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A Dialogue on Film With Steven Spielberg
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
By the age of thirty-five, Steven Spielberg had established himself as an accomplished director of audience-pleasing fantasies and frenetically-paced action movies, including Jaws (1975), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). In this 1988 interview conducted at the American Film Institute, Spielberg describes his early filmmaking techniques and comments on his search for a "dream project." In the years following this interview, Spielberg broadened his subject matter and entertained audiences with such great films as Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). |
Question: How do you think you've improved as a filmmaker since your first pictures in the early '70s? |
Steven Spielberg: Well, you don't really improve so much as you get more courageous--I think experience gives you courage. So it's not really a question of getting better because, looking at it subjectively, I think that some of my earlier films are better than some of my later ones. I'm always looking for different kinds of stories and subject matter. I like to put myself into strange territory where I don't really have a commanding lead. I need to feel as if I'm playing catch-up when I'm making a movie, even when I'm making Indiana Jones sequels. I continue to make them because I know what they do to an audience and I can appreciate that. You make a movie to get the audience to stand up and cheer at points that you determine. And that's a whole different kind of challenge for me. |
Q: When you received the Irving Thalberg Award last year, (1987), you talked about a need for better writing in film. Was that a comment about films in the recent past? |
Spielberg: I was talking about the future of the industry and I was also talking to myself. I was sort of saying to myself, "You know, it's time to stop balls from rolling and spaceships from landing and the light shows. It's time to deal with what people say to each other when they have an emotional need to communicate." I didn't mean to exclude all the wonderful screenplays that have come out of the industry over the years. We have been suffering a drought lately, but that doesn't mean that there's no water out there. |
Today, as all people who've sat down with pen and paper know, it's very hard to come up with a concept for a film that is truly original. Every time now that I write something down, and then am able to recall the film where a form of that idea may have come from, I immediately throw it out because I'm embarrassed. |
Q: It must be especially difficult for you because you've studied so many films. |
Spielberg: I know a lot of people, friends of mine, who've seen many more pictures than I. I mean Martin Scorsese has seen everything. There's not a nitrate can left unopened, if Marty can get near it, and he will hold it up to a light bulb and blink his eyes to get the impression of motion. [Laughs] |
And Peter Bogdanovich just saw six undiscovered Lubitsch films in London, including two that he feels are masterpieces. So, I have studied many films, but not dating back to the silent era. I'm really interested in films from around 1933 to 1954. And then I sort of go off films for a while--you know, from the mid-'50s until the early '70s. |
Q: What is your philosophy on what constitutes good film drama? |
Spielberg: For me, it's someone--a protagonist--who is no longer in control of his life; who loses control and then has to somehow regain it. That's good drama. All of my pictures have had external forces working on the protagonist. In almost every Hitchcock film, the protagonist loses control early in the first act. Then he not only has to get it back, he has to address the situation. That theme has followed me through my films, too. |
What's interesting about Empire of the Sun is that Jim is in control. He aspires to be in control in such a maniacal way that he aligns with the winning side, no matter which it is. I have said that Empire of the Sun is the story of a boy in search of heroes, and you have to be in control to do that. So Empire sort of goes against the grain of how I usually define the protagonist. |
Q: Where do you draw the line between drama and melodrama? |
Spielberg: In my work, everything is melodrama. I don't think I've ever not made a melodrama. E.T. is melodramatic, and so is The Sugarland Express. I mean, there's melodrama in life and I love it. It's heightened drama, taking things to histrionic extremes and squeezing out the tears a bit. |
Q: Is there a point where you say, "No, that's too much melodrama?" |
Spielberg: Yeah. I didn't allow Jim in Empire to have a dog. I didn't want anybody to shoot the dog at the end of the movie. I draw the line about there. [Laughs] |
In terms of melodrama, I'm anxious to make a love story that is to love what The Color Purple was to a reunion between two sisters. |
Q: When you made The Color Purple, it was seen as such a departure. Why did you want to do it? |
Spielberg: Kathleen Kennedy, the president of my company [Amblin Entertainment], gave me Alice Walker's book. She said, "Look, you're going to think I'm crazy, but if you don't hate this book, I think it will make a wonderful movie and I think you should direct it." |
She gave me some background: "You know, it's a black story. But that shouldn't bother you because you're Jewish and essentially you share similarities in Christian Bale--an atypical Spielberg protagonist--your upbringing and your heritage." I had some anti-Semitic experiences when I was growing up that Kathleen knew about, including prejudice and everything else that I had to go through at one particular high school. |
