Robert Shaw brought the idea that the Quint character he was playing should be eating something, jaws mimicking the shark itself and they gave him saltine crackers to champ on.
In the iconic scene of Quint eating while aboard his boat in Jaws, he is seen eating a tinned can of chili.
Sam Quint was rash because of a life of events which shaped him into that man: He developed a fear and hatred for sharks when the USS Indianapolis sank, and he was stranded in the ocean with a thousand other sailors for days on end.
Blood comes out of Quint's mouth when he's being chewed up by the shark presumably because its teeth have punctured his internal organs and he's being squeezed.
According to Gottlieb, Quint was loosely based on Mundus, whose book Sportfishing for Sharks he read for research. Sackler came up with the backstory of Quint as a survivor of the World War II USS Indianapolis disaster.
Freudian commentators consider the shark a phallic symbol demonstrating everything from the destructiveness of masculinity to the impotence of modern man to castration fears (source). Quint certainly gets castrated in the shark attack, along with losing most of his other parts.
The USS Indianapolis was a real ship that sank in July 1945 following a secret mission in the Philippine Sea, and the immediate aftermath that left almost 900 people adrift in the ocean resulted in the greatest loss of life due to shark attacks in human history.
Quint is marked by this event (literally, as the scar-comparison scene shows), and its implications will chase him. He realizes this, too. His destruction of the radio and refusal to put on a life-jacket suggest that he knows there is no point in trying to escape.
While there is no official explanation for Quint smashing the boat radio, fans have come up with two possible explanations. A. He wants Brody and Hooper to keep their eyes on the prize, so to speak. If they truly can't be helped by those on-shore, all that can be done is to kill the shark themselves.
Once they were far enough out, Quint had Brody lay a marked chum line while he used piano wire fishing reel to hook the shark. He succeeded, but the shark bit through the wire and escaped.
Quint had no first or middle name. Peter Benchley did not give him one in the book and Spielberg did not give him one in the movie. You lose all credibility by creating a Jaws Wiki with patently false information. His only known name was QUINT.
It was a repeatedly malfunctioning shark that gave those yellow barrels seen throughout the movie their emblematic status. Every time the shark wouldn't work, they would use the barrels to symbolize its arrival or presence.
Great White Sharks cannot move backwards once their gills are under water, as seen towards the end of the film. When Hooper finds the shark tooth in the hull of Ben Gardner's boat, the point is sticking up, with the root end of the tooth embedded in the wood.
If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no mates, there's just too many captains on this island. $10,000 for me by myself.
Ms. Backlinie is the swimmer in the opening scene who becomes the first victim of the shark in Jaws (1975). She later spoofed this scene in Spielberg's 1941 (1979) but encounters a Japanese submarine instead of a toothy fish.
And indeed, Sam Quint is eating crackers on his boat in a later scene... ... Which explains where he got it - it was probably in his pocket (alternatively, a town hall meeting might provide this sort of snack).
He tries to call the Coast Guard for rescue, but Quint takes a club and smashes the radio to bits. Brody goes nuts at Quint. No time for couples counseling, though: The shark's coming back toward them. Quint shoots the shark with two harpoons and Brody shoots it several times with his revolver.
The End of Quint
Spielberg thought that wasn't dramatic enough—thus the more Jaws-y movie death, as he slowly slides down toward the shark's snapping jaws and is bitten in half as he desperately stabs the shark and tries to fight it off.
“Counting money all day.” In what is surely the most memorable drinking scene in “Jaws,” Quint cracks open a can of Narragansett beer and drinks it down in one gurgling gulp. He eyeballs Hooper and crushes the can with one hand, letting it drop to the deck with a clang.
The long take of Shaw and Dreyfuss allows the scene to breathe, but it turns out to only be a deep breath before Brody makes the faux pas of asking about the scar on Quint's arm: It's a removed tattoo of the words “USS Indianapolis.” Suddenly, the good ribbing's oxygen vanishes from the room, and even smartass Hooper ...
Sam Quint is a main character in Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller Jaws. He was a grizzled sailor and shark hunter who took up the task of hunting the great white shark terrorizing the island community of Amity. He was portrayed by Robert Shaw.
Then we learn that Quint's biggest fear isn't that he will be eaten by a shark, but the time spent waiting for the unknown to strike. “I'll never put on a life jacket again,” he tells his companions. And we know he means it.
The story highlights that Quint left the experience (understandably) scarred mentally. He tried to remove the memories when he had the tattoo removed, and perhaps his career choice was also an effort to exercise his demons.
Quint smashes the radio because he doesn't want the others to be able to call for assistance. He doesn't want the others to be able to call for assistance because he wants to have caught the shark by himself.