Spielberg (2017 TV Movie)

Steven Spielberg: Self

Photos 

Quotes 

• Steven Spielberg : It was not fun to be me in between ideas or projects.

• [first lines] 

  Steven Spielberg : I started making movies when I was a young kid. But, I remember the time I almost gave up my dream of being a movie director. I must have been 16. A movie came into town called, "Lawrence of Arabia". And everybody was talking about it. I never sat in a fancy theater seat before. Premium ticket price. 70mm projection. Stereophonic sound. And when the film was over, I wanted to not be a director anymore. Because, the bar was too high. There's a scene where he looked at himself in that sword-knife. When he was first given the robes and he thought he was alone and he walked around laughing and looking at his shadow where the diaphanous robe he was holding out was actually imprinted on the sand and shadow. It was a great moment. And then later when they rout the retreating Turks, you seem him again, covered in gore, and he's got the knife in the same position he had it in his pristine days, in his glory days, and he's looking at himself - who he's become. It was the first time seeing a movie I realize that there are themes that aren't narrative story themes, they are themes that are character themes, that are personal themes. That David Lean created a portraiture, surrounding the portrait with a mural of scope and epic action. But, at the heart and core of "Lawrence of Arabia" is: who am I? I had such a profound reaction to the filmmaking and went back and saw the film a week later. I saw the film a week after that. And I saw the film a week after that. And I realized that there was no going back. That this was going to be what I was going to do or I was going to die trying. But, this *was* going to be the rest of my life.

• Steven Spielberg : [on filming "Jaws"]  What you don't see is generally scarier than what you do see. The script was filled with: shark, shark here, shark there, shark everywhere. The movie doesn't have very much shark in it.

• Steven Spielberg : [on filming "Jaws"]  This was supposed to be a thriller, based on people like you and me that are out of our element and having to fight something we have no comprehension how to deal with. That needs a level of authenticity that I thought shooting it in the backlot of Universal in North Hollywood would not give it. So, to me there was no going back. It had to be shot in the ocean. I thought it was going to be a cakewalk. But, I didn't know anything about tides or currents. I didn't know about how the wind affects the water. How the color of sky changes the color of the water. Or, how you can't get anything to match. It was one nightmare, worst case scenario after the other. I didn't think we'd ever finish. I just assumed I'd be fired off the picture.

• Steven Spielberg : Just try to hold a whole movie story in my head is a very lonely thing. There's nobody to really help me with that. I have to see it before I film it.

• Steven Spielberg : The more I feel backed into a corner, the more rewarding it becomes when I figure my way out of the corner.

• Steven Spielberg : Every time I start a new scene, I'm nervous. It is like going to school and having to take a test. I've never heard the lines spoken before. I don't know what I'm going to think of hearing the lines. I don't know what I'm going to tell the actors. I don't know where I'm going to put the camera. And every single time, it's the same. But, I tell you, it's the greatest feeling in the world. I'll tell you why it's a good feeling. The more I'm feeling confident and secure about something, the less I'm gonna put out. The more I'm feeling "uh-oh, this could be a major problem in getting the story told," I'm going to work overtime to meet the challenge and get the job done. And so I hate the feeling of being nervous, but, I need to feel in this moment I'm really not sure what I'm doing. And when that verges on panic, I get great ideas.

• Steven Spielberg : [on filming "Jaws"]  We were isolated in the middle of the ocean, 12 miles off shore. And it was technology over art - every single day. We'd get a shot, art was there, but you couldn't recognize the art from the effort.

• Steven Spielberg : The success of that changed my life. You know, it gave me final cut. It gave me a chance to pick and chose the movies I directed from that moment on. So, "Jaws" was a free pass int my future.

• Steven Spielberg : Joan Crawford is the first professional SAG member

  [laughs] 

  Steven Spielberg : I ever directed in my *life*.

• Steven Spielberg : After "Night Gallery" came out, there was a lot of criticism on the fact that I was a novelty item, the youngest term director ever put under contract in history. And the producers who do the hiring, wouldn't hire me. There was a lot of hostility and I had to prove myself to everybody.

• Steven Spielberg : My early themes always had the underdog being pursued by indomitable forces of both nature and natural enemies and that person has to rise to the occasion to survive. And a lot of that comes from the insecurities I felt as a kid and how that bled over into the work. I was always the kid with the big bully and "Duel" is my life in the schoolyard. The truck was the bully and the car was me.

