Steven Spielberg movies

Chris: So, how did we get into Spielberg?

Ian: Not through his films, but through a book. My brother bought me Bob Balaban’s diary of the making of Close Encounters. It’s amazing. It’s a portrait of this young, exciting, intelligent, funny director. I fell in love with that. I wanted to be Steven Spielberg. Now I think I might be the person alive who’s interviewed him the most.

Chris: There was a time in my life when

I thought Steven Spielberg directed every single movie. His name was on everything. The Goonies. Back To The Future. But as a director, Temple Of Doom is one of my earliest cinematic experiences. I remember screaming, “Come on, Indy!” as he reaches back in to grab his hat before a stone door closes on it.

Helen: I don’t remember a time when I got into Steven Spielberg. I don’t remember a time without Steven Spielberg. It was probably E.T.

I saw first. I would have been very little and everybody was doing the voice in the playground. Dan: For me, Jaws was just always there. I saw it when I was too young. But one of my earliest memories in a cinema is E.T.. I remember this clearly, looking across at my entire family, and every single one of them was crying their eyes out. Including my dad, who is a hard bastard.

Chris: Like his son.

Amon: The first one I got into was probably

Jurassic Park. He’s been doing this at such a high level for so long, and that’s why he’s one of the, if not the, best directors of all time.

Ian: When you’re compiling a top ten and you look at the list of films, it’s ridiculous. Classic after classic after classic.

Amon: You just think about how many Best Of lists will have a Spielberg entry in it. Think about all the genres he’s done, from serious movies to action-adventure movies.

Dan: To movies starring people named Tom.

Chris: Spielberg is cinema. The reverse dolly from Jaws, the boulder from Raiders, the end of

Close Encounters.

Dan: The camera always ends up in exactly the right place.

Ian: He’s fucking Mozart, is what he is. He’s the most naturally gifted filmmaker who’s ever been involved in the medium. And he’s The Beatles, in the sense that he’s doing his most interesting work right at the heart of the mainstream. He has a popular touch that connects with audiences everywhere. Your Coens and your David Lynches are brilliant, but they’re talking to a small coterie of people.

Chris: Where do we stand on Duel? Do we consider it as a feature film?

Ian: I don’t, because it was made for television. But it’s so confident and precocious.

Dan: I saw that before I saw a lot of his movies that were released in cinemas. It’s just a great high concept — a guy is on the road and a big truck comes after him.

Ian: It’s the first statement of one of his big themes, which is the ordinary man up against something extraordinary.

Dan: And that truck is a monster. It’s the shark, it’s a dinosaur, it’s a Martian. It’s his first monster.

Ian: Is it fair to say that Close Encounters is the film that crystallised how we view him? He’s a poet of suburbia, it’s a film about absent parents. Sugarland’s a bit like that as well, but that was the most personal statement of his career.

Dan: You’ve got the childlike wonder element. But never has wonder been so terrifying.

Ian: It spins on a dime, that film.

Dan: As a kid, it was a scary film to me. It’s a weird film. You go, “Hang on, Roy, you’ve just left your family behind, what are you doing?” Amon: It amazes me that Jaws was a train wreck of a production. It’s a perfect movie. I love the way in which he uses different switches in perspective, from the shark to the underwater perspective, and how he creates fear out of that. And then you factor in the score by John Williams, and I want to stay away from water now. Just for a little while.

Ian: The train-wreck aspect is important.

It gave him time for the actors to work on those characters and to work on those dynamics. That’s what I think of when I think of Jaws.

Chris: It might be my favourite Spielberg. That last 40-minute stretch where he sticks three characters on a boat; to have the confidence to wait, is tremendous.

Ian: 1941 is famously the film that tightened him up, that stopped the excesses.

Amon: We get better through failure.

Dan: But even when you’re talking about his failures, there’s nothing that he has made that is genuinely unwatchable. Maybe Hook comes close. I saw The Lost World late, after all the reviews, and when I saw it, it was bloody well made.

