When most people think about Steven Spielberg‘s journey to directorial stardom, they almost always refer to the 1975 movie Jaws, and it’s easy to see why. This movie is a blockbuster that has transcended generations. But, four years before that, Spielberg had gotten his breakout moment when he put his stamp on Duel, another impressive creation that seems to have gone under the radar.
Imagine you’re driving down a quiet highway, the radio humming, sun in your eyes, and suddenly a massive, dust-caked truck appears behind you, just inches from your bumper. Everything seems fine at first, until you realize that when you slow down, it slows down too. You speed up; it speeds up. To make matters worse, there’s no face behind the wheel, no reason, just a truck with serious road rage issues. That’s the nightmare Spielberg captured in Duel, and it’s the movie that taught him how to make fear feel real.
How ‘Duel’ Put Steven Spielberg on the Map
At its core, Duel is based on a short story by Richard Matheson about his terrifying real-life experience of being chased by a truck on a highway. In reality, ABC intended for it to be a cheap one-off thriller for their “Movie of the Week” TV slot. With that in mind, the execs needed someone who already understood the landscape of TV movies. As a result, that responsibility fell on a then-24-year-old Spielberg. It was an opportunity to add to his growing reputation, and boy, did he! He looked at the script and basically said, “Yeah, we don’t need all this talking.” In an interview with fellow director Edgar Wright for Empire Magazine, Spielberg revealed that he chopped off about 50% of the dialogue from Matheson’s original script. Why? He preferred the action of a massive truck trying to turn a sedan into a pancake to define the movie instead of words.
The main protagonist of the film is David Mann (Dennis Weaver), just an everyday electronics salesman who is trying to get to a sales meeting while minding his business. The entire mood of the movie changes dramatically when he accidentally cuts off the wrong truck. The truck suddenly becomes the villain. Now this truck, which later became the prototype for the shark in Jaws, wasn’t chosen at random. Spielberg actually held truck auditions before picking the Peterbilt 281 because he thought it had a menacing face.
The entire movie was shot in under two weeks with a $450,000 budget, which wouldn’t even cover craft services on thrillers today. But Spielberg didn’t let that deter him. He was a mad genius with a camera who mapped out every shot on motel walls and turned the seemingly simple chase sequences into a masterclass in “how to make an audience forget to breathe.” His creative brilliance led to the TV version, which blew up when ABC released it in 1971. Following the favorable critical reviews, Universal Pictures came calling. They asked him to add more scenes for theatrical release abroad, and he did just that with scenes that included an extended opening, a phone booth scene, and a school bus scene.
Overall, what makes Duel so fascinating isn’t just that it launched Spielberg’s career, it’s how it previewed his style. You know all those visual effects viewers now associate with a Spielberg movie: the sweeping camera movements, the precise timing, and the sense that danger can strike from anywhere? It’s all here in skeleton form. You can almost feel Jaws being born on that desert road, long before audiences watched the shark turn tourists into snacks.
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What ‘Duel’ Taught Spielberg About Fear and Why It Still Works
There’s a reason why the fear factor in Duel still works more than 50 years later. It taps into that little voice in your head that whispers, “What if that guy in the other car is having a really, really bad day?” For instance, we never see the truck driver, and we don’t know his motive either. He’s just pure rage. Simply put, Spielberg figured out that our imaginations will always cook up something way scarier than anything he could show us.
The movie is brutally simple. Case in point is the diner scene where David Mann is trying to figure out which guy is the truck driver. As if following his train of thought, the camera just pans across several people drinking coffee, and suddenly every single one of them looks like a potential serial killer. In reality, nobody there’s doing anything wrong, but it feels like his brain is screaming, “It’s him! No, wait, it’s him!”
Also, the ending doesn’t feature the typical Hollywood victory, either. We see none of the often-predictable stuff where the hero outsmarts the villain with some clever trick. In fact, David Mann survives by pure, desperate luck when the truck finally goes off the cliff. That scene doesn’t feel like a win, instead, it feels like he just survived a fight with a bear. Overall, the main legacy of this film is that most people still talk about how they get nervous whenever a huge truck pulls up behind or alongside them on the road.
In the end, Duel was Spielberg’s film school. It’s where he learned that suspense isn’t about the bang, but about the wait for the bang. He took every lesson from that desert highway and applied it to everything that came next.
Watch Duel on Apple TV and see how Spielberg became the master of making us afraid of the ordinary.
