Steven Spielberg on The Post

WASHINGTON — Had Steven Spielberg never slid himself into a director’s chair, he thinks a reporter’s hat would have fit well.

“Look, your job is cool!” says the acclaimed filmmaker, perhaps forgetting for a second he’s the man who gave us Indiana Jones, E.T. and one very iconic hungry shark. “Of course, I’ve always said in my next career I would want to be a film composer, and just after that if I weren’t a director, I probably would have been a journalist.”

In his new drama “The Post,” Spielberg tackles the newsroom of The Washington Post and their public 1971 tussle with Richard Nixon’s White House to print the Pentagon Papers and reveal a massive coverup about involvement in the Vietnam War.

It was Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), her working relationship with editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and the hard decision she had to make — to publish or not to publish — that attracted Spielberg. The timeliness also helped, with a current news cycle “that was very evocative of the Nixon administration and their attempts to suppress the truth through the judicial system,” Spielberg, 71, says.

“The great revelation that put all of us who made this movie in complete solidarity was the fact that sometimes history is best viewed through a lens, and there was a huge reflecting mirror that could take the date ’71 and flip it to ’17.”

Spielberg is also currently readying his retro fantasy “Ready Player One” (out March 30) and eyeing a new version of the classic musical “West Side Story” (“It would still take place in 1957 and it would still be about the Sharks and the Jets,” he promises). USA Today talks with the Oscar-winning director about “The Post,” Trump and seeking out the truth:

Q: You’ve made a career out of heroes you’ve put on screen. Is that the label you’d give Graham, Bradlee and the Post journalists?

A. I see them as hard-working heroes. You can’t be a hero unless you’re bucking a system and they had a huge system to buck called the Nixon administration. (H.R.) Haldeman, (John) Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, they were all at the throats of The New York Times and The Washington Post. The great thing (is) no matter what administration comes and goes, journalism is here to stay.

Q: The Post ties into Watergate