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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 was 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 in shadow.
It was a great moment.
And then later, when they route the retreating Turks,
you see 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 realized that there are themes that aren't narrative story themes.
There are themes that are character themes, that are personal themes.
That David Lean created a portraiture,
surrounded 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 I 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 gonna do
or I was gonna die trying.
But this was going to be the rest of my life.
And then trying to get-- it felt lined up.
- The camera just gotta go right. - Just a little bit lower.
That's good right there. That's perfect.
Yeah, camera has to go right a bit, please.
Go right.
- Right, right, right, right. - Can you get there?
Right there would be good.
Every time I start a new scene, I'm nervous.
And it's like going to school, having to take a test.
I never heard the lines spoken before.
I don't know what I'm gonna think of hearing the lines,
I don't know what I'm gonna tell the actors,
I don't know where I'm gonna 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 gonna work overtime to meet the challenge
and get the job done.
All right, that's done. I don't know if it's worth it.
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.
The more I feel backed into a corner,
the more rewarding it becomes
when I figure my way out of the corner.
I love it. Next shot.
Good.
- Did you see that? - Yes.
Martin Scorsese: I remember when Steven was in production on "Jaws,"
the word around town and in the "LA Times"
was that it was folly and that it was gonna be a disaster.
Richard Dreyfuss: "Jaws" started filming on May 2nd.
I was hired, I think, on May 3rd,
and they had no shark, no script, and no cast
when they first started, so...
The script was never locked.
We were rewriting the script
12 hours before we were shooting what we just wrote.
You know, it's scary for a director to not know
if he's gonna be able to hand pages to his cast the next morning.
Guys, we can't shoot right now.
- Hold on. - Hold on.
This is my second day at sea
and I have 54 more days to go.
And if I survive this,
I'll have learned a lot, because right now all I can tell you is
it's twice as slow shooting at sea as it is shooting on land.
Bill Butler: Well, the studio had never shot a film on the ocean before.
They would do it on the back lake.
They would do it in a studio tank.
They would make miniature boats.
They would-- everything would be so easy
that you would never get cold or wet.
But Steven said, "I'm gonna shoot in the open ocean."
Roll sound.
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 back lot
at 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 gonna 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 the 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 had just assumed I'd be fired off the picture.
We were isolated in the middle of the ocean, 12 miles offshore,
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.
Just trying to hold a whole movie story in my head
is a very lonely thing, because nobody can really help me with that.
I have to see it before I film it.
And that's why it was so scary on "Jaws"--
when I couldn't see it until I finally did.
Just before I went off to make "Jaws," I got to meet Henry Hathaway.
He was kind of a tough-guy director, and he said,
"There's gonna be moments where you're gonna get to the set
and you're not gonna know what the hell you're doing.
It happens to all of us.
You've gotta guard that secret with your life.
Let no one see when you're unsure of yourself.
Hide that from everybody,
or you'll lose the respect of everyone."
Marker.
- Good blood. - And... ready?
- And action, Roy. - Slow ahead.
I can go slow ahead.
You ought to come down and ladle some of this shit.
And down.
Absolutely everything was falling apart.
The first time we tested the shark, it sunk.
It would come up out of the water and go...
Like that.
I knew that it's gonna take
three or four weeks to rebuild the shark,
and so we'd have to make up something else
that didn't exactly show the shark
but gave the sense the shark was near.
Bring it around after him!
The barrels were a godsend,
because I didn't need to show the shark as long as those barrels were around.
What you don't see is generally scarier than what you do see,
and the script was filled with "shark."
Shark here, shark there, shark everywhere.
The movie doesn't have very much shark in it.
John Williams: If the shark had been available visually,
it might have changed the whole psychology
of the experience.
Williams: When you hear, "boom-boom, boom-boom,"
you've already been conditioned to think that's when the shark is present.
When the shark is far away, it's very faint.
When the shark is just about to attack, it's very close and it's very loud.
Williams: We can advertise the shark's presence or his attitude
by how we manage these notes,
just very few notes.
Dreyfuss: You are in a state of anxiety without seeing a shark.
It just scares the crap out of you.
Charlie, take my word for it!
Don't look back! Swim, Charlie!
Swim! Come on, Charlie!
Dun-dun. Dun-dun, dun-dun.
Dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom.
Come on, a little more, Charlie. Attaboy.
Come here, Charlie. Attaboy. Attaboy.
David Edelstein: It is a perfect exercise in suspense
with technique that any other filmmaker would kill for.
I knew I was using an electric cattle prod on the audience
every time there was some kind of a pop-up surprise.
Michael Phillips: Like Hitchcock, he knows how to get you
on the edge of your seat.
He doesn't show you what you want to see,
and then he delivers it when he wants to deliver it.
J. Hoberman: He certainly likes torturing the audience.
Has he ever been in analysis?
1, 1,000; 2, 1,000;
3, 1,000; 4, 1,000...
Everything scared me when I was a kid.
Everything.
1, 1,000; 2, 1,000; 3, one...
I had a tree out my window that was terrifying.
It was just terrifying.
1, 1,000; 2, 1,000...
I was filled with so much fear
that I needed to exorcise some of that.
And what better audience to exorcise myself of my demons
than my three sisters.
He would lock us in the closet with a skull,
which he had dripped different colors of wax all over.
It almost looked like blood.
I'd blindfold them one at a time,
bring them into the closet.
I'd put my whole body weight against the door.
They'd take their blindfold off,
and I would just sit there listening to them screaming.
I mean, telling this story now...
I still think it was pretty cool.
I was gonna say, "I hate myself for that."
I don't hate myself for that. It was fun.
At first, he just scared us.
But through his movies,
he gets to scare the shit out of everybody now.
Dan Rather: The blockbuster movie
of the summer, of course, is "Jaws,"
a tale of a murderous white shark on the loose.
And that movie's release was well timed
for maximum impact during the vacation season,
and some people who have seen it
are now seeing phantom sharks every time they go near the water.
Scorsese: I remember the night "Jaws" opened.
I was with Steven. He said, "Let's go and see the lines."
And we were looking, going by all the lines in Westwood
and places like that, and I said, "This is it.
This is gonna be a major change."
Janet Maslin: I was with him in the car
and he was really, really nervous but excited.
And the car went around the corner,
and there was the line went around the corner,
and then the car kept going, and the line kept going.
And he was absolutely beside himself.
You know, it was this instant breakthrough.
It was like balloons were exploding inside of this car.
And his whole life changed in that couple of minutes.
And he was 25 years old or something.
"Jaws" went triple its budget
and it went about two and a half times its schedule.
We wound up shooting the movie in 159 days.
The film was originally scheduled for 55 days.
But my hubris was I actually thought
I could shoot the film in 55 days.
Steven shook the very bones of Hollywood.
"Jaws" made more money
than any film had ever made up to that time.
The success of that changed my life.
You know, it gave me final cut.
It gave me a chance to pick and choose
the movies I directed from that moment on.
So "Jaws" was a free pass into my future.
I want you to meet a filmmaker now who has taken
the movie-going public and shaken it to its very roots.
- Oh, boy! - Aren't you excited?
- And everybody loves it. - Have you seen it?
Dinah Shore: Please welcome Mr. Steven Spielberg.
When did you first really get interested in movies?
When I was a bad little kid.
- Really? - About, yeah, 13 years old.
- That was the whole thing? - Very early starter, yeah.
Not-- I didn't take it seriously.
I did it-- like some people paint
and some people like to, you know, drive little cars,
and I liked to make little movies.
I didn't realize there was 50 years of filmmaking before me.
And I lived in Phoenix, Arizona,
where you can listen to cactus grow if you have nothing better to do.
- Yeah. - And I took a movie camera
and I was learning sort of the ABCs as I went along,
but it was just fun, it was something to do.
I really wanted my childhood to be
sort of the pie-in-the-sky, Norman Rockwell American Dream.
My dad was this computer genius that was on the team that invented
the first commercial data processing machine at RCA back in 1950,
and so my dad was headhunted a lot and went from company to company.
Like Army brats, we moved from place to place.
But most of my formative years took place in Phoenix, Arizona.
My father was the American man who worked very hard.
Sometimes worked six days a week and he came home late at night.
His career demanded a lot of time away from the family.
And my mom was Peter Pan.
She was a sibling, not a parent,
because she was a best friend,
not a primary caregiver.
And she got into trouble like we got into trouble.
Anne: Steve had a feeling that family should be
like "Father Knows Best,"
but we were not the usual family.
We just kind of were bohemians growing up in suburbia.
I went to a pet store one day, and there was a monkey
sitting in a cage like this, fetal position.
And the shopkeeper said the monkey was dying.
He had been taken away from his mother and he was depressed.
So, I come home, driving my jeep
with a big cage in the back and a monkey in the cage.
And I remember the kids freaked out.
They were so scared.
Steve said, "You know, in a normal household,
kids say, 'Can we have a monkey?'
And the mother says, 'Are you crazy?'"
You know, when I hear my stories about
the things I've done, I think, "That's crazy."
Susan Lacy: Did you think she was crazy?
I liked the monkey.
As a child, I spent a lot of my time watching television,
or listening to soundtrack albums,
or just sitting around, looking at the clouds.
My dad was always on me for that.
He did not like me getting Cs,
but school was not a place I was really drawn to.
Nancy: Steve was a kid that was sort of watchful and tentative
and in some ways hesitant.
You know, he wasn't like the normal kids in the neighborhood.
He wasn't the muscle guy.
You know, he got bullied a lot.
That was tough.
Most of my demons were self-inflicted wounds.
They were things inside myself.
The way I saw myself.
I didn't have a lot of high esteem for myself,
you know, growing up.
I just was a lonely guy.
J.J. Abrams: I think that explained a lot
of why and how he was compelled to make movies.
It was not just a means of expression,
but it was a means of escape,
and it was a means of sometimes making friends with people
that you couldn't otherwise, or getting to hang out
with girls that you might not be able to otherwise,
or just finding a way to have meaning.
The camera was my pen.
I wrote my stories through the lens.
And when I was able to say "action" and "cut,"
I wrested control of my life.
I love films like the "Sands of Iwo Jima,"
the "Flying Tigers," "Battleground,"
films that I'd see on television.
And I would watch these things over and over and over again.
I was really influenced by all that stuff,
and so my first couple of movies
were stories about World War II.
There was an airport with a bunch of World War II airplanes
just sitting out there on the tarmac.
