Steven Spielberg’s Jaws recalled by Valerie Taylor as film turns 40

Forty years after Spielberg’s classic Jaws was released, meet the film’s Australian inspiration, Valerie Taylor.

Jaws convinced a generation of cinemagoers that sharks were ruthless killing machines.

When I tentatively ask 79-year-old Valerie Taylor if she still scuba-dives, she erupts with incredulous horror. “Oh my God, yes! What else would I do? I dive as often as I can. I’m just back from a five-week trip around the Indian Ocean.” This is a woman who began her underwater career as a teenage spearfishing champion before becoming one half of a famous and glamorous husband-and-wife marine cinematography duo, so understandably the idea of a week above water must seem unnatural.

It is 41 years since the work of Valerie and her husband Ron Taylor caught the eye of a 27-year-old wunderkind director called Steven Spielberg, who hired them to film footage for one of his first major film projects, Jaws. This month marks the 40th anniversary of the blockbuster’s theatrical release, which would propel their work into the public consciousness in a way that neither Valerie nor her husband could have predicted.

But the silver screen was far from Valerie’s mind when she first started diving. Her illustrious and thrilling career began simply because her London-born father suffered from stomach ulcers and required a meat-free diet. “We had a waterfront home in Sydney and my brother and I snorkelled with spears to catch fish to eat,” she explains. “Spearfishing and diving was very male-dominated at the time; I didn’t know any other female divers. But I was a spearo, and I was good.”

In her late teens she joined the St George Spearfishing Club in Sydney, where she met Ron, the man she would later marry and work alongside for decades, until his death three years ago from leukaemia.

In addition to spearfishing, Ron was an underwater cinematographer, and the couple swiftly realised there was money to be made in filming Valerie underwater.

“What documentary-makers really loved was footage of a beautiful young blonde in a ­bikini, swimming with marine animals,” says Valerie with a chuckle. “And they weren’t interested in coral or swordfish; they wanted me with sharks, manta rays, anything big or dangerous.”

The Taylors’ first big underwater film production, Shark Hunters, was sold to Australian and American television in 1963. “Ron and I sensed that marine animals just need to be treated with respect and then they will give you space,” says Valerie.

Indeed, in all her decades diving with sharks, Taylor has only been bitten on a couple of occasions. “Nothing major,” she shrugs. “He couldn’t take a chunk out of me because I’d just hang on to his nose.”

In 1969 she took up underwater photography and became a world star of the genre, eventually appearing on the cover of National Geographic. With their own underwater cinematography company, Ron and Valerie were much in demand for documentary and feature film footage. During filming for the 1971 documentary Blue Water, White Death, they found themselves in the midst of a feeding frenzy of 200 oceanic whitetips on a sperm whale, a particularly hairy moment. “But I don’t really get frightened, I get excited,” Valerie says. “Being afraid just isn’t part of my personality.”

The novel Jaws by Peter Benchley, which Spielberg adapted, was partly inspired by Ron’s documentary Hunt for the Great White Shark. Shooting footage for the film off the coast of South Australia, the Taylors used a small shark-proof cage with a small diver inside — an ex-jockey named Carl Rizzo — to make the real sharks look as large, relatively, as the 25ft mechanical model. While recording the sequence, a great white became entangled in the cage’s cables and began thrashing violently as it tried to break free. The resulting footage, shot by Ron, is among the most terrifying episodes in the film. Surely this was a frightening moment? “No,” insists Valerie. “Jaws was just a job.”

But nobody could have predicted the impact this particular job would have — on the box office and on the public’s attitude to sharks. “Universal was horrified,” recalls Valerie. “They took Ron and me all over America, doing talk shows to reassure people this shark didn’t really exist, that it was safe to swim in the sea.” But shark phobia had gripped the West; an entire generation of cinemagoers left theatres convinced sharks were ruthless killing machines, despite Valerie’s constant reiterations that prior to the 1970s there were only five recorded deaths due to great whites in Australian waters. “Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today,” Benchley later admitted.

Within the marine conservation world, Ron and Valerie were vilified for their role in a movie that demonised sharks. “It caused the most incredible slaughter of sharks, and they tried to blame us,” says Valerie. “To us, Jaws was a fictitious story about a fictitious shark. But Jaws was so well done that people took it to heart.”

The criticism stung because by this stage Ron and Valerie had renounced spearfishing and were fiercely committed to marine conservation. It was at the Australian Spearfishing Championship in Queensland in 1969 that the pair had an epiphany. “We looked at all these beautiful tropical fish lying on the beach waiting to be weighed in, and I thought, ‘What have we done?’ Ron said to me, ‘This is terrible. We’re making a living filming beautiful marine animals and then for sport we’re killing them.’ ”

They won the competition but never fished again, instead using their celebrity status to raise awareness. In the late 70s, with post-Jaws shark phobia at fever pitch, Valerie made what she considers a big contribution to the public understanding of great whites. “There were three around our boat and I went down on a tiny platform and could see one of the sharks had a sweetness about him. We had a con­nection. So I crouched down and brought him in and had this great white shark eating from my hand.”

By the 80s, Ron and Valerie — along with fellow conservationists Benchley and his wife Wendy — had regained the high regard of the international conservation community. They successfully lobbied the Australian government to protect the Coral Sea Islands off Queensland, and their documentary films about the wreck of the Yongala, an iconic diving site, and the Great Barrier Reef proved instrumental in promoting the conservation of reefs. Valerie, who still lives in Sydney, has continued her conservation efforts since Ron’s death, as well as continuing to dive with sharks.

“Last year I travelled from Sydney to Adelaide with a big sign, to sit alone on the steps of parliament,” she recalls. “I felt pretty stupid actually. But the press came and the politicians called. I spoke to one for 45 minutes and he ­finally voted with the conservationists.”

Recently even Jaws, which was so controversial at the time, has been retrospectively credited with raising public interest in marine life. While shark attacks have been steadily rising for the past century, according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History, this can be explained by better reporting of such incidents and the growing number of people spending time in the water. Scientists at the museum point out that an ocean swimmer has only a one in 11.5 million chance of being bitten by a shark.

Valerie, meanwhile, takes a philosophical approach to the risks. “Yes, we have shark attacks here, but I don’t know one person who has survived a shark attack who blames the shark,” she says. “It doesn’t come up on the beach or up a street and grab you. You are a monster in its world. You made the decision to go into the water, and you have to live with it.”

© Anna Hart / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2015