Director Steven Spielberg is apologizing for the impact his movie Jaws had on the shark population 47 years after the film’s release.
The 1975 Hollywood blockbuster is about a New England beach town trying to fight off a great white shark that is killing tourists and hikers. The director, 76, told BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs in a recent interview that he believes the film’s popularity correlated with the decline of sharks.
“I sincerely and to this day regret the destruction of the shark population because of the book and the movie. I really regret it,” said Spielberg, who was 27 when the film was made.
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“That’s one of the things I’m still afraid of. Not to be eaten by a shark, but that the sharks are somehow mad at me because of the feeding frenzy of the crazy sports fishermen that happened after 1975,” he said. continue Spielberg.
However, the link between the film’s popularity and the decline of shark populations in recent decades is not widely accepted, according to shark expert Paul Cox, who told the Guardian that pinning the blame on jaws it would be “giving the film too much credit”.
“The cases of shark population declines are very clearly overfishing,” Cox added.
However, the author of the book on which the film is based agrees with Spielberg that the popularity of the franchise had a devastating effect on the shark population.
“Knowing what I know now, I could never write this book today,” Peter Benchley told the BBC in 2015. “Sharks don’t target humans and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”
This story originally appeared on Fox News and is republished here with permission.