I would take a shot of my friend with his finger on the stick
and intercut actual 8mm combat footage.
A lot of it shot by John Ford, by the way.
And made a movie that looked like
the production value was off the charts
because the production value was off the charts.
It was the real thing.
Abrams: You can just look at those movies,
and you see the ability to tell a story without words.
His use of primitive special effects was spectacular.
You know, he'd have big bullet hits,
he'd put little see-saws of dirt,
so that when his actors were running,
they'd step on one piece,
and it would sort of catapult the dirt up in the air
as if they were being shot as they were running.
There were things that he did that just made complete sense.
You saw the trajectory.
There was something in the DNA of it that,
despite it being shot on 8mm film,
was the voice of that same filmmaker.
But I didn't know anything about whether
I was gonna have a career or where this was gonna go.
I just knew that it filled up the time and it gave me
a tremendous amount of satisfaction.
And the second I finished a movie, I wanted to start a new one
because I felt good about myself when I was making a film.
But when I had too much time to think,
all those scary whispers would start-- start up.
It was not fun to be me in between ideas or projects.
Sid Sheinberg: The lore has it that as a young man,
Steven was sort of the Phantom of the Opera,
haunting the lot of Universal Studios.
He would literally get on the lot
one way or another.
I got on the studio tour bus,
took a jaunt around the back lot.
And then at one point they give you a bathroom break,
and I never came out of the bathroom.
I waited till I could hear a pin drop, and then came out.
The bus was gone and I was on the lot.
James Brolin: Word was that he went upstairs
in the tower and took an office on the sixth floor,
and nobody bothered him for six months.
Dreyfuss: The story was he requisitioned an office,
telephone, put his name on the door.
Eh, I don't believe it, but you know what they said
in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"--
when the legend is bigger than the facts,print the legend.
Roger Ernest: One time he sneaked onto Alfred Hitchcock's set
and watched him direct a little bit
until he got caught and was asked to leave.
Steve was constantly learning,
constantly looking, constantly asking questions
from all of the tradespeople--
cinematographer, lighting, editors.
It was like Spielberg 101 in overdrive.
I tried very hard to get into USC Film School,
and I just didn't have the grades to get in.
And I even had a personal interview at USC,
and they turned me down even in person.
So, Universal became my film school.
Ernest: Steven was laser focused.
He never lost sight of the fact that the audience early on, for him,
wasn't the audience in the theater.
The audience were the studio executives.
And he figured out how to make a film
that will convince the studio executives that,
"Yes, I have the talent to be a director.
This is what I can do."
I looked at this film, and I was very taken with it.
I had a very strong feeling
that this was not your average young filmmaker.
Sid Sheinberg, who was President of Universal Television at the time,
he said, "So, sir, I saw your film.
Very well made.
I'd like to offer you a seven-year contract
to come to Universal to direct television."
He said, "If you sign with us,
I will support you as strongly in failure
as I will in success."
And he was true to his word.
And that was the beginning of the most important relationship
I could ever imagine having in this business.
Steven was known as the uncrowned prince.
He was the guy who was gonna make it.
I mean, he was directing Joan Crawford
when he was 20.
That'll teach you a lot of things.
Joan Crawford is the first professional SAG member
I ever directed in my life!
I want to see something!
Trees, concrete, buildings, grass, airplanes, color!
It was Cassavetes who said, "If you want to be a real filmmaker,
you can't be afraid of anything or anybody."
And Steven's not.
He's there with Joan Crawford who wants him out every day.
And he's gotta shoot and be on schedule and be good,
meaning that it has to have a vision.
The shots have to have a point of view.
But 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 were doing the hiring wouldn't hire me.
There was a lot of hostility,
and I had to prove myself to everybody.
You know, they looked at me as sort of Sheinberg's folly.
He underwrote me. Let him find me work.
Brolin: I had wanted to direct,
and Steven walks in, and he's a kid!
And I'm envious as hell right away.
Steven's able to walk into a room,
look for a second or two, say, "Here. Here."
"Move that here. Give me a 25mm here."
"Put it this way. Face forward."
"Move it. Silhouette here."
Two takes, three takes. "That's enough. Thanks."
"Let's move on." It was amazing.
Steven Bochco: Steven had a gear in his brain
that automatically translated words into pictures
almost without it being a conscious process for him.
There was a unique visual voice there
that you had to not only pay attention to,
but you had to give somewhat of a free rein to.
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 just 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" was my life in the schoolyard.
The truck was the bully, and the car was me.
George Lucas: I was over at Francis Coppola's,
and "Duel" was gonna be shown that night,
so I sort of snuck away from the party
and said, "I wanna see this film. I wanna see what this kid did."
I was sort of on the fence about Steven.
I said, "Knows what he's doing,
nice, but a little too Hollywoody for my taste."
I saw "Amblin" and I thought "Amblin" was nice,
but it wasn't-- you know, it was very, very flashy.
It was very, very professional.
And for the rest of us, we were all rough-edged,
crazy guys that were doing much more dirty work.
So, I thought, "Well, I'll watch the first half hour
and just see what he's up to."
And I ended up watching the whole thing.
And I came down to Francis, I said, "This guy's amazing.
You really gotta look at this film."
Right off the bat, it was clear
that no one moved the camera like Steven Spielberg.
Other directors had a fantastic sense of space.
Orson Welles, you name it,
people who understood composition.
But the way that Spielberg's camera
moved through a shot
and then ended up somewhere that completely shifted
or intensified the emotion of the scene,
that was just a natural gift he had.
Who knows where that came from.
Who-- but it was his own technique.
Francis Ford Coppola: "Duel" was a composition
that had a very elusive and interesting theme.
You know, this unknown menace.
Everyone's been on a road and some idiot has crossed in front of you,
and, you know, you're tempted to rev up fast
and go do something nasty to him.
And here he took this and made it into a parable.
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,
George Eckstein called me and said,
"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 gonna 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, it's the death of the truck.
That's what the audience wants to see.
This criminal element paying--
you know, paying the price for what it did to this man.
I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't blow up the truck.
For Steven, the little screen was an interesting canvas,
and obviously he painted on it very well,
but he knew that this screen
simply wasn't a large enough canvas.
Vilmos Zsigmond: He's a director who knows
how important cinematography is,
and the way Steven directed "Sugarland Express" was so fresh,
you know, because everything was on location.
And half of the movie was inside of a police car.
And that was a difficult thing to--
to keep that alive all the time.
You know, the angles and all that.
I see lights, a whole bunch.
For me, directing is camerawork,
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I've gotta set up the shot, I've gotta block the actors,
choreograph the movement of the scene,
bring the camera into the choreography,
figure out when the camera stops, 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.
His strength is really the ability
to be able to tell a story in pictures instinctively.
I sometimes watch his pictures on TV without the sound
just to see the pictures.
Pauline Kael, one of the most influential film critics of all time,
wrote in "The New Yorker" that Steven Spielberg had made
one of the most phenomenal debuts in the history of film.
She compared him to Howard Hawks
in terms of how natural his feel for the medium was.
What Kael saw in Spielberg
was someone with a real movie sense,
but she also said she wasn't necessarily sure
there was great depth to go with it.
She didn't see a sign of an emerging film artist
like Martin Scorsese.
What she saw instead was the birth
of a new generation Hollywood hand.
Martin Scorsese, filmmaker of "Mean Streets."
This is Brian De Palma, loud as ever.
- George and Marcia Lucas. - Hi!
And this is Steven.
Get the camera arranged. Great.
♪ Time has come today ♪
♪ Young hearts can go their way... ♪
In the mid to late '60s, there was a major change
in the Hollywood studio system.
It was a very different world they had to serve,
and there was a new freedom, too.
Brian De Palma: So, suddenly the doors were open for young directors
with very crazy, seemingly original ideas.
It's almost like, you know, crashing a party.
Yeah, people were on the way out, and we were going in.
We were absolutely obsessed with movies,
but we certainly didn't look at it as a career.
We didn't think we were ever gonna make any money at it.
There was George and Francis,
and then there was Marty and me,
and then there was Steven.
We came from different places,
but needless to say, we were always very happy to be together.
When we got together, it was like a fraternity of directors.
George, put the camera on the table, on--
I'm gonna hit a ball into the lens,
and you pick the camera up at the last moment.
When I got into the group of the Movie Brats,
as somebody once called us,
I never-- it was the first time I felt like an insider.
We were very, very fortunate to be part of that time.
The culture was converging.
That's Albert.
It was filmmakers, it was artists,
musicians, performers.
It was an incredible, fertile time.
And here we have Amy Irving in the car.
Brian De Palma introduced us when she was making "Carrie."
- That's how we first met. - Then they started to go out together.
They were together and then they were apart,
and then they got back together again.
- Amy half dressed. - As usual, sewing.
Yes, sewing Steven's pants to get him ready
for the big day that's coming very soon.
Noogies, noogies.
Steven was a nerd.
Master of the world!
A loveable nerd, but he was a nerd.
He was not into sports or drugs or rock 'n' roll,
but he was passionate and he was so enthusiastic.
He used to love to talk about film,
and it was infectious, his enthusiasm.
Steven had the first car phone.
It's ringing.
So, Steven and I used to go around
and call up a girl and say, "Well, let's get together,"
and she'd say, "Fine."
And then of course we'd be parked right outside her house.
That was like-- I would say--
it may seem extremely silly now,
but in those days it was like a miracle.
He was fun. He was fun to be around.
I'm Julia Child, the French chef.
Today we are carving... turkey for Thanksgiving!
We were all struggling
with our first very unsuccessful attempts
to penetrate the Hollywood establishment,
but Steven was working all the time.
Steven always was a creature of the studio,
and his thinking and his methodology went that direction,
and he became a master of it.
He was very fortunate that the kind of movie
he really had a sense for was also the kind of movie
that the audience had a sense for.
We are now in the Scorsese kitchen.
We are going to show "Hell's Angels."
We all gravitated towards each other.
We had that one thing that kept us all together, the one element.
The one kind of a madness and an obsession with movies.
We were consulting with each other,
and unabashedly giving opinions about each other's works.
It was very much that way,
but we were still competitive.
"Come and see my movie.
Sit down-- sit here. The sound's best here."
And blow the other guy away.
Everybody was sort of forced to do a better job
to impress everybody,
because Marty had done this movie,
or Francis had done that movie.
They became like the acid test.
You get some real grounding and you hope an honesty--
maybe not too honest.
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.
It was basically a children's film.
