It was a film that made Steven Spielberg a name to reckon with both globally, both among critics and cinemagoers. Yet, the Oscar winning director, “truly regrets” the portrayal of great white sharks in his 1975 movie “Jaws” according to a smithsonianmag.com report as it triggered a steep decrease in their population.

When asked on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, how he would feel if he was on a desert surrounded by sharks, Spielberg said: “That’s one of the things I still fear — not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975. I truly, and to this day, regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film.”

The Academy Award winning film about how a cop, a ship captain and a marine biologist track down a killer great white shark that preys on individuals in a New York beach town led to hunting of thousands of these fishes for sport. Years after the film’s release there was a 50 per cent reduction in the population of large sharks in the waters east of North America.

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Writing in Smithsonian magazine in 2014, Nancy Knowlton and Wendy Benchley stated: “In the public’s mind, the fear of sharks that ‘Jaws’ initially inspired was soon replaced by fascination, which continues to this day. Sadly, that fascination has been joined with despair over the last several decades, as evidence has accumulated that shark populations are plummeting, driven by overfishing.”

That the shark population is precarious is evident from the Red List of Threatened Species of International Union for Conservation of Nature. It specifies that more than 33 per cent of the shark species and 75 per cent of oceanic shark species face the threat of extinction.

Still there are experts like Paul Cox, Chief Executive of Shark Trust, who don’t attribute the plight of sharks to Spielberg’s film alone. Talking to the Guardian, Cox said: “The cases of shark population decline are very clearly fisheries overfishing.”

Yet, the movie did instil a deep fear of these top marine predators. A major part of the tension created by the film was due to the fact that the audience gets to see the great white shark rarely. This was to create a sense of anticipation and also because the mechanical shark kept breaking down.

Spielberg told BBC Radio 4: “I had to be resourceful in figuring out how to create suspense and terror without seeing the shark itself. It was just good fortune that the shark kept breaking. It was my good luck, and I think it’s the audience’s good luck, too, because it’s a scarier movie without seeing so much of the shark.”

The film did create galeophobia – fear of sharks – among people. Elaborating on it, Christopher Paul Jones, a phobia specialist told the Guardian: “You can’t see below water, and the music creates a sense of fear. Movies are very good at hitting every sense—visual, sound—and can be very impactful on how we feel.”

Not just Spielberg but also the late author of the book “Jaws” that inspired the movie, Peter Benchley, had apologised for the adverse impact the narrative had on the population of sharks. He was quoted in the London Daily Express in 2006 as stating: “Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges. There’s no such thing as a rogue man-eater shark with a taste for human flesh. In fact, sharks rarely take more than one bite out of people, because we’re so lean and unappetizing to them.”