The Latest Breaking News from Steven Spielberg

When I was eight years old, on a Saturday night before surf lifesaving training, my dad put on the film Jaws and it changed my life forever.

It’s hard to believe Steven Spielberg was just 27 when he directed Jaws. Before that he’d mostly worked in television, helming episodes of detective show Columbo and the acclaimed TV movie Duel. He’d made just one theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express.

The collapse of classical Hollywood’s studio system in the 1960s mirrored much of America’s cultural and political uncertainties at the time. The assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement and the escalating Vietnam war provided a background that destabilised the optimism with which the decade…

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws opened across North America on June 20 1975, and immediately tapped into the primal human fear of being hunted by a huge, savvy predator.