You know, it wasn't what the other friends of mine
would think of as something really worthwhile.
Steven was the one person who was really enthusiastic about it
and said, "This is gonna be a huge smash."
But George said, "I think it's gonna be a disaster."
He was very depressed, and we all went
to a Chinese restaurant after the film was over,
and Brian stood up and started to geschrei about,
"What's going on around here? I don't understand the story.
Who are these people? Who's the hairy guy?
Where do 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.
George, I think, 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 foreword,
and all these words come on the screen, and they travel up,
and the foreword tells you what the hell you're looking 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 came to visit me when I was shooting "Scarface,"
and I gave him one of the units
to shoot the Colombians coming up the staircase.
Say hello to my little friend.
So, we were just shooting people getting shot
for a couple of weeks.
We all had great respect for each other's work,
and we were just trying to help each other out
when we would see things that we thought could be improved.
All right, now I am turning the--
the camera over to our new director--
That's the worst swish pan I've ever seen.
The worst swish pan I've ever seen.
He's shooting me. I'm totally in darkness.
How do you expect to see anything?
It's kind of like what happened in Paris in the '20s.
You know, you get a group of people, they're all crazy people,
and they're controversial and doing the same struggle,
but you sort of look at it later and you say,
"How could that whole group--"
the whole group became successful
and dominated the film business.
It's like, how could that be?
We were just a bunch of crazy kids.
But, you know, I think a lot of it was really love of film
and all desperate to make film any way we could.
Oh, my God.
Tony Kushner: When you're watching Steven's movies,
you feel like you're in the presence of something mysterious
and inexpressible and poetic.
Enjoying very simple pleasures--
being scared, being amused, being dazzled.
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 gonna work.
Bob Balaban: It was very risky.
The effects for "Close Encounters"
basically had never been done before.
He shot the people with a motion control camera,
making the camera move, pan, tilt,
whatever he want to do.
And then that's recorded, actually, on a tape,
and then when Doug Trumbull, the special effects supervisor,
goes back to the post production facilities,
he can actually duplicate exactly that camera move.
So, when you married the two images, they were perfect,
and you could have, for really about the first time,
moving special effects.
Always before, you had to kind of sit there quietly,
because if you moved, it would destroy everything.
Everybody is doing that today.
They could not be doing those effect movies
unless Steven and Doug didn't try all these things already.
The stakes were so high for Steven on "Close Encounters."
Columbia Pictures was literally on the verge of bankruptcy,
and they bet the farm on this movie.
He had bankers and Hollywood breathing down his neck
to prove to the world that "Jaws" wasn't a fluke.
So, Steven had a giant responsibility on his shoulders,
but he had to stay true to what worked for him,
or it wasn't gonna be a good film.
And he did.
Win or lose, he made the movie that he had dreamed of making.
When I was a kid, my dad took me to watch
the Perseid meteor shower and introduced me to the sky
as a place of unspeakable wonders.
And because it was such a beautiful experience for me,
the heavens promised if there was ever gonna be,
you know, a first meeting
between an extraterrestrial civilization and our own,
it would only be benign and constructive.
It would be a conversation.
When these extraterrestrials are coming here,
we don't know what they can speak,
what they understand, or even what they see,
so Steven had this idea that communication
should be a combination of sound and light.
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.
I don't search for films consciously
that have a spiritual core.
There's a spiritual part of myself that happens
to bleed over into the work, and so I subconsciously,
which is the only choice that's important,
will find things that inherently have something of a belief system
that's beyond our understanding, that's a little bit out there.
"Close Encounters" was much more a personal statement
than his previous two movies had been.
I mean, he wrote the script.
It really meant a huge amount to Steven.
Its genesis was from a film
I had actually written and directed when I was 17.
It was the story of man's first contact with UFOs.
And there were actually UFOs in "Firelight" that I created.
I saw a lot of movies, and I had a whole card catalogue in my brain
of the things I had seen.
And just by watching movies with special effects in them,
I could figure most everything out.
In a way, he had lived with "Close Encounters"
since he was a child.
And he had a vision in a real palpable sense
of what this movie should feel like
when you experience the movie.
Steven doesn't want to make little personal movies.
He wants to make big personal movies.
That's not right. That's not right.
I identified with this obsession
that Richard Dreyfuss was struggling with.
I was Neary 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 had made up to that point,
because it was also about the dissolution of a family.
I remember when we moved to Northern California from Arizona.
I had sensed that things weren't going well with my parents.
And one day, my dad just broke down,
and I never had seen my dad cry before.
And I just stood there in the kitchen,
outraged that my father was not a man.
He was crying like a little boy.
And I started screaming "crybaby" at him as loud as I could.
Just started screaming, "Crybaby, you crybaby, you crybaby,"
until they pushed me out of the kitchen.
Roy, promise me that you'll go! Please!
You crybaby! You crybaby! You crybaby!
- You crybaby! Crybaby! - Get out of here! Get out!
Come on, you guys.
- Crybaby! - Come on.
You crybaby!
- Be quiet! - Ronnie: Stop it!
My mom went from being completely joyful
and celebrative about life itself
to being full of despair and palpable sadness.
I would see my mom going into the living room
and playing some Schumann and crying.
Crying to the point she couldn't see the notes on the paper.
I'd sit with her and hold her hand, talk to her.
She just said, "I'm so lonely here. I'm so sad here."
I was going through the same thing.
And all I knew was that my dad
was fulfilled up there, and we weren't.
So, when it was announced by my mom
that my mom and my dad were splitting up,
I didn't know any of the details.
I didn't know why they were splitting up,
and I didn't for a long time.
I didn't want to know.
I fell in love with somebody else.
I was madly in love with Bernie Adler.
I look back, I think, "How dare I do that?"
But I really didn't care at that point.
It was all about me and my unhappiness.
Bernie had been my father's best friend,
and he was a fixture.
It was like having an uncle.
I never would tell the kids that she divorced me.
Instead, I let them think I divorced her.
Why did you do that?
Protecting her 'cause she's fragile.
And she still is.
And so, I figured I could be hurt less than she.
I still loved her.
My dad and my stepfather were best friends.
My mom married Dad's best friend.
You look at the big picture, that's shit.
That's really bad.
It didn't hit me till I got older
that that was a really tough thing for Dad,
and I-- my heart bled for him.
Steve really thought my dad left us.
So, during a number of years, we blocked him out.
And Steve, I know, blamed him
for the relationship going bad.
It was literally the worst period
of my entire life.
I never told my dad I was mad at him.
We never had angry words,
but it was an estrangement
that I created, not from my dad.
He was seeking a relationship with me.
I just went off and got lost in my work,
the way I saw my dad get lost in his
all those years of coming home late
and working weekends back in Phoenix and all of that.
I became my father. I became a workaholic.
And I just lost the contact with him.
It went on for... 15 years.
Tom Snyder: You know, I read about you today.
You've done four pictures. That's all.
Four movies that I can count.
You're not Alfred Hitchcock who's done over 50.
You're not John Ford.
Can you believe that you've directed
four pictures and you're a famous person?
- Can you believe that? - Can I believe that?
Yes, I can, as a matter of fact.
I can believe that I've directed four pictures,
although it seems like I've been directing much longer.
Tom Hanks: He arrived on the scene in such a huge manner.
You know, the way "Jaws" entered
into the consciousness of the world was huge.
"Close Encounters" was 10 times as huge.
But Steven was in the process of inventing himself.
I don't think he himself knew
where this road was gonna take him.
I'm sure, like everybody else at that age,
he was wondering was he really as good as he thought he was.
And turned out he was.
Once you do "Jaws"
and then "Close Encounters," well, where do you go?
The bar, as they say, is set a certain level.
And what do you do?
You get yourself into shape
and you jump over the bar again.
Originally, my idea for "E.T."
didn't include an extraterrestrial.
It was gonna be about how a divorce affects childhood
and how it really kind of traumatizes children.
- Dad's shirt. - Yeah.
Remember when he used to take us out to the ball games
and take us to the movies,
and we'd have popcorn fights?
So, the overriding theme was gonna be about
how do you fill the heart of a lonely child?
Me, human. Boy.
- Elliott. - And what extraordinary event
would it take to fill Elliott's heart
after losing his dad?
It would take something as extraordinary
as an extraterrestrial coming into his life.
Drew Barrymore: Steven, as a filmmaker,
can create otherworldly, almost impossible scenarios,
but do it in a suburban setting
and with real families and real people,
and so, you are able to go outer worldly, outer space,
extraterrestrial, implausible scenario,
because it's grounded in human beings
and human stories.
Okay, he's a man from outer space
and we're taking him to his spaceship.
- Well, can't he just beam up? - This is reality, Greg.
"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.
You know, the families all getting together,
nobody gets divorced, nobody's unhappy with each other.
'Course, it's all false.
Maybe you just probably imagined it...
I couldn't have imagined it.
Maybe it was a pervert or deformed kid or something.
A deformed kid.
Maybe an elf or a leprechaun.
It was nothing like that, penis breath!
Elliott!
Sit down.
Dad would believe me.
Maybe you ought to call your father and tell him about it.
I can't. He's in Mexico with Sally.
Where's Mexico?
I saw my childhood through this family
and those young, wonderful actors.
Peter Coyote: When Steven works with children,
he brings a kind of "let's play" feeling.
He'd have to pull you back. Grab on to this, right here.
It's not like somebody talking baby talk to kids.
It's just he's really communicating to them.
And it's sort of like direct transmission.
Now he suddenly turns to you, his eyes come open.
Do that to E.T. Give that joyful scream to E.T.
Do the line again, really excited about "Are they coming?"
Breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing, breathing.
- Work yourself up. - Does this mean they're coming?
No, work yourself up even more. Work yourself up.
Does this mean they're coming?
Bigger, bigger. "Does this mean they're coming?"
Does this mean they're coming?
Yes!
Melissa Mathison: He had to be a bit of a father, a bit of a pal,
but he was, more than anything, an observer of them,
and I think that was a lot of fun for him.
- All of the kids were fun for him. - You gotta take me seriously.
- This is Halloween, folks. Hello, my love. - Hi, Granny.
Wait a sec. Drew, this is for you, my darling.
- Your apple. - I wanted to shoot "E.T." in continuity.
It gives the kids a context for the work they're doing that day,
'cause 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.
Now they put the machine on his chest,
and they're gonna give him a shock to try to make him come back.
And when they give him the shock,
it's very loud and it makes you jump and cry even more.