• Steven Spielberg : When ABC saw "Duel" they were very excited by what they were seeing. But, at the very, very end when the truck did not explode in a pyrotechnics display, they George Eckstein called me and said, "The Network's really upset that the truck didn't blow up. So, they're ordering us to go back to that cliff and blow the truck up." And I said, "I'm not going to do it." The death of the truck is so agonizing. I said, "I made that truck die slowly." The oil like blood dripping off the steering wheel. The wheel slowly rolling to a stop. The fan still going, but, the truck's dying. I mean, the death of the truck - that's what the audience wants to see. This criminal element - paying the price for what it did to this man. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't blow up the truck.

• Steven Spielberg : For me, directing is camera work and so I'm very on the front line of that. I've got to set up the shot. I've got to block the actors. Choreograph the movement of the scene. Bring the camera into the choreography. Figure when the came is going to stop, how it moves, how far it moves, what the composition is. So, I've always got my eye on the lens and that's what I do. I even pick the lens I want.

• Steven Spielberg : [after watching an early cut of "Star Wars" with George Lucas and Brian DiPalma]  George said, I think it's going to be a disaster. He was very depressed. We all went to a Chinese restaurant after the film was over and Brian stood up and started take a shry about "What's going on here? I don't understand this story? Who are these people? Whose the hairy guy? Where did they come from? Where's the context? Where's the backstory? It's driving me crazy." Brian went off on George. And George just sat there. He turned red. I think he wanted to kill him. But, out of all that something great came. Brian basically said, "You need like an old fashioned movie, to start the picture with a forward. And all these words come on the screen and they travel up the screen and the forward tells you what the hell you're lookin' at and why you're in the theater and what the mythology is. Tell us what this world is and then we can enjoy the picture." And that was the birth of the famous prologue.

• Steven Spielberg : I had been very influenced by how far Stanley Kubrick took "2001: A Space Odyssey" into the world of really expressionist art. And I wanted to take "Close Encounters" even further. I really wanted the audience to look at the screen and say, "I'm having a sighting." But, I wasn't sure any of this was going to work.

• Steven Spielberg : George showed a bunch of us "Star Wars" for the first time and there were no effects in yet. It was just World War II black-and-white stock footage intercut with blue screen production color footage. And then showed that movie to us expecting us to be able to see the movie.

• Steven Spielberg : I identified with the obsession that Richard Dreyfuss was struggling with. I was near it, in that movie. Something opens up his imagination to go for something that he thinks is going to provide some cathartic answer. He had to go through chaos to reach some kind of clarity. He was an artist trying to plumb the depths of his imagination. And so I think in a sense, "Close Encounters" is maybe the most, at least, certainly the most personal film I made up to that point. Because, it was also about the dissolution of a family.

• Steven Spielberg : [on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"]  I had first thought mathematics would be the common language between intergalactic species, but, I thought it would be much more emotional if music was how we spoke to one another.

• Steven Spielberg : I think all of my movies that have dealt with young people and their stories are about the importance of empowering these children to take control of the story or at least take control of their lives

• Steven Spielberg : "E.T." was a suburban, American story and suburbia was all I knew growing up. So, the movies I made in the 70s, the 80s, were a reflection of what I knew. My main religion was suburbia.

• Steven Spielberg : I wanted to shoot "E.T." in continuity. It gives the kids a context for the work they're doing that day. Because they know that tomorrow will be tomorrow in the script. And yesterday was yesterday in the script. So, for young kids, it gives them a real confidence that they're living a life - and they're living a story's life.

• Steven Spielberg : Originally, my idea for "E.T." didn't include an extraterrestrial. It was going to be about how a divorce affects childhood and how it really kind of traumatizes children. - So, the overriding theme was going to be about how do you fill the heart of a lonely child? - What extraordinary event would it take to fill Elliot's heart to losing his Dad? It would take something as extraordinary as an extraterrestrial coming into his life.

• Steven Spielberg : I was looking for a different perception of myself. And if I didn't want to consciously make a departure and prove something, not just to myself, but, to everyone else, I might not have chosen "Color Purple" as my next movie. But, it was my first really mature film - which took on substantive, humanistic subject matter. I was turning 40 and I was looking at life, perhaps, less optimistically. And, so, I knew this was going to be a very sobering journey and I was willing to take it on.

• Steven Spielberg : [on "The Color Purple"]  I got in trouble with several critics who didn't like that I shied away from the love story between Shug and Celie and the scene where Shug Avery shows Celie with a mirror her vagina. That that did not go into the movie - which would have really changed the entire nature and tone of the film. I just didn't go for the full monty the way the book did. I might have done that had I made the movie 10 years later. I was just timid. I was just a little embarrassed. I was just wasn't the right guy to do that.

