Spielberg’s Surprising Favourite: Why Duel Outshines Jaws

Five decades on, Steven Spielberg’s name still carries considerable weight in the world of cinema. His output ranges from box office juggernauts to more personal fare, yet when pressed on his own preferences, Spielberg’s answer is not quite what most would expect. In a revealing conversation, he confessed a particular fondness for his 1971 television thriller, Duel, describing it as a bolder, more demanding project than the universally celebrated Jaws.

Spielberg’s admiration for Duel stems from the unique challenges it presented. Unlike the monstrous shark of Jaws, Duel’s antagonist is a faceless lorry, its menace conjured from the ordinary. The director credits much of the film’s success to Richard Matheson’s script, and he’s quick to admit that writing has never been his favourite part of the process. Collaboration, he says, is where the magic happens.

Improvisation at the Heart of Spielberg’s Early Work

Spielberg has never been one to stick rigidly to the script. He’s spoken openly about his aversion to writing, preferring instead to let scenes evolve through the instincts of his cast. On both Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he would often identify the emotional core of a scene, then encourage the actors to improvise around it. These sessions, sometimes chaotic, were recorded and later mined for the best material, which he would then weave into the final script overnight.

This approach, he believes, stripped away unnecessary dialogue and left only the raw emotion. It’s why the terror in Jaws or the wonder in Close Encounters feels so immediate. As Spielberg put it,

There are moments with the people when they improvise and go beyond the script. Essentially I’m not a writer and I don’t enjoy writing. I’d much rather collaborate… So I locked myself away to write Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and when I came out I had a pretty good structure but I wasn’t crazy about some of the characters.

The actors helped me shake out the fat and get right down to what the scene was about – essentially the same thing I did on Jaws. We would find the theme of each scene, we would do improvisations about that theme (I had a tape recorder running), then I’d quickly run to the typewriter, find the best lines, and rewrite the scene.

Jaws: A Primal Scream, Not a Philosophical Exercise

When it came to Jaws, Spielberg’s intentions were straightforward. He wasn’t aiming for a deep, philosophical meditation; he wanted to provoke a visceral reaction. The film was designed to unsettle, to tap into a primal fear. He described it as a “primal scream movie,” intent on delivering the same jolt he’d felt when reading the original novel.

Despite the daily script changes and the resulting production chaos, Spielberg recalls being left largely to his own devices by the studio. Reflecting on this period, he remarked,

For some strange reason, I got away with murder on ‘Jaws’. They just left me alone. I changed the script every day, but I never received a telephone call from any of the powerful executives on the West Coast. I don’t think anybody was ever in love with any of the screenplays and felt that the story and script could only be improved.

When I read the book I had a lot of fun, and when I began reworking the screenplay I had even more fun. And I really said, I’m going to make a primal scream movie. When I first got involved in the project, the thing that terrified me most was the idea that there’s something else out there, that has a digestive system with intake; and the whole idea of being on somebody else’s menu was just utterly horrifying.

That creative freedom, he suggests, allowed Jaws to become the raw, unforgettable experience it is. The fear at its core is simple: the terror of being prey. Spielberg never set out to make anything more than a thrilling ride, but the result resonated far beyond his expectations.

Duel: A More Audacious Undertaking

Yet, for all Jaws’ cultural impact, Spielberg maintains that Duel was the more audacious film. The challenge, he explains, lay in generating suspense from something as mundane as a lorry. Sharks are inherently frightening, but to make a truck terrifying required a different set of skills. Duel, he says, had to invent its own rules for tension—no musical cues, no villainous speeches, no rationale for the threat.

Spielberg found this lack of logic more disturbing than anything in Jaws. The truck in Duel is less a character than a force, its motives unknowable. As he put it,

‘Jaws’ is a raw nerve movie, it’s just baring your nerves and saying this is about the birth sac, you swim around in yourself. That’s why I like parts of ‘Duel’ (1971) much better than I like parts of ‘Jaws’ (1975), because ‘Duel’ was more daring.

It was about a very unnatural occurrence, whereas ‘Jaws’ is as natural as the evolution of mankind. ‘Duel’ was much more of a challenge, because trying to create that kind of fear out of a truck is a lot harder than the established fear of a man-eating fish underwater. But ‘Duel’ had a whole new set of rules.

For Spielberg, the real test was sustaining tension with so few tools at his disposal. That, he believes, made Duel the braver and more creatively taxing project.

Duel’s Enduring Power

More than half a century later, Duel remains a masterclass in suspense. Its premise is simple: a routine drive turns into a relentless nightmare, with road rage taken to its most extreme. Dialogue is sparse, the sound of the engine and the road doing much of the heavy lifting. The faceless driver is never revealed, transforming the lorry into a symbol of pure menace.

Spielberg’s decision to withhold the antagonist’s identity heightens the sense of threat. The lorry doesn’t attack constantly; it stalks, intimidates, and waits. Audiences are left to share in the protagonist’s anxiety, glancing in mirrors and bracing for the next move. Even now, Duel stands as a testament to what can be achieved with a simple premise and a director willing to take risks.