Though the mechanical shark on the set of Jaws often refused to function, John Williams conjured a theme for it that worked like gangbusters. And while the primordial dun-duns he landed on to signal the great white’s presence may be so simple that Spielberg assumed his maestro was having a laugh when he first heard them, the genius driving Jaws’ score is no joke.
“There’s this wonderful sense of the pistons of a machine going.”
Take that main theme, a bassy, two-note tuba ostinato rooted in the stabs of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho and the orchestral drama of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite. What strange alchemy allows this basic semitone to give Jaws’ shark such power? “What you have to understand is, because these two notes, E and F, are so close together, they sort of clash,” explains fêted composer — and John Williams superfan — Hans Zimmer, speaking to Empire over Zoom as he plays Williams’ theme on his synthesiser. “You don’t know what key you’re in. You don’t know where the shark is. Is he here? (Plays an E) Is he there? (Plays an F) Are you an E? Or an F? You know, Williams and Spielberg describe the shark as this relentless machine, and in the rhythm of the theme there’s this wonderful sense of the pistons of a machine going.”
But if it’s the simplicity of Jaws’ theme that gets the blood pumping, it’s the Oscar-winning suite Williams builds around it that makes the movie soar. “It’s an extraordinary orchestral adventure,” says Zimmer, citing Williams’ ‘Shark Cage Fugue’, an almost Bachian composition that sees him tee up the battle of wills between the minds of Hooper, Brody, and Quint and the sheer primal power of the shark, as a particular highpoint. “It serves the picture beautifully. It’s man versus machine, it’s two subjects colliding, and it’s what I adore about John. He always writes something of great quality. He makes the film more sophisticated.”
For Zimmer, there’s no question that Williams’ score ranks among the legendary composer’s all-time classics. “We’re still talking about it 50 years later, so it’s timeless,” he enthuses. “And it does this beautiful thing — which I love — which is it actually exists outside the film. You don’t need to have the images playing. You don’t need to have the film playing. You can just listen to it as a concert piece, and it works.” Job done, JW.
This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Empire