Helen: The clifftop scene and the raptors in the grass alone are super. I just don’t get the hate. I get why it’s not Jurassic Park, but show me where it really failed.

Chris: It just feels a little empty. But also darker, which is interesting. It’s that second half of Spielberg’s career where he’s willing to give into the darkness a little bit more.

Helen: He did kill the kid in Jaws. He did have a father leave his family in Close Encounters.

It’s always been running through his work.

Dan: Just look at Raiders Of The Lost Ark. A big, fun action adventure with so many scary bits, screaming skulls, and of course melting faces.

Helen: It’s one of the things he instinctively understands about family storytelling. You’ve got to have the scary bits because otherwise, what are you really worried about?

Amon: I read a description of Indy as Clark Kent and Superman at the same time, and that’s spot on.

Dan: It’s also the best Bond movie ever made. Ian: Can you imagine, you’ve made Raiders

and the next year you make E.T.? How can you be that good, to do something in a completely different register?

Dan: He’s the guy who made Jurassic Park and

Schindler’s List in the same year. Chris: Lost World and Amistad was 1997. Ian: Always and Last Crusade were 1989. Dan: Tintin and War Horse came out four days apart in the States, I think.

Chris: These achievements are diminishing. Ian: But E.T. is such a lovely film. It’s amazing to think that’s a blockbuster when it’s such a gentle, tender little thing.

Helen: There has never been a time I’ve watched that and not sobbed my eyes out.

Chris: In the ’80s, the three that stand out for me are the indie films. Not the Indy films. Is there a sense that he was looking for an identity, that he was trying to grow up as a director, so he makes The Color Purple, he makes Empire Of The Sun, he makes Always?

Ian: I think so. He became a father during The Color Purple. I think he was getting fed up with being accused of just being a children’s director. He’s been a grown-up director from the start of his career.

Helen: If you think about the way they talked about him in [Peter Biskind’s] Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, there’s that perception of him as someone who just sells out. I don’t think that’s ever been the case.

Ian: While we’re talking about it, do we need to get into what’s the best Indiana Jones film?

Temple Of Doom is interesting. He and George Lucas were going through divorces at the time. That’s a dark film. That’s a film of two men going through a divorce.

Amon: Raiders is objectively the best, but my favourite, and the one I’ve watched the most, is

Last Crusade. It’s so much fun and the father-son tandem puts it over the top for me.

Chris: I don’t think it’s a tandem. I think it’s more of a motorcycle-sidecar combination.

Ian: For me, it lacks the richness of Raiders. Chris: It’s a Sunday-afternoon film, Last Crusade. Just before Songs Of Praise. But the heart of the relationship at its centre puts it over the top for me.

Ian: Is anyone going to be brave and say something nice about Crystal Skull? [Silence for a good ten seconds] Nope? I think the first hour of that film is good. Until John Hurt turns up.

Chris: I think it’s until Shia Labeouf turns up.

Helen: The endless waterfalls is a funny gag. Chris: It’s the same thing with The Lost World.

It feels a little bit forced, like his heart’s not in it.

Ian: I was always a little disappointed with

Jurassic Park, in a sense. I didn’t think it was

Jaws-good, the characters weren’t as rich. But I’ve come round since then.

Dan: That was my dreams come true. I’m watching fucking dinosaurs. They’re real. I love Ray Harryhausen but you always had that suspension-of-disbelief thing. I remember watching Jurassic Park and going, “Nope, those are dinosaurs.” And they still stand up today.

Ian: When the T-rex comes out in the rain he says, “No John Williams — we don’t need you,

John Williams.” And some of the best set-pieces don’t have dinosaurs in them. The race down the tree, or the climb up the fence. It’s just proper filmmaking. And while he’s editing Jurassic Park,

he’s making Schindler’s List.

Helen: Maybe it helped. Maybe just making

Schindler’s List would drive you mad, or send you spiralling in a way that would stop you from telling that story. Maybe you need to be editing

Jurassic Park every night. But it’s incredible.

