Everybody who has seen Jaws remembers the music cue that John Williams created for the great white shark. There are few scenes or lines of dialogue in the movie that are as memorable – or as frightening – as that score.
This video captures the power of that score to stay lodged in memory many years after seeing the movie. The video also features Williams, Steven Spielberg and others talking about the music and how it came to be.
Williams, who became the composer of choice for Spielberg, George Lucas and others who created the new kind of movies that forever changed Hollywood and the moviegoing experience in the 1980s, remembers Jaws as the first film he worked on that he actually really liked.
“I think he saw something deeply primal about Jaws and I think he decided that it needed a primal response,” Spielberg says. “It needed a primal sound, something that was…extremely basic.”
The sound, Spielberg rightly observes, was “almost like a siren to warn you that something was coming in to get you.”
This excerpt is one of the features included on the new Jaws Blu-Ray