• Steven Spielberg : [on "Empire of the Sun"]  It was playing on what I knew were my strengths in being able to take the dark, grim reality of war and put it with a child's approach in the way this particular special child saw that war. It was based on the experiences that J. G. Ballard had in a Japanese internment camp. In a lost boy trying to figure out where he belongs in this world. It's a movie about growing up too quickly and abandoning everything you once used to keep yourself safe. When you have nothing to keep yourself safe, you become a survivor like all the rest and you grow up awfully quickly.

• Steven Spielberg : [on "Schindler's List"]  And nothing could prepare for my first visit to Auschwitz. And nothing prepared me for that. I wanted to shoot where the story actually took place, all the actual locations. But, I realized at that point when I went to Poland for the first time, that I was playing with fire.

• Steven Spielberg : I knew this couldn't be just another movie and it couldn't be anything like anything I'd ever directed before. I had to approach the material and I had to approach the location with a great deal of reverence. And I had to make this a very quiet, quiet production. We were shooting on hallowed, sacred ground. Everywhere we shot in Krakow felt like we were shooting in a cemetery. And it changed my entire approach to cinema. That film looks different than anything I'd ever done before. I tried to do it with no fancy tricks, no fancy lens, no big Hollywood sweeping cranes. I tried to take all the tools with which I made so many of my films and just chuck them out the window. I never handheld anything; but, I wanted to handhold as much in "Schindler's List" as I possibly could. I just wanted to create - for all of us - the feeling that we were absolutely there at the time.

• Steven Spielberg : [on "Jurassic Park"]  It was the beginning, really, of the digital era. Where central characters were digitally created. No one had ever gone there before that way.

• Steven Spielberg : "Jurassic Park" is a cautionary tale. We stand on the shoulders of giants to create the next great thing and yet we take no responsibility for our own creations. But, it's an old time worn science fiction story. It's what brought Godzilla up from the depths. You mess with atomic energy, you get Godzilla.

• Steven Spielberg : [on "Saving Private Ryan"]  I tried very, very hard to put the audience as close to the experience as I possibly knew how to do. So, there wouldn't ever be a safe feeling in the audience. And when you narrow that distance, if you're successful in narrowing the distance, then the audience really becomes the characters.

• Steven Spielberg : I've avoided therapy because movies are my therapy.

• Steven Spielberg : "Amistad" and "Lincoln" and "Bridge of Spies" are all about the rule of law. They're all about the rights of even people who are either brought here against their will or come here to be a soldier in an opposing army and are caught. The law fully covers everyone.

• Steven Spielberg : I really believe in this country - and I always have. And it just resonated throughout my work. Wanting to tell American stories, wanting to tell stories about principled, ethical people who against all advice and against most everyone else's better judgment, just proceed to do the right thing. I'm sure that sounds like I'm this kind of, you know, idealist or some sort of patriot. But, I am a patriot - and I'm somewhat of an idealist too.

• Steven Spielberg : The movie that I made a real statement about 9-11 was "War of the Worlds". For me it began with what would *really* happen if we were invaded. And everything that we thought made us invulnerable to invasion was all wrong.

• Steven Spielberg : History is its own reminder of how bad things can get and if we don't solve these problems they accumulate. And there's no rug big enough to sweep these problems under. And, eventually, something's going to happen. And so "Munich" is a pray for peace, but peace the hard way. You know, peace by discovering within yourself you're moral high ground.

• Steven Spielberg : John Williams is my oldest collaboration and I depend on Johnny more than I've depended on anybody to rewrite my movies musically and put them a wrung higher than I ever could reach.

• Steven Spielberg : Geography is one of the most important things to me - so the audience isn't thrown into chaos trying to figure out the story you're telling. The audience needs to be clearer than you.

• Steven Spielberg : Families a big battlement in my life. Which is why so many of my stories are about separation and then - reunification. Even "Lincoln".

  [laughs] 

  Steven Spielberg : It's about separation and reunification.

• Steven Spielberg : Great filmmaker's works live onto create tremendous moments of inspiration. And so one of the films I still see every year is "Lawrence of Arabia". The shots, the sheer vistas, and the portrait of such a complex character. It's pure moviemaking.

• Steven Spielberg : The experience of making "Schindler's List" made me reconcile with all of the reasons, the vain glorious reasons, I - I - I hid from my Jewishness. And it made me so proud - to be a Jew.