Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

You're gonna need a bigger boat

Ad-libbed by Roy Scheider 1932–2008 · American actor · Chief Martin Brody in Jaws (1975)
Verified In copyright

The popular wording is the real wording: Wikiquote’s transcription of Jaws (1975) and the American Film Institute’s official quotes list both give it as “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” What is not straightforward is where it came from — the screenplay is credited to Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, but the line was never scripted. Scheider ad-libbed it into the scene, and Gottlieb himself says it was already a standing joke among the crew about the boats the production had been given.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Verified quote & credit

“You're gonna need a bigger boat” You're gonna need a bigger boat. — Roy Scheider, ad-libbing as Chief Martin Brody in Jaws (1975), screenplay credited to Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Commonly misquoted as 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.'

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Universal City Studios / Universal Pictures). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Roy Scheider — American actor · Chief Brody in Jaws (1975). Theme: "You're gonna need a bigger boat". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "You're gonna need a bigger boat". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The line, as transcribed

Work
Jaws (1975 film)
Spoken by
Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) — a fictional character
Screenplay
Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, from Benchley’s 1974 novel — but this line is reported as Scheider’s on-set ad-lib
Released
20 June 1975 · Universal Pictures / Zanuck–Brown Company

“Slow ahead.” I can go slow ahead. Come on down here and chum some of this… [the shark suddenly appears, causing Brody to recoil in shock] You’re gonna need a bigger boat. Jaws (1975)

As transcribed at Wikiquote, which bolds the final sentence and notes its No. 35 AFI ranking; the bracketed stage direction is Wikiquote’s. One word of Brody’s complaint is elided here.

Wikiquote: Jaws (film) — full dialogue transcription

How we verified this

  • The transcription. Wikiquote’s Jaws (film) page lists the line under “Police Chief Martin Brody,” in context and in bold, as “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” — second person, no ambiguity Wikiquote ↗.
  • The institutional record agrees. The American Film Institute’s own list prints entry 35 as “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” — Jaws (1975), writers Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes ↗.
  • But the writers did not write it. The BBC’s obituary of Roy Scheider states that his famous line when the shark reveals itself “was ad-libbed by the actor,” and gives the same AFI placing BBC News, 11 February 2008 ↗. That is consistent with how the film was made: Wikipedia’s production account describes scenes being written the night before shooting, with many pieces of dialogue originating in the actors’ improvisations Wikipedia ↗.
  • Ad-libbing it is not the same as inventing it. The best-placed witness on where the sentence came from is Carl Gottlieb, the credited screenwriter who was on the boats for the whole shoot and later wrote the production memoir The Jaws Log. He told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016 that the line was already a crew catchphrase: Richard Zanuck and David Brown were, in Gottlieb’s words, “very stingy producers”, the crew kept telling them they were gonna need a bigger boat, and it got said whenever anything went wrong on the water — a late lunch, swells rocking the camera ACMI, quoting Gottlieb ↗. Scheider picked the saying up and kept slipping it into takes until one reading landed in the finished film Mental Floss ↗.
  • No specialist ruling to defer to. A search of Quote Investigator for “bigger boat” returns “Nothing Found” QI search ↗ — QI has not investigated this line, so no specialist finding is being set aside. The wording rests on the film transcription and the AFI list; the origin rests on the credited screenwriter’s own account.
In copyright

Jaws was released by Universal Pictures on 20 June 1975 and remains in copyright — US public-domain status reaches only works first published through 1930. Screen writing is work-for-hire, so the rights in the film and its dialogue sit with the studio rather than with any individual writer or performer, whatever the origin of a given line.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What actually goes wrong with this one

Nothing here is fabricated and nobody is falsely credited with a film they had no part in. The film is real, the line is real, and — unusually — the wording people search for is the wording that was spoken. Two things still go wrong with it, and one of them is the opposite of the usual complaint.

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat” the actual misquote

The pronoun is what people get wrong, and they get it wrong in the direction nobody expects: the corrupted form is “We’re,” not “You’re.” A full-text search across the Internet Archive’s scanned books shows the “We’re” version in print again and again — trivia collections, business books, comics, craft manuals — and turns up “They’re gonna need a bigger boat” and “I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat” for good measure see the results ↗. The line as transcribed is second person: Brody is telling Quint, whose boat it is.

Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb credited — but not for this sentence

They are the credited screenwriters, and AFI prints their names beside the quote at No. 35 on its list AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes ↗, which is why the line is routinely treated as a piece of screenwriting. The BBC’s obituary of Roy Scheider says otherwise: the line “was ad-libbed by the actor” BBC News ↗, and Gottlieb himself places the sentence off-script entirely — a catchphrase the crew were already using before it was ever a line ACMI ↗. Credit for the screenplay and authorship of this particular sentence are not the same claim.