So I read the book and I loved it, but I didn't want to direct it. Then I picked it up again about a month and a half later, and I read it a second time. And I couldn't get away from certain images. But before I could go any further, I had to get Alice Walker's blessing because she had a lot of control over the project. I met with her and I told her essentially what I wanted to do with it as a film. I was excited about meeting her because I'd done some research on her and she is a brilliant, brilliant author and she has a kind of beneficence about her, a light. She's very kind, which I respond to. We talked for hours, and we really hit it off. |
Q: She was on the set, wasn't she? |
Spielberg: She came down as sort of a spiritual counselor. She never said "That's not accurate. That's not what my grandmother was like," although she did sometimes have those feelings. It would get back to me through three or four people that she felt Whoopi had lost her accent and would I listen more carefully. |
She was on the set when I shot the scene where Mister is separating Nettie and Celie. I did the master in one shot because I wanted everyone to experience what the separation was like. I didn't want to have to say, "OK, go down the steps of the porch. Cut. Have lunch." I wanted the actors to feel the horror, and you can't do that when you piecemeal a scene. So I did it in one shot, and I turned to Alice and she was a wreck--really crying. That was good for me because I wanted to impress her. This was her book; she'd won the Pulitzer Prize. |
I knew I had a responsibility to The Color Purple, and yet I didn't want to make the kind of movie from the novel that some people wanted me to because that's not who I am. Some people wanted the movie to be about the tumbledown, ramshackle deep South. But Alice Walker's grandparents were well off, they were successful, and we based Celie and Mister's house on pictures Alice showed us. |
We took criticism on The Color Purple for the art direction from people who weren't aware that her grandparents were wealthy by the standards of the day. I think some people had a kind of Uncle Tom's Cabin view of what the picture should be, which is wrong. And, ironically, it pointed out their own inclination for racial stereotyping, which is what some of the same people said we were guilty of. |
Q: Knowing that your films receive worldwide attention, what goes through your head in terms of social responsibility when you make a film? |
Spielberg: You know, I've never really had a philosophy about that. I've always made the kinds of films that I, as an audience, would want to see. That's been my main philosophy. I've never been a social thinker in my cineaste life. In my personal life, very much so, but I've never been one to say, "I think this picture is going to change the way America thinks." |
I do have friends who approach everything they do wanting to make some positive change. I never really have. Still, I wonder what everybody's real intentions are. When I talk to my friends who are film directors--I should let them speak for themselves, but some people whom one might judge as our greatest artists have, on occasion, the lowest of standards. They will sit around and say, "Oh, this'll get 'em." [Laughs] We all do that. We all do. |
Seriously, I feel that if I found a subject that would be beneficial for everyone to see, I would probably do it for television because that medium reaches more households than motion pictures ever can. I mean, my goodness, E.T. is the biggest film of all time around the world, but the same number of people see two episodes of "Cosby" over two weeks as have seen E.T. in the United States. |
Q: How easy was it for you to make your first films, such as Duel? |
Spielberg: I really have to tell you, I have thought and thought about Duel and I have no idea how that film was made in fourteen days. I just remember we had a real fast crew--Universal Studios always had contract crews because of its great seniority program. |
I had a Universal crew on Jaws, too, and half would have liked to quit because we were making a movie that was impossible to make on the open ocean. Humanely, it should have been done in a tank and been very controlled. |
That film was such a nightmare: we were getting two shots a day--one in the morning and one in the afternoon. On a good day, five shots. We had crew members who threw up every day, but they would not quit because they'd lose their positions with Universal. |
On Duel, they knew they had to go fast because it was a TV movie scheduled to be shot in eleven days. The fact that it went fourteen days mortified some of them. It was, "Do it fast! Do it fast!" That was the philosophy of ABC's "Movie of the Week"--they were done very quickly. You just had to hope your mojo was working every day. |
The night before each shoot, I'd stake out all my shots. I would literally put stakes in the ground and say, "A, B, and C cameras go here." The three cameras would be about one hundred yards apart. I would simply run the car and then the truck past the cameras, with the fourth camera in the car shooting the truck. That way, I got four shots in one run. Then I'd just turn the cameras around and the procession would come right back again. [Laughs] |
Q: The camerawork in The Sugarland Express, your first theatrical film, was highly praised for its complexity. How did you plan all the shots? |
Spielberg: With Sugarland, I didn't storyboard at all. I just kind of made it up as I went along. There's one shot in the car where the camera goes around in a 360-degree turn, and I've got to confess that it wasn't because I had this great idea for a shot; it was because we were given a Panaflex camera. Sugarland was the first film to use that camera from beginning to end. I wanted to show Bob Gottschalk what a great camera he'd invented so I made up shots to show off his equipment. That was fun. |
