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Steven Spielberg thought the iconic Jaws theme by John Williams was a joke the first time he heard it
Watching John Williams play the iconic Jaws theme on the piano for the first time had director Steven Spielberg laughing
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John Williams today is considered THEE maestro of film scoring. And like all geniuses, Williams has had the experience of being misunderstood and laughed at. It's just that the person who laughed at him just happened to be a young Steven Spielberg, who'd just heard the theme music for his 1975 feature Jaws for the first time.
Steven Spielberg recalled when John Williams played the Jaws theme for him for the first time in a 2023 interview, saying that the composer "played for me on the piano the main Jaws theme — I expected to hear something weird and melodic, tonal but eerie — perhaps something to suggest the shark underwater. "And what he played me instead with two fingers on the lower keys was ‘Dun dun, dun dun, dun, dun, dun . . .’ At first, I began to laugh — I thought he was putting me on. It seemed too simple."
Upon hearing Spielberg's laugher, the director said that Williams "said, 'That’s the theme for Jaws!' I asked him to play it again, and it suddenly seemed right. Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones, and John had found the signature for the whole movie. Without that score, to this day, I believe the film would have been only half as successful.”
Poor Williams. He did not channel the sense of anxiety of Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King in a creature feature score, just for a whippersnapper of a director to think he was joking. Luckily for all of us, Spielberg was open-minded enough to give Williams's minimalist score a chance.
The score for Jaws is simple but effective, just like the film's story: "Ocean scary. Big shark scary." The fear we have of being eaten by an animal is deeply primal, and I think over-intellectualizing with the film's score would have undercut the horror of Jaws. Because at the end of the day, in an enclave like Martha's Vineyard, no one ever wants to reconnect with their lizard brain. There's something placating in not having to worry about the same things that your ancestors did hundreds and thousands of years ago.
When that sense of safety is removed and we can't use our intellect to address the urgent, many-toothed problem swimming directly at us, it's a horrifying loss.
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