They're putting it on his chest now,
and he presses the button, and it goes, "Pow!"
Are you okay, honey?
Huh? Are you okay?
Let's see. Wipe your doll's face, too.
Thank you. Thank you.
Okay. Oh.
For many years I wondered about the universal appeal of this movie,
and one day, it hit me.
There are no two humans on Earth
that are farther apart
than those humans and that alien creature.
Come.
Stay.
And if Elliott,
and the mother, and the little girl,
and the scientist, could all love and empathize
and make a rapprochement
and a rapport with this creature,
so, too, can any two humans on Earth,
and I think that was a subtext that bubbled up through the film
and must have touched something,
because you don't get many films
that are universally loved and appreciated
40 years later.
And it spoke to something.
Some desire to be able to reach across boundaries
and touch other people.
I'll be right here.
Bye.
Leonardo DiCaprio: It's a very difficult balance as a director
to push a young child to do a dramatic sequence,
because you're obviously manipulating them to some capacity.
But Steven knew how to take them as a director
into some of these darker places
while handling them with kid gloves.
A.O. Scott: The children in Spielberg's world
may be vulnerable, may be unhappy,
but they're also very-- they're very powerful
and they're heroic.
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,
at least take control of their lives.
Kathleen Kennedy: Steven intuitively looks at the world
through a lens of innocence,
and children do that naturally.
So, it became the kind of go-to lens
that he wanted to use for his storytelling.
George Negus: One of the most interesting things that I've read about you
was a headline which said, "Steven Spielberg is making
movies and a fortune while he's still growing up.
He's really just a big kid."
Is that how you see yourself? Is that a reasonable comment?
I think it's reasonable.
You have to understand-- how do you define a big kid?
A responsible big kid, or just an irresponsible big kid?
Because I think you have to be responsible,
but you don't want to lose the child in you,
because that's what keeps you young,
and that's what keeps you in touch,
and keeps a smile on your face.
I don't quite know
what it would be like to become an adult.
- Oh... - My...
God!
I was feeling my oats
after both "Jaws" and "Close Encounters."
And so I thought, "I can do a comedy." Why not?
If I did those two movies, why can't I do anything?
And I have a sense of humor.
I go to movies and I laugh when they're funny.
Why not tackle a comedy?
I felt pretty invulnerable at that time.
I can assure you
there will be no bombs dropped here.
Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote the script,
and it was lean and mean.
I'm the one that stretched the humor
and the budget to its breaking point.
To me, it was an excuse to just blow a bunch of shit up
and try to get an audience to laugh.
But it was like I committed a war crime by making "1941."
Everyone was eviscerating it.
I was really devastated.
Just that feeling of failure, that cold emptiness,
where every reminder of the movie,
you get that sick feeling in the center of your stomach,
and you just want to go dig a hole and stick your head in it.
I mean, for the next year, I put my head in a lot of holes.
And my friend George Lucas came to the rescue.
George said, "What are you doing next?"
And Steven said that he really wanted to do a James Bond film.
And George said, "I have something much better than James Bond."
It's about an archeologist
and he goes hunting for supernatural artifacts.
And Steven said, "I love it.
Let's do it."
He's not a stock, standard hero.
He's not one of these "just add water"
and he'll grow into the hero of your dreams.
There's a human being under all of that.
That's what made Indiana Jones accessible to audiences.
- I think they're trying to kill us. - I know, Dad!
Well, it's a new experience for me.
Happens to me all the time.
It's an action-adventure movie where every reel is a cliffhanger.
Just pure escapist entertainment.
It was gonna be an all-out "B" movie,
and "B" movies are fun because they don't take themselves that seriously.
You do them quick. You do them dirty.
You cheat on everything you possibly can
to save as much money as you possibly can,
and you don't worry about the fact
that it's not gonna be "Lawrence of Arabia."
We took it to the studios, and what I didn't realize
was that Steven didn't have that great a reputation,
because he was always going over budget and over schedule.
So, every studio said no.
And some of them even said, "You know, if you can get a different director,
we'll do it, but Steven can't make that film for $20 million."
So, Steven said, "I promise you, I will not betray you.
If it's $20 million, we will make it for $20 million."
My experience on three cost overruns,
"Jaws," "Close Encounters," "'41,"
taught me how to be more economical
and benefited "Raiders" immeasurably.
He had something to prove, but he also didn't wanna let me down, his friend.
You know, it's like, it wasn't a studio, it was us.
Friday night. If we don't get this, we don't get the shot.
If we don't get the shot, we don't get the movie.
If they don't get the movie, we're all up the creek.
George said, "Look, if you direct this,
you have to shake my hand right now and promise
if it's a big hit, you gotta direct two more."
And it was a great collaboration.
Dad!
- What? What? - Dad!
- What?
- Head for the fireplace. - Oh.
Harrison Ford: The "Indiana Jones" movies were always more about movies
than they were about anything else.
They followed certain film formulas,
which freed them to do silly stuff.
Tom Stoppard: There was something which I simply adored
in "Indiana Jones."
When Harrison had fallen over a cliff
and his friends thought he was dead and they were peering down,
and Harrison had come up without his hat,
because he'd fallen over a cliff, for heaven's sake,
and a mysterious breeze blows the hat into frame.
These movies are clearly made for an audience.
They're made for the filmgoer.
They're meant for the pure joy of entertainment.
Which doesn't mean that they can't be emotionally involving,
which doesn't mean they can't be smart from time to time.
But they have to be satisfying entertainment.
And Steven and George have figured out
how to use the engine of filmmaking
to satisfy an audience in a way
not so many directors or producers have.
Hugh Downs: In the century-long history of motion pictures,
there has been one director, just one,
whose movies have earned a total of a billion dollars--
Steven Spielberg.
Walter Parkes: Steven is arguably the most commercial director
in the history of motion pictures,
and I think it's because he has a deep understanding
of how the language of cinema
elicits an emotional reaction in an audience.
And there's no question that the idea of making movies that became phenomenons
was extremely exciting for Steven.
But it brought a lot of mixed results.
There were people that hated him,
people that blamed him for ruining the movies.
William Goldman had written specifically
that the blockbuster and Steven
and George Lucas had destroyed Hollywood.
Some people saw Spielberg as a repressive force,
that he was bringing in a kind of empty escapism
that was going to take film in another direction.
And certainly with the marketing executives
who moved into the studios
in the late '70s and the early '80s,
it was clear that what they saw were dollar signs.
But I wouldn't blame Spielberg for that.
Go back to the first review by Pauline Kael.
She said he was a great popular entertainer,
that he had a feel for what audiences wanted to see.
Why should anybody apologize for that?
Let me get you to react to something
that one of your peers said, another director.
"Steven Spielberg can't be compared
with people like Mike Nichols and Barry Levinson.
There is a place for mass entertainment,
but it shouldn't be confused
with art or quality, award-winning filmmaking."
Sometimes I think that statements like that
are pretentious in themselves,
because it sort of says that, you know,
art is serious and art can't be-- can't move you.
Art can't be on a bicycle with E.T. and fly across the moon,
that that can't be art.
If you're making the kinds of movies
that make the kinds of money that his movies do,
and if you're making franchise entertainment
or just something that appeals to a lot of people
and is unapologetically mainstream entertainment,
then there's a little bit of, I think, suspicion.
You know, how can we take you seriously as an artist?
Come on, girl, 'cause I'm waiting for you.
You cut me and I'll kill you.
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, you know, substantive, humanistic subject matter.
I was turning 40 and I was looking at life perhaps less optimistically.
And so, I knew this was gonna be a very sobering journey,
and I was willing to take it on.
All my life I had to fight.
I had to fight my daddy, I had to fight my uncles,
I had to fight my brothers.
A girl child ain't safe in a family of mens,
but I ain't never thought I had to fight in my own house!
I loves Harpo.
God knows I do,
but I'll kill him dead before I let him beat me.
Oprah Winfrey: For Steven to even take on this material
was a really big deal,
because you're messing in some territory
where if you get it wrong, then you get a lot of people upset.
He wanted to create not only an African-American worldview,
but a matriarchal world
in the presence of patriarchal repression and violence.
And I truly believe that he wanted
to stretch himself in a way that he never had before.
And he does push himself,
but he's not gonna push himself too far in advance--
the audience or maybe his own,
you know, core inclination.
He don't ever ask me how I feel.
Just never asked me nothing about myself.
Just climb on top of me, do his business.
"Do his business"? Do his bu--
why, Miss Celie, you sound like
he going to the toilet on you.
That's what it feel like.
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've 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've done that had I made the movie 10 years later.
I was just timid. I was just a little embarrassed.
I just wasn't the right guy to do that.
Steven was telling the story that Alice wrote,
and he was trying to access that
from his personal point of view.
He could never go where Alice went with that book.
Maslin: That book was appreciated for its grit and its realism,
and neither of those were qualities that he was known for.
He was just asking for it by even going anywhere near that.
Nobody really wanted Steven Spielberg
to be a gritty filmmaker.
That wasn't his sensibility.
But with "The Color Purple," colors are exact,
the settings have been built from the ground up
according to his specifications.
There's something so false and so Disney storyboard-like
about that movie.
You know, he wanted to make a prettier picture
than was intended in the text.
That's Steven.
He wants to make everything like that.
He wants to make life like that.
I have a baby on the way,
and the child is going to change my life.
- It already has, in a way. - Are you nervous about it or what?
I'm not nervous about it at all, no.
I just think it's the best thing
that's ever happened to me and to Amy.
We really can't wait for this.
I think the destiny of Amy and I
was to bring Max into the world,
which was such a beautiful thing.
Before that, I'm not sure I knew what a personal life was.
I thought life began
with, you know, "Action!"
And then, "Cut!"
After my mom and dad broke up,
I always thought that I would do my best
that if I ever decided someday to get married,
I wouldn't get divorced.
And then, of course, I did.
Divorce in any situation is painful.
And it's especially painful for me
because I am a child of divorce
and I know what it felt like.
And so, you know, I felt terrible for Max,
that he had to endure that.
- Jamie: My plane. - Jamie! Jamie!
Mom?
- Mom? - Frank Marshall: "Empire of the Sun"
was about this young boy growing up in Shanghai
who gets separated from his parents
during the Japanese invasion.
Mommy!
- Jamie! - Mommy!
And he goes through a tremendous transformation
and growing-up process.
It was playing on what I knew were my strengths,
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.
Jim was 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 that 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.
