“It’s a primal road rage story. You’re watching a lightweight go up against a heavyweight champion.”

Four years before forever changing the summer blockbuster with Jaws, Steven Spielberg made his feature debut with Duel, his 1971 adaptation of Richard Matheson’s road thriller that starred Dennis Weaver as a motorist being terrorized by a tanker truck in the remote California canyons. The made-for-TV film initially premiered on ABC in November 1971, and it helped propel Spielberg to the near-mythical figure we know him as today.

One fellow filmmaker who’s a mega fan of Duel is Edgar Wright, who cites the film for inspiring his own Baby Driver. “I still think, even in the wake of his later classics, its still one of the greatest displays of Spielberg’s talent and a masterclass for young film makers,” Wright notes in a recent article on the film for Empire Magazine.

For the article, Wright interviewed Spielberg about Duel, asking him to reflect upon his debut feature as brand new movie Ready Player One arrives in theaters this weekend.

“I had a hell of a bedrock foundation. It was a streamlined story by Richard Matheson that gave me a lot of direction to direct it with,” Spielberg recalled. “The other thing that really helped was there was such a paucity of dialogue in the script and even less so in the finished movie. I cut about fifty per cent of the dialogue out of the script. It told me that this was going to be my first silent movie. I was a huge fan of the silent era and had at that point in my life gone out many times to the Nuart and other revival houses to watch silent movies on the big screen. I even tried to get the network to agree to let me cut out even more dialogue, but the network was adamant that we needed what remained as some kind of a road map for people who just watched TV and who didn’t want to put too much effort into the viewing experience. If I’d had final cut in those days, I would have cut the dialogue even further back.”

Spielberg also told Wright that Duel very much laid the groundwork for Jaws.

“I was conscious of [the similarities between Duel and Jaws] when I put myself up for the job to direct Jaws,” he told Wright. “I told David Brown and Dick Zanuck, please watch Duel, because Duel is basically Jaws on land. I really think it qualified me to direct Jaws.”

On another Jaws-related note, Spielberg confirmed to Wright that the sound of the truck going over the cliff in Duel was used in Jaws, when the shark is killed off at the end!

“Not only is it a similar sound, it’s the same sound,” he explained. “I asked the sound effects editor on Jaws to go into the library and find the death rattle of the truck of Duel and put it underwater with the shark and he did.”

For more, be sure to head over to Empire to read the full chat.