San Francisco Film Society Oral History Project Interview with ...

CLAUDE JARMAN: Let’s talk about that later. We had Steven Spielberg in the afternoon as a new
director. He had just made Jaws, which I just saw 30 minutes of last night. My twelve-year-old daughter
loves Hitchcock. She loves Psycho. And finally I said, “OK, you’re twelve; I’ll show you Jaws.” And
my other daughter won’t watch it. It was her birthday yesterday, so I said, “OK, we’ll watch a half hour
of it.” Such a great film.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Oh, yeah.
CLAUDE JARMAN: Oh, man, it’s such a good film.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Did he bring some of the film to show you, because it hadn’t been
released yet, had it?
CLAUDE JARMAN: He showed some of it.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: What impressed you about him?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Just a casual, nice guy. He had just made one other film, The Sugarland Express,
right? And of course, Jaws was just putting him on the map. It was pretty amazing, pretty amazing.
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: Did you know that was going to happen, or did you suspect? Is that why
you had him?
CLAUDE JARMAN: Yes, I think he was a new person that we wanted to feature, because he was
somebody who, like Coppola, was coming up. We had Michael Caine and his Indian-born wife, Shakira.
And was that Jack Nicholson that year?
MARGARITA LANDAZURI: I think that was later. Yeah, ’76 was Nicholson.
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