Christian Bale: It's an extraordinary story
of the resilience of children,
this incredible survivor
who manages to have more fortitude to him
than, really, any of the adults around him.
It's in the great tradition of epic filmmaking.
That sports stadium at the end when all the goods,
all the stuff that had been stolen is there,
the surrealism of that
and what it makes you feel at that time and place,
the sense of what the world was like,
how it had fallen apart, all of civilization.
And then, something even more disturbingly beautiful,
and that is the glow from the atom bomb.
It's like a soul transcending into another life.
Mrs. Victor.
This is very poetic and... mystical.
This was war
and it was death and real horror.
And it was like an end of innocence
for the Spielberg child.
I think it was a truly great film,
but, for me, it ultimately shaded
into an unnecessary softness or sentimentality.
I don't know where it comes from,
but he likes and enjoys sentiment.
It's part of him.
At the time, he was not dismissed, exactly,
by a lot of critics, but sort of looked at a little skeptically.
"Oh, he wants to be serious now.
Oh, he's trying to make serious movies.
Oh, now he wants it"-- which, I mean--
it's such a kind of nasty thing
to say about any artist.
It definitely hurt his feelings.
I don't think anybody as an artist
wants to feel like they're being pigeonholed
in a way that other people are determining who they are.
And when Steven began to explore
other kinds of more serious stories,
they were very reluctant to let him do that.
That was like, "How dare you, Steven Spielberg?
We've determined that you make these kind of movies,
so why are you suddenly trying to make this?"
He doesn't over-intellectualize,
but maybe as a filmmaker, Steven was using those movies
as stepping stones along the way.
He didn't know where he was headed,
but I think he was exercising those muscles, in a way,
to recognize he could go there,
that it was okay.
My very first memory-- I was in a stroller.
I just remember being wheeled somewhere,
and my grandmother and grandfather were with me.
We went into this underground space.
There was a red light over a set of doors.
And I just remember getting closer and closer
to this red light where all these old men--
just men were all chanting something.
And the red light was the Eternal Light, the Ner Tamid,
and that's my very first memory.
- Do you believe in God? - Yes.
Tell me about that. Where where does...?
It comes from my--
you know, my spiritual-- not even spiritual,
my religious roots and family.
All my grandparents had a very strong influence over me.
My grandfather, Fievel, played guitar
and he sang all Yiddish Russian songs.
And my grandmother, Jennie,
taught English to Hungarian Holocaust survivors.
We were Orthodox. I was raised Orthodox.
And tradition has been a huge part of my family,
and religious studies, and Hebrew school,
and bar mitzvahs, and bat mitzvahs for my sisters.
But we always lived in neighborhoods where there were no Jews.
And there was a real cultural divide in those days
between Jewish people and Gentiles,
a real cultural divide.
I remember that at one point,
kids were standing outside and chanting
"the Spielbergs are dirty Jews."
I certainly experienced being excluded
and being picked on and discriminated against.
All I wanted to do was fit in.
And by being Jewish, there was no way I could fit into anything.
My grandfather would come over to spend a week with us,
and I'd be playing in the front yard seven houses down,
and my grandfather would stand on our front porch
and yell my Hebrew name, "Shmuel!"
As loud as he could, "Shmuel!"
And all my friends would say,
"Is he talking to you? That's your house."
And I immediately denied that that was me.
"No, he must be calling somebody else."
"Is your name Shmuel?"
And all my friends started laughing.
"Shmuel? What's Shmuel?"
And meanwhile, in the background,
you can hear my grandfather yelling
with a Russian accent, "Shmuel!"
Steve did not want to be Jewish.
He didn't want to be Jewish because it made us
too different from everybody.
And the "Father Knows Best" family
is an assimilated family.
And I think he really yearned for that.
I began to deny my Jewishness,
you know, began to deny
everything that I had accepted as a child
and was not willing to accept
if it was going to make me a pariah.
I was ashamed of myself.
I still feel ashamed of myself
even remembering that long stretch of my life
where I didn't want to be Jewish anymore.
When I first met Kate,
something that only happens in the movies
happened to me.
It's a terrible cliché, but bells began ringing.
It was love at first sight. It really was.
There was something that was
so both self-assured about Katie
and reassuring for me.
There was a kind of in-syncness.
We could talk about anything,
and I couldn't get her off my mind.
Kate came into my world, in my life,
with a deep fascination with the traditions
and the depth of the history of Judaism.
And she really wanted to marry me as a Jew.
So, she converted to Judaism just before we got married.
Sue: She said she always felt like she was coming home.
She always felt this was where she was meant to be.
And so, as she studied Judaism and got into it,
it brought Steve back around to appreciating it.
Kate brought something to Steven
that I don't think Steven believed he could ever have.
She is so dedicated to the idea of family
in its, you know, purest essence
that not only did it bring him,
I think, a happiness he never thought he'd have,
but I suspect it contributed
to his growth as an artist.
In 1982, Sid Sheinberg gave me the book
of "Schindler's List" to read.
He felt it was my destiny to make this movie.
He was tenacious about getting me
to pay attention to it, not to give up on it.
I think he was intimidated
by the thought of making it.
He had the book for over 10 years
before he was ready to do it.
And he just said, "I'll know when it's time."
You know, if anybody pushed him on it,
"I'll know when it's time."
And then the time came.
Liam Neeson: On my first day, we were outside the gates of Auschwitz.
5:30 in the morning, bitterly, bitterly cold.
And hundreds of extras
dressed up in those horrible striped pajamas
and German guards
and real Alsatian dogs, real nasty dogs.
No! No!
Nothing could prepare me for my first visit to Auschwitz.
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.
That's horrible.
He was like someone whose skin had been torn off.
He was just so vulnerable,
pacing up and down all the time.
I could tell how important
this subject matter and this film was to him.
He was telling a story of his family, his tribe,
so I was aware of the weight of the subject matter.
I said to the crew, "This isn't a documentary,
but we are documenting things that actually took place
in the place that you're standing right now."
And I said also, you know, "Those of us who are Jewish,
you know, would never have been able to stand here,
you know, in 1943."
I knew this couldn't be just another movie
and it couldn't be anything like anything I had 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 Kraków
felt like we were shooting in a cemetery.
And it changed my entire approach to cinema.
I-- that film looks different
than anything I had ever done before that.
I tried to do it with no fancy tricks, no fancy lenses,
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 of "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.
Goodbye Jews!
I'm just wondering is the synagogue...
...a good background,
or is the park a good background,
because this is kind of interesting here.
Ralph Fiennes: Steven said, "I feel like I'm directing my first movie.
I'm not storyboarding anything."
And I think that gave him an adrenaline
or something that we all felt.
A fire, an alertness.
I've never felt the same level of energy and focus.
He seems to breathe cinema.
I wouldn't say he's an intellectual director.
I think he feels things intuitively and emotionally.
...and coverage up like that.
He was kind of like an abstract painter
who has his canvass
and has a palette of extraordinary colors
but just doesn't know what color
to put on that screen first.
But once he's committed to that color,
he was just firing on all cylinders.
And there was literally times he was running,
physically running, with that camera
because a lot of the stuff, he shot himself.
Handheld camera.
He'd be running up and down,
saying, "Come on, come with me, quick,"
as the idea was forming in his head.
And we'd all be running after him, "What? What?"
He'd be inspired. He saw something.
Sir Ben Kingsley: We were all struggling with the incomprehensible
as characters and as actors.
But we put one foot in front of the other in our mandate
to, as Elie Wiesel says, tell stories.
Kingsley: We took on the mantle
of actor-warriors, if you like.
Because if you soften anything with sentiment,
you lessen the blow that the audience have got to feel
and got to reel under.
In the liquidation of the ghetto scene,
I knew I had to serve the story.
I remembered my lines, but I was in deep shock.
No acting.
The beautifully orchestrated chaos
was unrepeatable or unforgettable.
Oskar Schindler was a gregarious man.
He was a second-rate businessman.
Bit of a shady character, you know?
A man about town, loved the women, loved his booze.
A bon vivant, that's what he was.
And he did this extraordinary thing.
He saved over 1,100 Jewish lives.
There was something indescribably mysterious
about this character.
It was impossible to really understand
why he did what he did.
But we decided just to let the audience
work that out for themselves.
I was a smoker at the time.
Steve was not a smoker, but in the close-ups,
he would start to tell me how to smoke.
He'd say, "Okay, you're looking at the table.
You see three of these high-ranking Nazi guys.
Take a drag of your cigarette."
"No, no. Do it again.
Keep your fingers there. Take a drag.
Let the smoke curl up your face.
Do it again.
Okay, now take your hand away very, very slowly."
So, he was basically telling me how to breathe.
I remember sharing it with Ben Kingsley
later on that night or the next day.
I said, "Ben, I just-- if every scene's gonna be like that,
I'm a fucking puppet, you know?
I don't want to be a puppet.
I'm 41 years of age."
And I remember Ben so well.
He said, "A great conductor...
needs a good soloist.
So just trust that.
Just go into his direction.
Don't fight against it. Just go into it."
And that's what I did.
I just opened myself for Steven, you know?
My father was fond of saying,
"You need three things in life--
a good doctor, a forgiving priest,
and a clever accountant."
The first two...
I've never had much use for.
But the third?
Itzhak Stern was the character
that I was closest to in my understanding of him.
Just pretend, for Christ's sake.
And I said to Ben, "You're the conscience of Oskar Schindler.
You're also my window
into my insight into Oskar Schindler."
I'm trying to thank you.
I'm saying I couldn't have done this without you.
Anything I can glean from Schindler himself,
I think a lot of it is gonna come from how you look at him.
You're welcome.
There are very, very few directors
who respect stillness as much as Steven.
He's gonna catch every single gesture
you offer to the camera, and he's going to use it.
His intuition for something real and present is very, very strong.
He wanted to avoid clichés about Nazis,
and, in terms of performance, I understood it on my first day.
You know, the thing about Amon having a cough-- "Ahem, excuse me,"
and giving him sort of banal human failings, touches like that.
Do you have any questions, sir?
Yeah, why is the top down? I'm fucking freezing.
There were ways in which, through performance and filming,
you can amp up and signal "bad guy."
And I think he wanted, quite rightly,
to say, "No, man doing job.
- You decide what you think." - I have an idea.
How about just lighting their mouths, nothing else?
I was just going-- you know--
no, him, I want to light just from the top, you know,
so we get some shadows here, just like...
Okay, I just want to make sure we're not being too on the nose
with the-- you know, the badness of the character
by having a straight-down light.
