How Jaws Terrified Even Steven Spielberg

As the blockbuster turns 50, the director details his panic and PTSD in a new Nat Geo doc

- JUSTIN HARP

"I was terrified I was going to be fired, but I never felt like I wanted to quit," Spielberg says.

“I thought I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t get a full breath of air.

I kept going to the bathroom and splashing water on my face. I was shaking,” director Steven Spielberg says of the “full-blown panic attack” he experienced after wrapping Jaws. The shark epic’s five-month Martha’s Vineyard shoot had been, in a word, brutal.