Jaws Secrets for the 50th Anniversary
8. As for Roy Scheider, he landed the part of police chief Martin Brody after meeting Spielberg at a party.
“I was sitting there and somebody walked over to me and introduced themselves to me and said, ‘You’re sitting here all alone. Are you OK?'” Spielberg recalled in Jaws: The Inside Story. “And it was Roy Scheider.”
Spielberg began lamenting to Scheider—who at this point had starred in The French Connection—about how he couldn’t find an actor to play Chief Brody.
“I told him the whole story—I even told him the five or six actors I had talked to that I decided that I didn’t want to go with,” the Oscar winner continued. “Roy looked at me and he said, ‘What about me? I’m an actor. I’d love to be in Jaws.'”
9. While Scheider got the part, Charlton Heston had also been vying for the role. However, Spielberg was concerned Heston—who’d starred in The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and The Agony and the Ecstasy—was too big of a star and that the audience wouldn’t relate to him.
“I thought for Charlton Heston to play that part would be a little bit not fair for the shark,” he added in Jaws: The Inside Story, “because the shark wouldn’t last through the first act.”
10. And you’re gonna need…to thank Scheider for this iconic line.
“One of the oft-quoted lines in the movie is Roy Scheider saying, ‘We gotta get a bigger boat,’ which he improvised on the set,” Gottlieb said in 1995’s The Making of Jaws. “I acknowledge that as a writer. I’m pleased that he said that.”