Everything we do in this medium is about light and shadow,
how the cinematographer lights the actors, lights the set.
If you look at "Schindler's List,"
Amon Goeth was always lit beautifully.
He always had that beautiful front light.
You know, the guy was very clear.
There was no mystery in him.
You don't have to enhance his evilness,
if you may say, by lighting.
Now, if you look at Oskar Schindler,
that was a confused individual.
He came to Poland to make money,
so it's always glamorous, but always shadowy.
And then as the movie's progressing, he gets more frontal light.
The shadows disappear.
They say you are good.
Because he's learning who he is.
The little girl in red actually happened.
Schindler on horseback watching these people being rounded up.
He did spot this little girl in a red coat.
Of all the carnage that's happening,
he can't take his eyes off this little girl
meandering down the street.
He couldn't take his eyes off of her
and wonder why is she not being taken
along with everybody else.
And, of course, the answer was, "Well, she will be taken.
May not be in the next few minutes,
but she's not going to survive."
During the liquidation of the ghetto,
when they were taking people and putting them in trucks
and shooting old people in the streets,
they were leaving her alone.
Somehow, the most obvious target
was not being apprehended.
And, to me, it was less about what turned Oskar Schindler,
and it was more that the world turned a blind eye on the Holocaust
and the industrialized process of wholesale murder.
Can you believe this?
As if I don't have enough to do, they come up with this?
I have to find every rag buried up here and burn it.
The party's over, Oskar.
They're closing us down, sending everybody to Auschwitz.
- When? - I don't know.
As soon as I can arrange the shipments.
Maybe 30, 40 days. That ought to be fun.
So, that little girl in red,
for me, symbolizes the Holocaust
and all of its monstrous evil,
and no one did anything about it when they could have.
Michael Kahn: I remember I put together a scene, very hard, emotionally.
And Steven comes in that night.
We went out to where he was staying
and I start running the scene.
And he looks at it. "Hold on, Mike. I can't do it."
He's like-- he went like, "I can't do it.
It's too tough." And he left.
I just remember getting home and just falling apart.
And Kate was on the set with me a lot.
We would cry together many, many times.
She really kept me going through that whole production.
We were four months in Kraków. A long time.
It was, emotionally, the hardest movie I've ever made.
Annette Insdorf: The film is not about
the Holocaust with a capital "H."
It is a particular window into the past.
And here, a mainstream director
had crafted a motion picture
that would in fact finally reach a large audience,
including people that simply may never have known
the word "Auschwitz."
About three quarters of the way through the shoot,
Steven had this idea about the end of the film.
He wanted to fly us to Jerusalem.
We would shoot a scene at Schindler's grave.
I needed there to be
some testimony built into the movie
that says this story actually happened.
Brave thing to do.
These are the real people.
That was a pivotal moment in Steven's life.
He recognized he couldn't take
any of the profits from the film.
He wanted to give something back,
so he started what became the Shoah Foundation,
documenting that oral history and capturing history
in a way that allowed people not to forget.
The Shoah Foundation is a way of trying to hear
the faintest echo of the stories that we've lost.
So, it's connected to him as a storyteller,
which is in his DNA.
They started running toward the tracks and they were shot.
It was probably the last patrol of the day.
They were not supposed to be there anymore.
And of course they asked for papers,
but my grandfather didn't have any.
And they took them. They took them.
He's got thousands and thousands of testimonies,
and not just about the Holocaust.
About Rwanda, about Bosnia, you know?
And it's amazing, this legacy that "Schindler's List"
has spawned through Steven.
The experience of making "Schindler's List"
made me reconcile with all of the reasons,
the vain, glorious reasons, I hid from my Jewishness.
And it made me so proud to be a Jew.
There are periods of time in moviemaking history
where you have a collision of events
that innovates and creates something new.
And "Jurassic Park" was one of those moments.
- Keep it there. - It was the beginning
of, really, the digital era
where the central characters were digitally created.
No one had ever gone there before that way.
Come on!
Steven said to me,
"I want 28-foot to 30-foot dinosaurs on the set
that the actors can interact with,
and I want them to be able to run."
There were going to be at least 60 wide shots
with 60 head-to-toe dinosaurs
that could not operate mechanically.
They had to run. They had to perform.
They had to twist and turn. They had to be real.
So, I went off to start to talk to experts
in the area of prosthetics and theme parks
to figure out how we're gonna do this.
And, of course, everybody said to me,
"We can build these things, but they can't run."
So, I went back to Steven and I said, "They can't run."
He said, "Well, they have to run."
- Okay, pushing team, move in there. - Move in.
So, all this development was going on,
and simultaneous to that, Dennis Muren called me and he said,
"I'm working on something with the computer
that I think could be extraordinary."
Aah!
Lock the opening!
And we flew up to ILM,
and we went in this little office,
and there was a computer, and Dennis said, "Watch this."
And he hit a button,
and there was a dinosaur running.
This is all in the computer.
There's no models, no cameras, or anything.
When we looked at them,
it was like nothing you had ever seen before.
And it was one of those primal moments
where you suddenly realize, oh, my God...
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God, we're there.
This is the future.
I could not believe my eyes.
Couldn't believe it.
They were alive. They were real.
And it was so exciting, we all leapt to our feet
because we had never seen anything like it.
I'm not exaggerating when I say
looking at that test was like the moment
when sound came to movies.
There was this new tool that was going to be huge,
and you could just tell.
Laura Dern: It was that much of an experiment.
It felt that wild.
And watching, you know, their brains at work
as we were shooting, and how'd they adjust a shot,
and how giddy Steven would get,
you get caught up in the dreams he was building and the magic.
Jeff Goldblum: During the scenes where we're first seeing the dinosaur,
he puts the camera on me and says, "Okay, Jeff,
now you're looking at the thing.
Okay, so look at it.
Yeah, keep going. Keep rolling.
Is it real? Is it a trick?
And now, for no reason at all, you start to laugh.
Keep laughing a little bit.
Laugh a little bit more. That's it.
Now you're stunned by it again
and you just get very still.
Okay, that's it. Okay, I got what I need.
Let's go. Let's move on." Like that.
He knows exactly what he needs.
Weapon, you know, guy face-- all faces,
weapons, faces, and then right to Bob.
- Get in there! - "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, timeworn science fiction story.
It's what brought Godzilla up from the depths.
You mess with atomic energy, you get Godzilla.
Rick Carter: There's a lot of dark themes in "Jurassic Park"
that are about, you know, unleashing Pandora's box.
As it turns out, it's not only genetic engineering,
which is a theme in the movie,
it's actually the digital revolution
coming out right from behind the fence.
Muren: This opened up a whole new world in storytelling
because you can do anything you want.
You're not limited by plastics or metal
or gravity or anything.
If you can imagine it, you can do it.
It was the end of an era, no question about it.
And it was the beginning of a whole nother era.
Muren: Steven is a master of putting the effects shots in for a purpose.
They're there to advance the story
and to make it a different journey
than anybody's seen before.
And it could be a spaceship,
it could be a dinosaur, it could be an alien landing,
it could be, you know, a red coat that somebody's wearing
when they're running through a black-and-white movie.
- Put the camera down. - It's part of the emotional landscape
of the story he's telling.
I've never seen a single moment
in a Spielberg movie in which you feel
that the technology is crushing the story.
And that's really hard.
I mean, these moments, which have to feel
spontaneous and real on-screen...
There are 200 people around,
and half of it is being created six months later
and half of it was six months before.
When he made "Jurassic Park,"
there was no guarantee that it would work.
That could easily have been a disaster.
But it was the right ratio of excitement and fear for Steven.
Doing a movie has to scare you a little bit.
Otherwise, you're not pushing it.
"Schindler's List," which seems--
clearly, that should have been a movie now--
was a three-hour black-and-white movie about the Holocaust.
In the halls of Universal, that was-- that was crazy.
That was not--
who green lights that movie, you know?
It was as big a risk as CG dinosaurs. Bigger.
You're saying "All my credibility as a fantasy filmmaker--
I'm gonna risk all that on CG dinosaurs.
And all my credibility as an artist,
I'm gonna put on the line, too.
And I'm gonna do it all over the course of 12 months.
Fingers crossed."
They seem obvious now.
They were by no means guarantees.
And that must have been a really terrifying period,
because you really are pushing all your chips into the middle of the table
at that point.
Of course, it turned out very well for Steven,
giving him one of the strangest
and most astoundingly successful years of any film director, ever.
This is my greatest technological masterpiece--
the Schpiel-Borg 2000.
I spared no expense.
Your play pal, Pinky,
is actually an extremely advanced cybernetic clone
of one of Hollywood's most powerful figures.
And if his box office numbers are any indication,
he has the potential to become ruler of the world.
Steven is the best-known director in the world, easily.
- Listen. - What?
Steven, you've made so many films.
When are you gonna do the big one?
Wow. What do you mean "big one?"
Something that clicks with the public.
"Something that clicks with the public."
The guy's an unmistakable force
in the business of making movies.
Running a company, being an executive producer,
being a producer, and being a director.
Robert Zemeckis: For a filmmaker, you can't have a better producer
than one of the greatest directors in the world.
He really nurtures young talent coming up.
It's a pretty amazing roster.
He's also a major figure in the television business.
He started a restaurant.
Dive! Submarine sandwiches.
The man was, like, doing 27 things at once
and being perfectly unselfconscious about it.
How many hats does that man wear? It's impossible.
He once told me, "When I'm at a buffet,
I like to have too much food on my plate."
Holly Hunter: He will be in production on a movie,
doing preproduction for another movie,
and editing yet a third.
He's got a lot of different channels.
You know, me, I have a list.
You know, "change light bulbs,"
and that's on there for a week.
No, he gets a lot accomplished.
Tom Brokaw: Three of Hollywood's richest, most powerful boy wonders
teamed up today to create a movie studio,
Hollywood's first major new independent studio
in almost half a century.
I don't think Steven really fears anything.
He's always ready to go and do something new.
Jeffrey Katzenberg: No one can consume information,
be in so many places so effortlessly.
It used to make me crazy if a screenplay came in,
that, you know, we were all waiting for,
no matter what, I could never get home
and get it read before him.
Dustin Hoffman: To be that talented,
to be that successful almost in a mythological way,
your jaw drops.
Many times you see the person
incorporating their success into their personality.
There's a sense of self-importance.
And it's the opposite with Steven.
Steven's like a guy who works for Steven Spielberg.
