Amity, Ben is the first man to greet him at the dock, and at the start of the shark hunt Ben is the first man shown in a moving boat, as he complains about the other fishermen.
Throughout the movie the color yellow runs as a theme. Yellow is known as a color that sharks can actually see, which is why lifeboats should not be painted in that color.
Brody's dog actually was the real life pet dog of Steven Spielberg.
After the shark blows up and they show it under water you can hear a sound, taken from "Creature from the Black Lagoon ". It was also used when the truck was falling off the cliff in Duel, another Spielberg movie.
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