Q: In what way do you usually plan your camerawork before shooting a scene? |
Spielberg: Where I put the camera is something I do intuitively. I don't think I do a lot of planning. My storyboards are in no way about actual camera angles or about what kind of lens I should employ. They only show me what I need to do to get across the story points of a scene. |
It's important not to stage the shot in your head when you're working with actors, especially with a movie like The Color Purple. I block it like you would a play--you want to give the actors a chance to feel natural as they move about. Then I step back and take some time to figure out how I want to coordinate the scene. Not just the master shot, but where the coverage will be. It takes time, with the crew wondering, "Doesn't he know what he's doing? He's not giving us a shot. He's just pacing back and forth." |
Q: It sounds as though, for you, directing is almost synonymous with camerawork. |
Spielberg: For years I thought that it was just where to put the camera. I thought I was getting jobs because I knew where to put the camera better than anybody else of my generation, when I was 22 and working in television for Universal. I thought that was why they were hiring me. And as I discovered, that was why they were hiring me. I was just doing a lot of flashy stuff and they said, "Oh, put him on this episode, this one has chrome." |
But that was just style. I don't think Preston Sturges was so amazing with his camera, but he made some of the best movies ever made. And I don't think Howard Hawks was as visionary and audacious as John Ford with the camera, and yet Hawks made some films that were better than some of the films Ford made. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad director, but there are bad storytellers. |
Q: How do you feel about the popularity of your films? |
Spielberg: It's sort of interesting how that works. I didn't make E.T. to be popular. I didn't make Close Encounters of the Third Kind to be popular. We made Raiders to be popular, but not The Color Purple. I've been as surprised as anybody else when the results are greater than I ever dreamed possible. People begin to get suspicious of your intentions when the films are so wildly popular. Of all my "mega-hits," so to speak, everybody loves the movie for the first few months, and then when it starts breaking records some will say, "Well, wait a second. I'm being tricked. There's some kind of evil seduction afoot. I don't trust that Spielberg. He's manipulating me now. I know, I enjoyed it, I saw it four times, but that little bastard manipulated me!" I just have to separate myself from all that, otherwise I'd start believing only the bad publicity and I'd never make another film. |
Q: What are your goals at this point? |
Spielberg: Well, my goals are--I don't know. I read an interview with Louis Malle in The New York Times, and I feel exactly like him. I don't know what I'm going to do now, either. Not because I feel I'm so satisfied with what I've done, because I'm not. I'm always hungry and I think that's the secret. But as far as goals, I don't have a dream project. After E.T., I didn't have any dream projects, so I began pressing my luck. The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun were worthwhile growing experiences. |
I have to rediscover the passion. I'm going through a very creative period right now, a complete reevaluation. I've been through this once before and it's very helpful. That last time was right after Close Encounters. I'd been so satisfied, both with Jaws and Close Encounters, that I had a major period where I didn't know if I wanted to work. |
People said, "God, you're not thirty and you don't want to work for a couple of years? Are you nuts?" You know, the old fear tactic: "If you don't keep working, they'll forget about you and you'll never get another job in this town." |
I made 1941, and I am making no excuses for that film because there are parts of it that I'm proud of. And Raiders was also made in that unsettled period of "What do I really want to do?" Only when I began writing the E.T. story did I rediscover my passion. |
Q: Will there be a sequel to E.T.? |
Spielberg: I'm waiting for a dream project, but it will not be E.T. II, because I can't imagine ever making another one, unless I wake up one morning with a master thought. Sequels can be very dangerous because they compromise your truth as an artist. I think a sequel to E.T. would do nothing but rob the original of its virginity. People only remember the latest episode, while the pilot tarnishes. |
Q: Over the years, the scope of your films kept getting bigger. Will you be returning to smaller-scale films? |
Spielberg: I don't know if the films did get bigger. I think they've gone up and down: Close Encounters was large, E.T. was small and The Color Purple was small. The budgets got larger each time simply because of inflation. Look at Jaws: in 1974, with 155 shooting days, it cost $8 million. If I made it now during the same amount of time--in Martha's Vineyard, with the same crew--it would cost $40 million. |
You will be seeing fewer and fewer films like Empire of the Sun until technology is able to find an easier way, through videotape, to re-create certain moments of history without having to go to another country and hire ten thousand extras. In the next ten years, these movies will all be dinosaurs, and that's a blessing out of disguise because it will bring us back to the story and the characters. It will compel us to return to the source of all great storytelling: the human soul and how it suffers and celebrates. Let's get back to finding out who we are, not necessarily what we are capable of constructing. |
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