Shark!
A day of pure bliss, for me,
is a day where I'm with my family.
I've got my eyes closed, they're swimming in the pool,
- and I just listen to their voices. - One more time.
That's great, Theo. That was the best one.
I never knew I was going to have a big family.
That took me completely by surprise.
Kate never thought she'd have a big family either.
So, the natural evolution in our life was a gift.
Jessica is my oldest,
and then Max, and then Theo after that,
and then Sasha, and then Sawyer,
and then Mikaela, and then Destry.
Woman: Whoo-hoo!
Kate is a force in my life.
There's such an honesty about her
and an awareness of the world.
And I think the authenticity
of the kinds of movies I began to make
after Katie and I got together
had to do with bringing a kind of truth into my life
where truth began to upstage make-believe.
Okay, turn the camera on.
- Roll. - Okay, do it.
Marker.
You know, I've turned down
a lot of very successful movie franchises
that 10 years before I would've jumped at the chance to direct.
But it wasn't the kind of legacy
I want to leave behind for my kids.
Steven wanted "Saving Private Ryan"
to be a different kind of very tactile and personal war movie.
We had no idea that Omaha Beach
was gonna be what it was like when we started.
He did not describe anything to us.
He was playing with our sense of confusion
and panic and fear,
capturing the moment of our own shock,
or our surprise, or our own blankness.
And the difference between standing around before we're shooting
and saying, "Hey, ready to do this? Nice to meet you. Here we go.
Can you swim? You can't swim?
You better, because you're in a Steven Spielberg movie.
You better..." So, we're talking like that.
And then it opened up
and all the powers of physical moviemaking went berserk.
Over the side!
Over the side, boys!
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 those characters.
Come on.
In "Saving Private Ryan," Spielberg understood
the expressionistic possibilities of sound.
You could hear the bullets streaking along.
You can hear them penetrate the flesh
and ravage these bodies.
You felt what it was like to have your ears ringing
in the midst of this and be completely disoriented.
The sheer intensity of that scene,
the visceral element,
not just metaphorically, but literally,
is like nothing-- nothing that had been put on film before.
I decided to shoot the entire Omaha Beach sequence
in complete continuity,
not knowing what was gonna come next.
And all my cameramen were given instruction
to be spontaneous in what they decided to shoot,
just like a documentary cameraman would.
And for, like, 27 days, we literally took the beach
as filmmakers, one yard at a time.
Mama! Mama!
"Saving Private Ryan" revealed
certain visceral truths about war
that people were not gonna learn from books.
They were not gonna learn from documentaries.
That was him at the height of his powers
doing something that nobody else could do.
The first time we talked about the movie,
he said, "I can't wait to shoot that
machine gun nest at the radar installation."
He had already mapped this thing out in his mind,
and when we got to the location, there was one problem--
the sun wasn't in the right place.
Steven had thought the set was built this way,
but it was built this way.
So, he could not shoot it, because the sun
was not going to give him the light that he wanted.
And he was mad, perhaps with himself or perhaps with someone
who didn't tell him what the compass points were.
So, he went on a walk, and when he comes back,
he says, "Okay, I know how I'm gonna shoot it."
And it's a different perspective
from any other assault that we had shot in the film.
And if you're not Steven,
if you don't have this lifetime
of cinematic language in your head,
that's a different kind of day.
But because his eye is so connected to his brain
and every movie that he's ever seen
and every movie that he's ever made,
he just went out and said,
"Here's how we're gonna do this, and that's it."
Incredible.
"Saving Private Ryan" was in honor of the veterans,
and I think a bit of a homage to my father
who flew missions during WWII.
He wasn't in Europe. He was in India and Burma.
When I was a kid, my dad was telling WWII stories all the time.
His veteran friends would come over to the house
and I'd listen to them tell war stories.
So, WWII, that greatest generation,
became something that I wished I could be part of.
Steven had a complicated relationship with his father,
but he was starting to reconnect and realize
that his first impressions of a lot of the things he had
weren't necessarily true.
It was complex for me for a long time,
but at least I had a art form
that I could filter it through.
At least I had that.
If movies did anything for me, it--
I've avoided therapy because movies are my therapy.
Junior?
- Yes, sir. - And this father-son obsession
I've had in my movies obviously speaks
to a great deal of feelings that I've been carrying with me
that I want to unburden myself of, and I have.
Do you remember the last time we had a quiet drink?
Huh?
I had a milkshake.
Hmm? What did we talk about?
We didn't talk.
We never talked.
The absent father
has haunted Steven throughout his life,
and he has fictionalized it in all kinds of ways on film.
It's the heart of him.
Although I liked the movies,
I noticed the absence of the father
quite significantly.
For a long time, Steven was very mad at me.
There he is.
- Get a hug? - I was hurt by it, but quietly hurt.
Confusing handshake? Kick in the teeth?
I didn't broach it with Steven.
I just ate it up a little bit
and hurt a little bit.
I thought I had lost you, boy.
I thought you had too, sir.
My dad and I finally resolved our differences,
and we're probably closer now than we ever were before.
When he made "Saving Private Ryan,"
he said, "I made this for my dad."
And that was wonderful.
That made me feel warm right here.
Lawrence Kasdan: Steven has always had a big vision
of what movies can be.
He's an American moviemaker.
And it's not starry-eyed patriotism.
Animals!
He is drawn to all the themes
that are inherent in the American character
and the American society and how it developed.
There are people struggling
in one way or another for freedom in these movies.
Give... us free.
He doesn't take freedom for granted.
Liberty and equality,
the Constitution,
and the rights of the individual.
He's evolved as a filmmaker.
"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.
We were supposed to show
he had a capable defense, which we did.
Why are you citing the goddamn Constitution at me?
Tom, if you look me in the eye
and tell me we don't have grounds
for an appeal, I'll drop it right now.
I'm not saying that. You know what I'm saying.
Tom is saying there's a cost to these things.
That's right.
A cost to both your family and your firm.
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 a patriot,
but I am a patriot.
And I'm somewhat of an idealist, too.
Say all we done is show the world
that democracy isn't chaos.
That there is a great invisible strength
in a people's union.
Say we've shown that a people can endure
awful sacrifice and yet cohere.
Mightn't that save at least the idea of democracy,
to aspire to?
Eventually to become worthy of?
Daniel Day-Lewis: The first thing that you have to overcome
is the reluctance to even approach Lincoln
because he's such a mighty figure.
His experience as a president was in, you know,
one of the greatest crises that this country's ever known.
And so, undoubtedly, of course,
he made decisions that were extremely unpalatable
to many, many people.
We are absolutely guaranteed to lose the whole thing.
We don't need a goddamned abolition amendment.
Leave the Constitution alone!
...peace commissioners appear today, or--
I can't listen to this anymore.
I can't accomplish a goddamn thing
of any human meaning or worth
until we cure ourselves of slavery
and end this pestilential war!
And whether any of you or anyone else knows it,
I know I need this!
This amendment is that cure!
Steven worked a long time
to find where the story was to tell it.
And it took guts for Steven to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln
in which Lincoln shares top billing with the House of Representatives.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: He had faith that if he told a story
that is about democracy and it's about messiness and politics--
and people are on different sides of the issue,
and people who were Democrats then are Republicans now,
and Republicans now were Democrats then,
was pretty confusing for people to get a sense
right away of what the story was.
But he somehow thought if the American people
can feel this man and feel what he was doing,
they'll see what democracy is when it really works.
A motion has been made to bring the bill
for the 13th Amendment to a vote.
- Do I hear a second? - I second the motion.
So moved, so ordered.
And in the end, it's not Lincoln's triumph
that's pushed to the fore in the film.
I think what's really pushed to the fore
is that it's a triumph of democracy.
The part assigned to me is to raise the flag.
And when up, it'll be for the people to keep it up.
That's my speech.
♪ We are coming, Father Abraham ♪
♪ 300,000 more ♪
♪ From Mississippi's winding stream ♪
♪ And from New England's shore ♪
♪ We leave our ploughs... ♪
Oh, yeah!
Todd McCarthy: From about the time
of the millennium in Spielberg's career,
there is something, whether it's personal, political, historical,
that pushed him in a more adventurous and a darker direction.
I fundamentally don't buy
that he has a pessimistic worldview
or that he suddenly changed and has a more dubious opinion
of the human race, but still,
there's been an alteration.
He has been willing to go places
that he would not have gone in his earlier films.
All right, Howard Marks. Where are you?
It was a very complicated story, "Minority Report."
A very dark story, actually.
You know, democracy, freedom of choice,
corruption.
That dark, futuristic dystopian tone
was so compelling for me at that time.
Tennessee Williams says that artists
are like the canaries in the coal mine.
And Steven has an uncanny knack
for feeling what's going on in the world around him
and what needs to be said at its moment.
I think he's a very present filmmaker.
By mandate of the District of Columbia Precrime Division,
I'm placing you under arrest for the
future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald...
The film anticipated the whole post-9/11 mentality
of arresting people before they can commit crimes
and preventive detention and so on.
But the movie that I made
that was 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?
There's a sequence where Cruise's character
runs through the streets and the ray is turning people to dust
and some of that dust is in his hair.
And he comes home and sees himself in shock
and realizes that that's remains that are in his hair.
Oh!
Steven handled that with great tact.
9/11 was so much a part of our national psyche,
you didn't have to do much to evoke the shock we all felt
and the helplessness we all felt at being attacked.
Good afternoon. I'm Jim McKay speaking to you
live at this moment from ABC headquarters
just outside the Olympic Village in Munich, West Germany.
The peace of what is-- would've been called the "Serene Olympics"
was shattered just before dawn this morning about 5:00.
Nobody was expecting Steven Spielberg,
maybe the world's most famous Jewish artist,
to weigh in on the Middle East
because it's such a minefield,
and Steven is not a sensationalist
in the sense of wanting to create,
you know, firestorms of controversy.
This is building number 31.
At this moment,
eight or nine terrified living human beings
are being held prisoner.
I felt I could not make this one-sided.
And so, I knew it would be controversial from the very get-go.
Eric Bana: It was that story of the group of Mossad agents
who were assembled to avenge the deaths
of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
It was their job to go after a list of targeted men
who were part of a terrorist group.
And it was their job to, one by one, assassinate them.
Daniel Craig: This movie was trying to affect and turn on a debate.
Is vengeance the answer? Does it actually solve anything?
If you continue the cycle of violence
and cycle of blood, then...
that's what they'll be and nothing else.