Dan: I’ve still only seen it once. It’s such an emotional journey that I haven’t rushed back to it. But it stays with you.

Helen: It’s a return to ’70s filmmaking, focusing on little moments that illuminate the whole. Obviously the girl in the red coat, but just the tiny moments of what people take with them when they’re running for their lives.

Ian: It’s his most impressive achievement.

Helen: It broke his personal Oscar drought.

Schindler’s List gave them nowhere to go. There was no argument. There was no counter narrative.

Chris: In terms of Oscars, he should have won for Jaws.

Ian: He wasn’t even nominated.

Chris: Precisely. Then there’s Close Encounters, Raiders, E.T. — there’s a good argument to be made that by the time he did actually win an Oscar for Best Director, he should have had at least four.

Dan: I don’t really get it. What do you want cinema to do, exactly?

Chris: He won another Oscar for Saving Private Ryan, which I would argue is one of the most influential movies of all time.

Helen: The opening sequence in particular has shaped every war movie since.

Ian: It’s got a rep as being a gung-ho film. I really don’t think it is. The final shot is of a desaturated American flag. The Stars And Stripes, drained of colour.

Chris: Was this a further proof of Spielberg’s maturation?

Ian: I’m not sure you characterise the career after Schindler’s List as completely dark and completely serious, but it does get more mature. A.I. and Munich and Lincoln are more complex than a truck chasing a car.

Chris: I think the playfulness has gone a little bit. Some of the blockbusters of late, Crystal Skull, Ready Player One and Tintin, they feel like purely technical exercises.

Ian: He has nothing left to prove. He can just follow his muse, and do whatever he wants. Helen: I am the A.I. fan.

Chris: I mean, Ian has A.I. in his name.

Ian: The first time I saw that, I was struck by how sombre it is.

Helen: Is that the Kubrick coming through?

Now, before we say anything else, the ending is Kubrick’s. I will brook no dissent on this matter.

Ian: The first 40 minutes is Kubrick. Then there’s Spielberg scattered around the middle.

Helen: It’s a bit of a duet, isn’t it?

Ian: That’s exactly what it is.

Helen: It does and says what Blade Runner thinks it does and says, but doesn’t do very well. It’s better at talking about the things that make us human.

Ian: And assigning morality. Fuck it, A.I.’S better than Blade Runner.

Chris: My favourite film of his from that decade is Minority Report.

Helen: Catch Me If You Can also has a good claim. But Minority Report is spectacular. It makes not a lick of sense, but I don’t care. It’s fantastic science-fiction. It takes one idea from Philip K. Dick and throws the rest of the book away.

Chris: That’s some serious Big Dick Energy. Dan: I found Minority Report quite vexing. Visually astonishing, but it was one of those ones where you could see the twist coming like a freight train.

Ian: Catch Me If You Can is pretty much the only film in his filmography that deals directly with divorce. So while it feels like a jaunty caper, it’s probably one of his most personal films.

Chris: He did another one-two punch with

War Of The Worlds and Munich. War Of The Worlds is a tremendous film. It’s got some sequences and images that are still residing in the old noggin.

Ian: Those are films about 9/11. War Of The Worlds, bizarrely, may be even more about 9/11 than Munich.

Chris: I’m not in love with the Spielberg output of this decade, I’ll be honest.

Helen: I bloody love Lincoln. It’s one of my all-time favourite Spielbergs. It’s a really fascinating look at what a good man will do to get a good end done.

Amon: I’ll say this for Lincoln. This might be controversial, but it’s better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Dan: Ready Player One has Dungeons & Dragons and New Order. It wins everything.

Ian: It’s a film he made about films he made when he was younger. It feels like it should have been made by Edgar Wright or J.J. Abrams.

Helen: It’s a bad book and he made it better. Chris: Jaws is a bad book.

Helen: Bad books can make great films, yes. Ian: That Shining sequence is joy to me.

Amon: It’s great. It takes a very skilled director to make something that chaotic coherent.

Chris: Alright, enough squabbling. Let’s vote!