Nature & Animals influenced Jaws

The shark in the water is a real shark. Ron and Valerie Taylor shot the live great white footage off Dangerous Reef in South Australia, using a scaled-down cage and a short actor to make the animals look larger, and that footage is cut into the film because the mechanical shark kept failing. The animal's behaviour is the film's subject and it was researched as behaviour: the approach from below, the roll of the eye, the bump before the bite, the fact that a shark does not reason and cannot be reasoned with. Hooper's dialogue is a marine biologist's. Behind it, Peter Benchley has named the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks and a 4,550-pound great white landed off Montauk in 1964 as what made him write the novel. He spent his later life campaigning for shark conservation, partly in answer to what the film did to them.