The sentence in the film is “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” — transcribed that way at Wikiquote ↗ and printed that way in AFI’s official list ↗. It was never in the screenplay: Roy Scheider ad-libbed it into the scene, carrying in a joke the crew had been making at the producers’ expense about the boats they were given Carl Gottlieb’s account ↗.

Context

The line the audience drowned out

Brody is shovelling chum off the stern, complaining about it, and not looking at the water when the shark surfaces behind him. The reaction is the joke; the sentence is the punchline. It works because it is the smallest possible response to the largest possible problem — a municipal budgeting observation delivered to a great white shark.

It very nearly did not land. Wikipedia’s production history records that at test screenings the audience’s screams covered the one-liner entirely, so the filmmakers extended Brody’s reaction after the shark appears and raised the volume of the line. The most quoted sentence in the film had to be rescued in the edit — and it was never in the script to begin with.

The most quoted line in Jaws started as a complaint about the budget.

How a film shot without a finished script produced its own best line

Carl Gottlieb was hired for what was meant to be a one-week dialogue polish and ended up the primary screenwriter, rewriting nearly the whole script across the nine weeks of principal photography. Wikipedia’s account of the production notes that each scene’s pages were typically finished the night before shooting, after Gottlieb had dinner with Spielberg and members of the cast and crew to decide what would go in — and that many pieces of dialogue originated in the actors’ improvisations at those dinners, with a few created on set just before filming.

That is the working method that makes an unscripted line plausible rather than legendary — but it is background, not the explanation for this one. Gottlieb’s own account points somewhere else: not a dinner-table improvisation, but a running gag the unit made at the producers’ expense about the boats they had been given, which Scheider kept feeding into takes until one landed. Either way, the screen credit and the authorship of any single sentence are different questions here: Benchley and Gottlieb hold the credit, John Milius and others contributed uncredited polishes, and the film’s most famous line came from neither the script nor the rewrites.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Courage Humility Doubt

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Jaws (film)en.wikiquote.org

The film’s transcribed dialogue. Under “Police Chief Martin Brody” the line appears in full context, in bold, as “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotesafi.com

The American Film Institute’s official list. Entry 35 prints the line in the “You’re” form and credits the screenplay to Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb.
BBC News: Obituary — Roy Scheidernews.bbc.co.uk

States plainly that Scheider’s famous line when the shark reveals itself was ad-libbed by the actor, and notes its No. 35 AFI placing.
ACMI: Jaws — “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”acmi.net.au

The origin account, from a public film museum: credited screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, quoted from The Hollywood Reporter, describes the line as an on-set catchphrase aimed at the producers before it was ever spoken in character.
Mental Floss: how the line came to bementalfloss.com

Reports the same Gottlieb account and spells out the consequence: the ad-lib was not pulled out of thin air — Scheider picked up the crew’s saying and started sneaking it into takes.
Wikipedia: Jaws (film)en.wikipedia.org

Production history: Gottlieb rewriting during shooting, dialogue drawn from actors’ improvisations, and the test-screening fix that raised the volume on the “bigger boat” one-liner.
Quote Investigator search: “bigger boat”quoteinvestigator.com

Returns “Nothing Found.” Included for transparency: QI has not investigated this line, so no specialist finding is being contradicted here.
Internet Archive full-text search: “gonna need a bigger boat”openlibrary.org

Hundreds of hits across scanned books showing how freely the pronoun drifts in print — “We’re,” “They’re,” “I think we’re” — alongside the correct form.

The actor, not the screenplay

Who put it in the film

Roy Scheider

1932–2008 · American actor · Chief Brody in Jaws (1975)

Roy Richard Scheider (10 November 1932 – 10 February 2008) was an American actor whose best-known work came in the 1970s and early 1980s, including The French Connection, Marathon Man and All That Jazz, for which he was Oscar-nominated. His defining role was Amity Island police chief Martin Brody in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). He appears here as the man who put the film’s most quoted sentence on screen: the BBC’s obituary reports that it was ad-libbed by the actor rather than scripted. He did not coin it, though — by Carl Gottlieb’s account it was a standing joke among the crew about the undersized boats the production had been given, which Scheider carried into a take and made permanent.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Film dialogue — transcribed

Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on the 1974 novel by Peter Benchley (Universal Pictures / Zanuck–Brown Company, released 20 June 1975). Line spoken by Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody; transcribed at Wikiquote, “Jaws (film)”, and listed at No. 35 in AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You're gonna need a bigger boat’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/youre-gonna-need-a-bigger-boat/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied