Q&A with Steven Spielberg

I was staring at a framed sketch of Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait when Spielberg entered the room, so the first thing I asked was whether he draws or paints in his spare time.

Spielberg: I’ve never been able to draw anything other than stick figures.

So when there’s storyboarding to be done, do you give someone else a little template or something?

No, I do them all myself. Then I turn over my little stick figures to professional storyboard artists, and they make me look good.

I grew up on your movies and have been showing them to my kids, and we just watched Close Encounters and E.T.

How old are your kids?

Twelve and nine.

And they saw Close Encounters?

Yeah, I thought they were ready for it.

What did they think?

They loved it.

Did they understand the man’s personal obsession?

Yeah, they loved it, and the reversal with the mashed potatoes, they really loved that. I was wondering what you’ve done with your own kids. Do you show them Jaws at some point?

I don’t really have a schedule of when I want to show my children my movies. They usually ask me to see Indiana Jones, which I think is fine for my younger kids, but then they’ve asked me to see Jaws and even Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, and when they ask me these questions, I pretty much have to evaluate their relative maturation, because kids, even in the same family, mature at different rates. For instance—I don’t want to name names, because kids in the same family like to protest the unfairness of one child gaining a privilege over another—I have a couple of kids who saw Schindler’s List when they were younger than the average audience that would be permitted by average parents to see that story.

Like under 10?

Not under 10. Not at all. No one’s seen Schindler’s List in my family under 15. No one has.

That sounds about right.

The important thing is, you’ve got to know your kids, and you’ve got to know them as individuals. I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.

What are the ages?

From 10 to 30.

What age do you set for Jaws?

I haven’t shown Jaws to my 10- or 11-year-old, and I won’t. I showed Jaws to Sawyer when he was, I think, 13. Because then they use the argument, “Dad, I was bar mitzvahed last week. Everybody said today I’m a man, and you still won’t let me see Jaws?” Sometimes the kids outsmart me. It is PG, but that was before the PG-13 rating. Today Jaws would obviously be PG-13.

Just because of the menace, the feeling of it, even more than the blood.

Yes, yes, yes.

I guess Temple of Doom ushered in the PG-13 rating.

The story of that was, I had come under criticism, personal criticism, for both Temple of Doom and, you know, Gremlins, in the same year. I remember calling Jack Valenti [then the president of the Motion Picture Association] and suggesting to him that we need a rating between R and PG, because so many films were falling into a netherworld, you know, of unfairness. Unfair that certain kids were exposed to Jaws, but also unfair that certain films were restricted, that kids who were 13, 14, 15 should be allowed to see. I suggested, “Let’s call it PG-13 or PG-14, depending on how you want to design the slide rule,” and Jack came back to me and said, “We’ve determined that PG-13 would be the right age for that temperature of movie.” So I’ve always been very proud that I had something to do with that rating.

You made movies when you were a kid, and people who know your work know that. Do you give your own kids movie cameras? Do they fool around with that stuff the way you did when you were a teenager?

Always, yes. Our kids have always had video cameras in their lives. We have two cameras at home. We have the high-def camera that I use to take all the family videos. Then we have a second camera that is a smaller Canon high-def camera that our kids are allowed to use. When you look at the tapes of the movies the kids make, it’s all very eclectic. The kids can only really employ that camera. They can’t use the family camera, because that is … you know.

So they can beat it up a little bit?

Well, the family camera’s sort of out of reach, and I just try to get my kids to take as many videos as they possibly can, because I can learn more about my kids based on their role-playing on video.

I gave my kids a camera, and they built a snowbank, and it’s all crashes.

Our kids role-play. They put on different accents, they put on different costumes, and they role-play. It’s wonderful to see, and it’s a wonderful window into the imaginations and the personalities of your children, when they show you, with pride, something they made that’s completely improvised. And it really is quite an insightful tool for moms and dads to get to know their kids better by.

Have your kids gone as far as to edit and add sound and things like that?

No, our kids don’t like to use the software, the tools. They pretty much do it the way I did it in 8-mm.: they cut in the camera.

When you set out to make a movie, you’re setting the tone or the mood for your entire year. I’m sure it’s difficult to know you’re going to Poland to film Schindler’s List for a few months, as opposed to doing an Indiana Jones movie. Does it carry into your home life and your thoughts?

Well, for one thing, I don’t know what I’m in for. Most of my presumptions about a production are usually wrong. For instance, with Schindler’s List, I was pretty certain that whatever came my way in Poland I could tolerate, and just put my camera between myself and the subject, and protect myself, you know, by creating my own aesthetic distance. And immediately, on the first day of shooting, that broke down. I didn’t have that as a safety net, and immediately I realized that this was about to become the most personal professional experience of my life. It was a devastatingly insightful experience, but it’s something I still haven’t gotten over. I think back on the production of Schindler’s List with very sad memories, because of the subject matter, not because of the working experience. The working experience was nearly perfect, because everybody held on to each other in that production. We formed a circle. It was very therapeutic, and for a lot of people, it changed their lives. A lot of the actors, a lot of the crew, it changed their lives. It changed my life, for sure. But then other productions that I’ve gone into with a blithe spirit, thinking, This film’s a pushover. It’s often when I take that attitude, the movie turns around and runs me over as if it were a tank. And so I’ve tried my best to stop second-guessing what the working experience is going to be like. Because I’m usually wrong.

I was watching the extras on the Amistad DVD, and it brought up the point that if you’re re-enacting history, it’s inevitable that the actors and everyone on the crew are going to feel it. The actors had to wear real chains, and it was a difficult experience.

Yeah, and I think it turns cynical people into very mindful people. I certainly thought I could withstand any image that I helped to put up on the screen, even images from history, but sometimes they’re hard to look at, and especially hard to look at when they’re being performed live right in front of you—maybe a little easier to look at when they’re on the screen, actually. But sometimes the re-creation of a very painful time in history, it feels like, to the people who are standing on the front lines of moviemaking, it feels like you’re recording history, not re-creating it. Now, I’m not fooling myself—we are re-creating it, which means it will never be 100 percent accurate—but it’s accurate enough that usually it slams us down pretty hard.

Now you’re coming back to Indy after doing Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad—heavy stuff. Do you have different muscles that you’ve developed? Did you just go back into Indy mode to make an Indy movie?

Well, for me, making the latest installment of Indiana Jones was like getting back on the bicycle I hadn’t ridden in 18 years. And I was able to keep my balance without training wheels. I was sort of amazed that all of us got our Indy legs back in the first couple of days of shooting, and that was the good news. It was a real reunion, with the sweetest memories we shared from 1980 through 1989, when we made three Indiana Jones features. And to have Karen Allen back, and to get Harrison back in such great form! I screened the movies for myself, too. I screened the films back-to-back before I began directing the fourth one.

How do you watch them?

I watch them with my cinematographer. We went down to a screening room here and we saw one a day.

Is that Janusz Kaminski?

Janusz. We watch them on the screen.

And he wasn’t the cinematographer for the first three.

He wasn’t. Douglas Slocombe shot the first three Indy films, and his lighting style defined a genre of serialized action adventure. I needed to show them to Janusz, because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.

From the 90s onward, your movies do look a little different. Munich is beautiful-looking and—

They’re all different. They’re all different. I think every movie I’ve made after Indiana Jones, I’ve tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I’m very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it’s hard, because everybody has style. You can’t help it. It just comes off you like pollen. I mean, if you’re a bee, you’re a bee, but at the same time I try very hard to work a little out of the box every time I make a choice. And I had to go back to a box that I had helped invent in the 1980s to accomplish this task of bringing Indiana Jones back to life in the 21st century.

I was wondering, since the story is set in 1957, if you were tempted to get that beautifully crisp 1950s Technicolor look Hitchcock had in North by Northwest.

We went right back to the blazing Technicolor style of the first three installments.

But I feel like the Indy movies are almost an update of a 1930s look. There’s something about them that feels warm, like 30s movies, and Hitchcock had a sharp style in the 50s.

This wasn’t that kind of a style. For Munich, I certainly tried to bring an early-70s Hollywood style, a cinéma-vérité style, with zoom lenses, and a lot of the tools that were used to make movies in the 70s, one of my favorites being The Day of the Jackal, the Fred Zinnemann film. But I didn’t want to update Indiana Jones to the 1950s beyond hair, makeup, costumes, and cars. I wanted it to look very similar to the first three pictures.

Which had the spirit of the old serials.

I never wanted to get away from the B-movie, pulp feeling of the entire cliff-hanger era of the 40s and 50s, the old Republic serials.

Hitchcock is funny, because he had a pulp sensibility but a very polished look.

Yes, he does, very much so. But Hitchcock also storyboards everything, and everything is done by the numbers in the order that he places them. He paints by numbers. Hitchcock’s most brilliant work is done privately, with the sketch artist, and so I think he spends the greatest amount of creative energy on the planning stages, and then when he goes to make a movie, he sticks very closely with the battle plan. And so his movies are, for me anyway, like perfect, pre-meditated murders. And he’s wicked. Hitchcock films have a wicked, deadly glint in the eye, and that’s the pollen that Hitchcock has left behind. But at the same time, his films are very different, one from the next. Lifeboat is much different from North by Northwest. North by Northwest is much more of a Hollywood genre movie, whereas Lifeboat is like a stage play.

Harrison Ford gets overlooked. An Indy movie is not like a Star Wars movie, where you have an ensemble of actors. What do you see that a layman wouldn’t see in a performance like his?

Harrison had the same problem I had. He’s spoken the words of so many different writers, and he’s been involved in so many different genres in 18 years, that we both wondered if we were going to be able to go back home together and be who we were. I mean, we’re both older—and we both look a bit older, I think, certainly—but at the same time Harrison needed to recapture the caustic, laconic spirit of Dr. Jones, and certainly he was going to have to manage the action, and he did both of those things amazingly well, far beyond what I expected. And he just did it so brilliantly and so effortlessly. He was just a little more out of breath after every stunt, just a little more, and so was I.

What’s the emotional range of Indiana Jones? Can he feel despair? Or is he just a machine to go forward and make the action happen?

Indiana Jones was never a machine. I think one of the things we brought to the genre—and we didn’t coin the genre; it’s been around a lot longer than we’ve been around—but one of the things that George [Lucas] and I and, originally, Larry Kasdan, the writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark, brought to the genre, was the willingness to allow our leading man to get hurt and to express his pain and to get his mad out and to take pratfalls and sometimes be the butt of his own jokes. I mean, Indiana Jones is not a perfect hero, and his imperfections, I think, make the audience feel that, with a little more exercise and a little more courage, they could be just like him. So he’s not the Terminator. He’s not so far away from the people who go to see the movies that he’s inaccessible to their own dreams and aspirations.

He’s not even Bond. Bond’s not a superhero, but he’s more impenetrable.

Bond’s more impenetrable, and I think to the credit of the Bond series, Daniel Craig allowed James Bond to suffer. And that was brilliant. It was brilliant of Martin Campbell and Daniel Craig and certainly Paul Haggis, who wrote the last draft, to allow Bond to go where Indiana Jones had been.

He was a great presence in Munich. Daniel Craig was like a time bomb, and I kept waiting for him to go off, but he never did. He never wavered.

Yes, he never wavered.

The women of Indiana Jones are different from Bond girls. There was a deeper connection between Indiana Jones and Karen Allen than there is between a Bond girl and Bond.

Well, a Bond girl—if James Bond gets fresh, a Bond girl will slap James across the face. But Marion Ravenwood will haul off and punch Indiana Jones’s lights out. She was always the feisty spitfire in a leading-lady action heroine that I had admired growing up watching movies, especially watching the old movies from the 30s, when women held their own against men, where women could win the day, like Irene Dunn, like Ann Sheridan, like Barbara Stanwyck. And writers knew how to write for women in the 30s and 40s.

Alison Doody, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was more like a Bond girl.

She was more like a Bond girl, but she was also a betrayer. She betrays Indy, but she’s more like a Bond girl. But not Kate [Capshaw, the co-star of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, who is also Spielberg’s wife]. Kate wasn’t a Bond girl at all. When push came to shove, she could stand alongside Indy and knock out thuggies.

When there’s an action sequence in Indy and your other movies, you always have clarity. You never wonder, “Who’s that guy punching that guy?” But in recent action movies, there’s more confusion on purpose, on the part of the director, to create a feeling of chaos on-screen. You don’t seem to go for that.

No, I don’t go for that. I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting. Which is fine, because audiences get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on The Bourne Ultimatum, and there’s just enough geography for the audience never to be lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure. I tried very hard, and I hope I succeeded, in not re-inventing the genre, because that would not make it an Indy movie. I just didn’t want to re-invent Indy in a way that would deny that these movies are more based on 1930s Hollywood pictures than anything else.

How do you get a movie to have speed? Is it partly the story?

Part of the speed is the story—it’s the story. If you build a fast engine, you don’t need fast cutting, because the story’s being told fluidly, and the pages are just turning very quickly. You first of all need a script that’s written in the express lane, and if it’s not, there’s nothing you can do in the editing room to make it move faster. You need room for character, you need room for relationships, for personal conflict, you need room for comedy, but that all has to happen on a moving sidewalk.

You went through a number of scripts.

I did.

People have read about Frank Darabont. Is it true you liked his script?

Very much. I very much liked Frank’s script.

Was it set in the 40s?

It was set in the 50s.

With latter-day Nazis coming at Indiana Jones?

Yes. And I quite liked Frank’s script, but George and I had a disagreement over it, and George and I have always agreed to agree. So when we take each other’s temperatures, if I really am passionate about something, George will give in to me, and if George is really passionate about something, I’ll pretty much go his way. And in this case George was passionate that this was not the story he wanted to tell at this point in the Indiana Jones saga. And I think it’s a wonderful script.

Is that leaving room open for another one?

Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about that. I’m still in the cutting room. I can’t even think beyond the next cut.

So what stage are you in now?

I’m in my second cut, which means I’ve put the movie together and I’ve seen it. I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven’t ever directed a film where I haven’t made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.

And what’s the process? Do you send the fifth cut to George?

I send my fifth cut to [composer] John Williams and the sound-effects people. They will soon be getting the cut, and John Williams will start writing the music.

Is editing enjoyable?

I love editing. It’s one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.

As long as you have the stuff and you’re not regretting what happened on the set.

Yeah. The best news is that, when I saw the movie myself the first time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.

Do you remember the first time you saw George Lucas?

I met him in 1967. I was a student at Cal State Long Beach. George was at U.S.C. He had made a short film called THX 1138. And there was a film festival, I think involving student films from all over California. They were having it at U.C.L.A., I think Royce Hall. I met George backstage. I was blown away by his short film, and Francis Coppola introduced us.

Were you an undergraduate at the time?

I was in my second year at college. There was no film program at Long Beach State, so I was on weekends making 16-mm. films on the side. And I was hanging around Universal. That was ongoing. I put all my classes Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I was shoving 15 and a half units into Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and having no classes Thursday and Friday so I could come to Universal and hang out with the directors and editors and sound mixers.

So when you met George Lucas, did you go out for a beer?

No, it wasn’t until a couple of years later that we became friends, because some writing friends of mine, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, were very close to George, and they put us together a second time, and that’s when George and I became fast friends.

Was it through movies or also a friendship?

It was a shared passion and a personal friendship.

George told you the first Indy story in Hawaii?

