“You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat”: How Jaws’s Most Famous Line Came to Be

The line “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” from Jaws (1975) has gone down as one of the most iconic quotes in movie history. Spoken by Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) moments after the eponymous shark appears behind the Orca, it’s been referenced countless times in film and television, and ranks 35th on AFI’s list of the top 100 movie quotes. It was famously ad-libbed by Scheider, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor didn’t pull the line out of thin air.

Carl Gottlieb, who co-wrote the screenplay for Jaws, revealed the origin of “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” to The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. Filming Jaws on the water made for a troubled production, with the crew working off a barge that carried the equipment and craft services plus a smaller support boat. Crew members complained to producers that this support boat was too small, which was how they coined the soon-to-be-famous phrase.

“ Zanuck and Brown were very stingy producers, so everyone kept telling them, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat,’” Gottlieb told The Hollywood Reporter. “It became a catchphrase for any time anything went wrong—if lunch was late or the swells were rocking the camera, someone would say, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’”

Scheider eventually picked up the saying and started sneaking it into takes. One of his ad-libs came after his character’s first confrontation with the shark, which is also the audience’s first good look at the human-eating antagonist following an hour of suspense-building. Scheider’s timing and delivery instantly made movie history. “It was so appropriate and so real and it came at the right moment, thanks to Verna Fields’s editing,” Gottlieb said.

The stories of the making of Jaws have almost become as famous as the film itself. Here are more facts about Steven Spielberg’s classic monster movie.

Read About More Movies Here:

A version of this story originally ran in 2020; it has been updated for 2024.