Still young at heart
Steven Spielberg’s latest film allowed him to relax and indulge his inner child – and discover a new star. Ed Potton reports.
NEVER work with children and animals – it’s one of many maxims that Steven Spielberg has ignored in a career lasting almost half a century.
It’s a sweltering Saturday afternoon in a central London hotel, and the world’s most successful director – who defined the blockbuster with Jaws and ET, before moving with stubborn, Oscarwinning versatility to war ( Saving Private Ryan), the Holocaust ( Schindler’s List) and politics ( Lincoln), and whose movies have grossed more than US$9 billion – is promoting his latest film, The BFG. It’s a delightful adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book about a giant, played by Mark Rylance, who blows dreams into kids’ heads while they sleep.
Spielberg has agreed to be interviewed on the proviso that he is joined by Ruby Barnhill, the 12-year-old from Knutsford in Cheshire who beat 800 others to land the role of Sophie, the girl who befriends the BFG. This is surely a PR trick, a way of softening the questions, but it does give an insight into how one of the great children’s storytellers is around real kids.
Very good, it turns out: warm, encouraging, but never patronising. He has had lots of practice, being a father of seven and grandfather of three who has worked with child actors from Drew Barrymore in ET to Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun.
When Barnhill enters the room, Spielberg scoops her into a hug, complimenting her on a lost tooth. It’s her birthday, and she is wearing a silver dress and sparkly sandals.
Spielberg, a grey but energetic 69, is dressed in the uniform of a billionaire slacker: blazer, suit and tie on the top half, jeans and garish trainers on the bottom. When he learns that this is a print interview, he sighs with relief: ‘‘It’s not on camera, so I can just get schleppy and open my shirt.’’
There’s steel with the informality, though. ‘‘I’m not going to answer any questions about present-day current politics,’’ he says firmly.
‘‘What does that mean?’’ Barnhill says, proving to be a fearless second interviewer.
‘‘That means I’m not going to talk about the EU, the new prime minister, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.’’
Barnhill is clearly sharp as a tack, but admits to having butterflies when she first met Spielberg. Her only acting experience was a small amount of TV.
‘‘I was very, very nervous, but I spoke to Kate [Capshaw, Spielberg’s second wife, an actress] for a very long time. She asked me some questions, and I actually asked her a lot of questions as well. Like about Indiana Jones, because she was obviously in The Temple of Doom [where Capshaw and Spielberg met].’’
Has Barnhill seen that film? ‘‘Yeah, but I usually skip out the part where . . .’’
‘‘The heart Spielberg says.
‘‘That was scary!’’ Barnhill says.
She talks about the first time she walked on to the set of The BFG. ‘‘I was surrounded by this came out,’’ REUTERS whole other world that I had no idea existed. Steven and Mark made me feel really relaxed and that I could just be my weird self.’’
Barnhill doesn’t seem weird at all, but her creativity was an asset when she acted opposite Rylance, who played the animated BFG by means of motion-capture technology. That often meant just reacting to his facial expressions, but her imagination ‘‘allowed her to fill in all the blanks’’, Spielberg says.
‘‘Mark is also a child at heart . . . In that sense, there was a communion between Ruby and Mark.’’
What made Spielberg pick Barnhill? ‘‘There was a spark of genuine guilelessness.’’ He smiles at her. ‘‘Don’t get too embarrassed.’’
Does she know what guilelessness means? Barnhill squirms in her chair. ‘‘Erm . . .’’
‘‘There was no self-consciousness,’’ Spielberg says. ‘‘You were taking the words of Roald Dahl and Melissa Mathison and you were making those words belong to you.’’
Mathison is the screenwriter of The BFG and ET – and the ex-wife of actor Harrison Ford – who died of cancer before The BFG was finished. She was close to Spielberg, who has said that he hasn’t had time to mourn her properly, such has been his furious schedule.
Her death, and that of Ry- lance’s step-daughter, Nataasha, in 2012 from a brain haemorrhage, added a bittersweet air to the shoot.
That may actually have worked to its advantage because, like ET, the film is about ‘‘isolation and loneliness’’, the friendship between two outsiders – Sophie the orphan and the BFG, who is bullied by larger, maneating giants. Both films are also, Spielberg says, ‘‘a celebration of diversity, very consciously’’.
Was Dahl’s darkness a reason why the famously schmaltzy Spielberg has taken so long to adapt one of his books? It seems odd that two such celebrated storytellers have not intersected until now. Spielberg thinks it’s simply the fact that ‘‘a lot of filmmakers beat me to it’’.
So why make what he describes as his first fairytale film now? Could it be that, after a run of historical dramas, he wanted to escape from a depressing world?
The BFG ‘‘was like going on vacation,’’ he says. ‘‘I could have an imagination and not always get in trouble for it.’’
He is certainly a fan of Dahl’s, having read his books to Max, his REUTERS
‘[ Making The BFG] was like going on vacation. I could have an imagination and not always get in trouble for it.
WALT DISNEY STUDIOS son by his first wife, actress Amy Irving, and to his other children (he and Capshaw have five together, and Capshaw a daughter from a previous marriage). ‘‘I enjoyed playing the BFG. I would do the voice,’’ he says.
I ask Spielberg if he sees any similarities between Barnhill, Barrymore and Bale. He shakes his head.
‘‘They’re very dissimilar, in fact. But they all made the writing invisible. When an actor can say a line and convince an audience that nobody wrote that line but themselves, that’s a real great sign.’’
Would Barnhill like to follow in their footsteps?
‘‘I don’t know if I want to become a big, big Hollywood movie star, to be honest,’’ she says. ‘‘But I do like the idea of becoming a director. Luckily I’m only 12, so I don’t have to decide yet.’’
What does Spielberg think? He looks at her with grandfatherly fondness and, like a character in one of his movies, says: ‘‘Ruby can be anything she wants to be.’’ The Times