Superstar treatment
Spielberg picks up Lifetime Golden Bear at Berlin film fest
Steven Spielberg, here at Berlin’s International Film Festival to be honored with an honorary lifetime achievement Golden Bear, proved more to be more popular than any movie star.
At Tuesday’s packed-to-the-rafters press conference, a few hours before the actual ceremony and a screening of his autobiographical, Oscar-nominated “The Fabelmans,” a relaxed, upbeat Spielberg, 76, admitted that this kind of award comes with a handicap.
“Right now I’m very happy talking to all of you. That’s an honor. I must have done a couple of things right,” he said. But to be honored for a lifetime’s work forces him, he added, “To do something I don’t usually do which is reflect.” Usually, he’s moving forward. Looking back is “spending too much time in neutral.
“My mom Leah Adler Spielberg Posner died six years ago today. My mom as you know from the movie” — she’s played by Michelle Williams —”was very forthright. My mom used to say, ‘I’ve given you such good material!! When are you going to use that material?’
“So when the pandemic came I thought about mortality and aging and that gave me the courage to tell my personal story, to look back and figure out what story I could tell about my formative years. And that’s what a lifetime award does — it forces you to go back. And to be honored in Berlin is a tremendous highlight in my life, an honor.”
The Berlinale, in conjunction with his Golden Bear, mounted a sevenfilm retrospective that includes his earliest hit, the 1972 TV-movie “Duel,” three blockbusters (“E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Jaws”) and movies made in Germany (“Munich,” “Schindler’s List,” “Bridge of Spies”).
“Jaws,” he said, was “the hardest movie I’ve ever made.” “Duel” was the cult favorite that got him, for the first time, offers to direct movies.
Spielberg worked with the French auteur Francois Truffaut on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “There was nobody like him. He was a child at heart but like the title of his film he was a ‘Wild Child.’ I worked with him for four months on ‘Close Encounters’ and part of my reason for making ‘E.T.’ was because of Truffaut. He said to me, ‘You have the heart of a child. You need to make a movie with kids’ — and I never forgot that.”
Although friends with the legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, they never worked together. But now, Spielberg revealed to a round of applause, “We are mounting a big production for HBO based on Stanley’s original script on Napoleon, a seven-part limited series.”