 To direct, Zanuck and Brown first considered veteran filmmaker John Sturges—whose résumé included another maritime adventure, "The Old Man and the Sea"—before offering the job to Dick Richards, whose directorial debut, "The Culpepper Cattle Co." had come out the previous year.However, they grew irritated by Richards's habit of describing the shark as a whale and soon dropped him from the project.Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg very much wanted the job.