He had called me up and he said, “Do you want to come to Hawaii? I need to get away for the opening of Star Wars. Do you want to join me?” So I got on a plane, and joined him and his wife, and we were in Hawaii, and we were just waiting for the grosses. Waiting for the morning shows to be reported, because I think the movie opened at 10 o’clock in certain theaters. We got word about three in the afternoon or so, or four in the afternoon. The sun was still up. I remember George got word that all the 10-o’clock-in-the-morning shows had sold out all across the country. And at that point George was the most giddy I had ever seen him in all the years prior to that that I had ever seen him. He was just beside himself, with relief more than anything else. He had been inward for a long time, waiting for those numbers, and then he turned to me, he said, “So what are you going to do next?” And I told him that I wanted to, for the second time, approach [film producer] Cubby Broccoli, who had turned me down the first time, to see if he would change his mind and hire me to do a James Bond movie. And George said, “I’ve got something better than that. It’s called Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He pitched me the story, and I committed on the beach. We started a tradition of building lucky sandcastles. So we used to build sandcastles in Hawaii, and if the sandcastle withstood the first high tide, the film was a hit. If the high tide overran the sandcastle, we were going to have to struggle to make our money back. That was our superstition and that was our tradition.

What beach was that?

At the Mauna Kea. On the big island.

A white-sand beach?

White-sand beach.

I was curious if you’d seen Knocked Up and the scene where the main character says he loves Munich, because Jews kick ass.

I loved Knocked Up! I called [director] Judd [Apatow] to compliment the movie, and Judd sent me the uncut improvisation, the uncut Munich improv that didn’t show up in the film. They just used about the first third of it, but it goes on another two minutes. So Judd sent me the entire scene to look at, and it was fantastic.

Are you going on with a Lincoln movie or Chicago 7?

I’m developing Lincoln and developing Chicago 7. We’re in the process right now on Chicago 7 of doing a feasibility study of what actors are available.

Does it look like that would be before Lincoln?

I don’t want to say it’s a done deal, but it’s possible that will be ready for me before Lincoln.

I saw that [playwright-screenwriter] Tony Kushner is working on Lincoln.

Not anymore. There’s a strike. All my writers are on the picket line.

You’ve had this dual career of entertainments and very serious movies.

All the films, every movie … If a movie is going to be a reflection of any kind of a real-life situation, it has to have all the sine waves of real stories, meaning there’s absurdity, there’s comedy, there’s tragic loss, there’s huge impenetrable forces chasing you down, and then there’s redemption at the end. Every movie is really just a distillation of a moment in time, a moment in someone’s life, but filmmakers and writers love to shove every possible option into those moments, so the audience gets to experience an entire life in a couple of hours. So every movie strives to achieve that.

It surprised me, re-watching your movies, that A.I. feels almost the most tragic out of all of them.

It is the most tragic—but not out of all of them.

Even in Schindler’s List and Amistad, there’s some redemption for the main characters in the end.

I never saw redemption for the main character at the end of Schindler’s List. I saw that, at the end of the Holocaust, there were witnesses who could testify to the Holocaust’s existence, and without those survivors there would have been no witnesses to ever speak the truth about the great murders. There wouldn’t have been any eyewitnesses to illuminate for the rest of the world the greatest crime that has been perpetrated against the human race. So I never saw the end of Schindler’s List as being anything other than that, without those 1,200 survivors, there wouldn’t have been anyone to tell the tale. And that was important to me. But in a sense there’s a darker outlook with A.I., because somehow A.I. is about the end of the entire human race that is superseded by the Frankensteins that man has put on the planet in the greedy effort to make a boy who could love you. But the boy himself is not human, he’s next to human. A substitute love child, you know, is almost a crime, and the human race pays for that crime. And so I think it’s a very tragic story, and I think I was as true to Stanley Kubrick’s vision as I possibly could be.

George Lucas tends to write about fathers and sons, and you often write about mothers and sons. The new Indy movie, I assume, is another father-son story.

I wouldn’t say it’s a father-son story. The new Indy movie is about a great quest, an amazing quest—and that’s all I’m gonna say. [Laughs.]