Steven was very keen to tell a human story,
that these were men and not superheroes.
Their indecision and their mistakes
and their-- is the reality of what happened, you know?
Life isn't a "James Bond" movie.
Are you-- are you Wael Zwaiter?
He said yes already. He already said yes.
What are we doing?
What do I do?
Do you know why we're here?
In "Munich," Spielberg is trying to come to terms
with the war against terror.
And he doesn't know where he is on it.
He's-- he supports it,
but he's also disturbed by it.
And so, that's an example
of a kind of thoughtfulness that goes into his work.
I mean, he's the Hollywood equivalent of a public intellectual.
I remember when we shot the telephone bomb sequence.
In that one dolly shot,
you got a complete sense of the geography of the entire scene.
It took three days to shoot the scene.
Everything had to be from points of view.
There was the point of view of the guys in the car.
So now we wait for the red light.
There was the point of view of the man in the phone booth
who was gonna dial the number.
There was a point of view of Avner.
It's a triangle of shots.
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.
- Is the truck blocking the signal? - No.
Will the remote still work?
I can create suspense
if the audience knows where all the players are,
and they know what the stakes are,
and they know that there's a ticking clock.
Like the mom and daughter that get into the car
and then wind up returning because she forgot the glasses.
The suspense of that sequence
is letting the audience know geographically
where everybody is at all times.
Allô? Allô?
Allô?
Stop!
Stop, stop. Abort.
You're in the hands of somebody who
will always show you what you need to see
in order to understand, on a narrative level, what's happening.
And you'll also see a lot of things
that will help you understand on deeper levels as well.
And that sort of narrative device that's in his head
is, you know, I think almost without precedent.
- Oui? - Mahmoud Hamshari?
Yes.
We talked a great deal about the politics
of making a movie like this.
How do you make a film that allows
for the possibility of understanding
why these men who murdered the athletes
did what they did?
Not in any way to excuse it,
but to try and comprehend it.
You kill Jews, and the world feels bad for them and thinks you're animals.
Yes, but then the world will see
how they've made us into animals.
They'll start to ask questions
about the conditions in our cages.
The movie was perceived to be suffering
from a sense of moral equivalence,
which is really the bravest thing about the movie.
It's looking for aspects of humanity on both sides of this conflict.
Ambiguity is something that you don't normally associate with Spielberg's films,
and "Munich" is the film where he went the furthest
in the bluntness and the ferocity
with which he approached that subject.
Did we accomplish anything at all?
Every man we killed has been replaced by worse!
Why cut my fingernails? They'll grow back.
Did we kill to replace the terrorist leadership or the Palestinian leadership?
You tell me what we've done.
You killed them for the sake of a country you now choose to abandon.
The end of this film is not celebratory--
rejoicing in the death of the enemy.
It is incredibly quiet,
and only on the second viewing
did I realize the Twin Towers
are revealed at the end.
We did several takes of that scene
without having that space in the frame,
and then we did one take
with having that space in the frame,
knowing that he would put the Towers in.
Steven knew that he's making a controversial movie.
He just didn't want to push the boundaries.
But then at the end, he realized,
"You know what? I'm already doing it.
Why not just go and say what I want to say, you know?"
I made the choice because I wanted people to say
"Munich" is the context
for problems that exist in today's world
and basically are threatening to all of us.
You know, history is its own reminder
of how bad things can get.
And if we don't solve these problems,
they accumulate.
And you can't-- there's no rug big enough
to sweep these problems under.
And eventually, something is going to happen.
And so, "Munich" is a prayer for peace,
but peace the hard way.
You know, peace by discovering within yourself
your moral high ground.
All my films come from the part of myself
that I really can't articulate.
I certainly have intuitive facilities,
but I don't really analyze those or don't really question them.
It's like looking a gift horse in the mouth,
and I'm almost superstitious that if I start to question that,
it's gonna, you know, fly away.
I don't think there's any doubt that Steven's work
deals with specific themes in his life,
which makes him a real personal filmmaker.
Do you understand what we are saying to you, Frank?
Your father and I are getting a divorce.
And his express through the images,
through the choice of story and how he deals with character.
All of Steven's sensibilities
were right in tune with this young man's journey.
You're immediately with this kid,
and no matter what he does,
you know he's searching for some way back
to repairing this torn household.
- Have you tried to call her? - No.
Why-- why don't you call her right now?
Dad, why don't you call her right now? Here.
Dad, just call her.
Call her for me. You call her.
You tell her I have two first-class tickets to go see her son--
Your mother's married now to my friend Jack Barnes.
- They have a house in Long Island. - Oh, no.
So often in Spielberg's movies
the relationships that matter
are the relationships between parent and children
or members of a family or members of a community
bound by affection and loyalty and responsibility.
It's a huge theme that comes up again and again and again
in different phases of his own life
and in different stories.
Whoa! Hey!
Ronnie, hold it. Hold it. Wa--
Hold it.
Family is a big element in my life,
which is why so many of my stories
are about separation and then reunification.
Even "Lincoln" is about separation and reunification.
Barry!
I've made a lot of movies
about a family disintegrating
and then a family finding common ground to reunite.
There's a sense that everything, including the natural world,
conspires to pull people
or beings apart from one another
and then to return them.
It's like Shakespeare's romances.
There's a deep faith in his work that...
what's lost will in some way be restored.
And I think he is searching for that
in almost all the films that he's made.
Now slowly.
My mom and dad have a relationship today
which a writer in a storybook
would be accused of exaggeration.
I feel very lucky that after all these years apart,
my parents spend quality time with each other.
If you look at the first 18 years
of Steve's life and now, current day,
you would not know that there was a huge chunk in the middle,
that there was a divorce and a separation,
a lot of tears, and another man, and another wife,
and, you know, it looks like we were one continuous, happy family.
We just lost the reels to the home movies
in the middle of life.
Now she's back in love with me.
Isn't that nice?
Oh, Leah.
Janusz, it'd be a better two-shot.
If Dougie is here, okay, then it's not such a spread.
- So, it's not a single. It's over here. - No, no, it's a single.
When we start pulling back, Dougie comes into the shot sooner.
And then we continue with the move?
Yeah, we continue with the move,
but right now it looks like
- there's nothing in the center but the window. - Got you.
Steven loves to be a part of a big gang of people
and the company of filmmakers who are making a movie.
It's a big, great club. It's a big, great family.
- Tom, action. - I think it defines Steven's filmmaking
in many, many different ways
because Steven is grounded and feels very safe
inside an environment with family.
He likes close relationships
with a few people who he trusts
and he can open his life up to.
And then he's very reluctant to have anybody leave.
That's it right there. It looks great.
We work for Steven.
He's the boss, but he encourages people with talent
to use the talent, to be brave with it,
to take risks,
because he wants to be stimulated as a filmmaker,
but those who he works with, you know.
And that's a really good quality in a filmmaker.
He's very collaborative.
He uses his people over and over again on the films
because we already speak a shorthand to each other.
- We've all worked together. - And they'd come on to full size...
He understands that people and can serve him
and how to synchronize his wishes with your own.
He would've made a great general.
If you could say that a film unit
can be like a Special Forces film crew,
that's what he has.
His team works so fast,
so hard getting through a lot every day.
Everybody on their feet, applauding.
And I think you could come to grief
very, very quickly on Steven's set
if you weren't very well prepared.
Everyone has to be.
And that creates incredible energy.
I work with my peeps, and I have for decades.
I mean, I don't know what I would do without them.
Roll sound. Roll!
I can't really have sanity
unless I have familiarity.
And it's just an extraordinary family
that I've been able to assemble over all these years.
I love being part of his tapestry,
so to speak, you know, like "Fiddler on the Roof."
♪ After 37 years, it's nice to know... ♪ You know?
Michael Kahn and I are blood brothers.
He started with me on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind,"
and except for one time, he's edited every movie I made since then.
Janusz Kaminski has done everything since "Schindler's List."
But 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 rung higher than I ever could reach.
You know, if I had to go back and recast
the creative team surrounding me,
I wouldn't be able to work as often as I do.
It'd be impossible.
Steven looks at movies constantly
and over and over and over again,
referencing shots and framing and ideas.
That's something Steven does all the time.
Great filmmakers' works live on to 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.
Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey!
Who are you?
Steven has always wanted to work
in a kind of big, you know, historical canvass like that,
and it took many movies before he accomplished
that level of masterly filmmaking.
Many years ago, Pauline Kael gave me a really great review
on "Sugarland Express," but she said,
"Whatever's on the surface might be all that is there.
There may be nothing behind that."
And she was absolutely right.
I hadn't grown up yet through the movies.
That was going to come in time.
Take a look at what he's done over close to 50 years.
There's certainly a lot of variety.
There are some things he's done that haven't worked,
but there is absolutely nobody like him
and no film career trajectory
that is anything like his in the history of film.
He speaks cinema as if it's his native language.
He is so fluent in it that he does things
that nobody else would dare to do
and they are instantly recognizable
as things that are purely his.
He has a dynamic sense of real filmmaking.
I'm talking about filmmaking of--
in the great narrative tradition of American cinema.
Steven was blessed
in that he could be commercial
and he could do art.
That's why I always compare him
to a kind of George Gershwin,
because Gershwin could write a Broadway show
or he could write "Concerto in F."
He could do both, and very few people can do both.
And Steven can do both.
And that's a talent you have to be born with.
You think of that young kid in Arizona,
in the desert, watching movies,
watching television incessantly,
one day sneaking his way into a studio,
and manifesting his own destiny.
It's a pretty fantastic Hollywood story.
He's found a way to take his view of the world,
his wishful thinking, his optimism,
and also his uncanny sense of the thrill,
and sort of galvanize the whole thing
into whatever the story is he's telling.
It's authentically him.
Steven has a part of him
that wants to see something good
in the darkest of the dark
or that wants to just have a playtime.
And there may be people who say he's not edgy enough
or he's not bitter enough, he's not quirky enough,
or he's not dark enough,
but when it's all over and said and done,
what Steven has left is enormous.
To have both humor and suspense
and adventure and heart
through his grand eyes of storytelling
is a hell of a good thing.
Steven still has an enormous appetite
for the work that he does.
It's quite a rare thing.
You know, we all have, probably, a shelf life.
Yes, we probably go past that shelf life,
most of us, without even knowing it.
But in his case, I think, till the day he dies, he'll be doing work
that he feels absolutely viscerally compelled to do.