Spielberg’s films reveal the man
HBO documentary chronicles life of acclaimed director
You can learn a lot about a man from the films he makes.
Spielberg (HBO, Saturday, 8 ET/ PT), Susan Lacy’s 2 1⁄2- hour documentary that chronicles the life and career of acclaimed director Steven Spielberg, reveals film themes as it weaves together discussions of his movies with an examination of his youth in suburban Phoenix, including the pain caused by his parents’ divorce.
While “part of Steven is in every movie he makes,” Lacy says, quintessential films from the more than 30 he has directed reflect his thinking at various points in his life.
“He wrote Close Encounters (of the Third Kind),” released in 1977, which “came out of the optimistic belief in the benign nature of alien contact. He had made a version of the film when he was 16 (called Firelight).”
As Spielberg matured as a filmmaker and person, becoming a family man with greater responsibilities, he took on major events and issues.
Schindler’s List, his 1993 classic about the Holocaust, “is about as personal as it gets for him. … Saving Private Ryan is a monumental film. Lincoln, in terms of subject matter, is different from anything he’d made before, a quiet, interior film.”
Lacy’s film provides fascinating information about Spielberg ’s career, some of which may be surprising even to fans:
After watching David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia, when he was a teen, Spielberg, now 70, almost quit plans to direct before he’d even started. “The bar was too high,” he says. He watched the movie again and again, finding inspira- tion and deciding that filmmaking “was going to be the rest of my life.”
During production, Jaws didn’t seem destined to become a blockbuster. For authenticity, Spielberg filmed the boat scenes in the ocean rather than a studio lagoon, but he didn’t factor in wind and waves. Budgets ballooned and a fake shark sank, but the flotation barrels that conveyed the harpooned shark’s movements added to the sus- pense. “What you don’t see is generally scarier than what you do see,” Spielberg says in the documentary.
While 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is clearly a story of how divorce can traumatize children, fans may not know that Spielberg originally thought of making the film without an extraterrestrial, Lacy says.
For all of Spielberg ’s huge successes, he hit some bumps along the way. Riding a hot streak, Spielberg tried a comedy, 1941, starring John Belushi and released in 1979, and the result was not funny. Later, he was criticized for a timid film interpretation that softened the grittier details of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple.
After 1941 bombed, Spielberg wanted to direct a James Bond film, but “my friend George Lucas came to the rescue,” he says, steering him toward an escapist B-movie that became Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Indiana Jones franchise.
Spielberg took very different approaches to two 1993 releases. He pared down his shooting technique for Schindler’s List, cutting out “fancy tricks” to approach his topic with a quiet reverence, he says. Yet he and his team forged new ground in computer-generated effects on Jurassic Park, creating 30-foot dinosaurs.
Spielberg, not content to rest on his estimable laurels, is busy with upcoming films: The Post, which looks at the 1970s publication of the Pentagon Papers, and Ready Player One, a sci-fi film set in a dystopic future.
Lacy doesn’t see him stopping. “Daniel Day-Lewis says it in the film: ‘Most of us have a shelf life. Steven does not.’ He’ll be doing this until the day he dies.”