Still in awe of the movies at age 65
FOR those of us who grew up on the movies of Steven Spielberg, it’s hard not to think of him as a boy wonder. He is the director laureate of the Peter Pan generation, and we’ve all ‘never grown up’ alongside him. He was in his 20s when he made Jaws, which redefined the summer movie, and within seven years he had made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET.
Judged in economic terms, Spielberg has no peers: the films he’s directed — never mind the 130 movies and TV projects that bear his name as a producer — have generated €3bn in box-office revenue in the US.
Spielberg, who’s turning 65, is in the fourth decade of his career. At that age, many of the early giants of Hollywood were entering the last phases of their directing careers, telling tales of an autumnal spirit: Billy Wilder made The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; Hitchcock made Marnie and would shoot only four more features; Howard Hawks directed Rio Bravo, then slowed to a crawl.
There is nothing autumnal about the two movies Spielberg has coming out this holiday season. The Adventures of Tintin, a hit here in Europe, where audiences are familiar with the Herg comic strips, is his first venture into motion-capture animation and 3-D. War Horse, based on the award-winning play set during World War I, has an epic structure unlike anything he’s attempted. Spielberg’s now filming Lincoln, with Daniel Day-Lewis as the president in the last four years of his life, from a screenplay by Tony Kushner. He’ll follow that with Robopocalypse, a futuristic thriller about a robot uprising.
This is not a man with his eyes on the finish line. Spielberg’s in an extended mid-career. He is sitting in a vast, empty antechamber of the capitol building in Richmond, built in 1788, which is doubling as the White House and the Congress.
Why, at a point in life when many men would be slowing down, does he keep up the pace? A New York Times article asked “What Makes Steven Run?” and posited the theory that he was driven by fear (Spielberg has said he was born a nervous wreck), a fear that permeated the themes of his films. Spielberg is having none of it. “I disagree with that,” he says. “Fear isn’t what drives creative people. It’s more trust, and hope, and the challenge of doing something you haven’t done before. It’s not fear so much as it’s confidence.”
So what makes Steven run? Making movies. “I just love being on the floor, filming things. I miss it when I’m not doing it. Because producing is not the same thing. Running a studio [DreamWorks] is not the same thing. Physically working with crews and actors — there’s nothing like it,” he says. A friend of his had told me that Spielberg was “a bit of a nerd, but when he’s on a set he’s transformed.” Watching him at work proves the point. He’s directing a complicated scene for Lincoln in which the ‘members of Congress’ are shouting each other down as they debate a passage of the 13th Amendment, the abolition of slavery.
He calls out to his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski what lens he wants for a shot, where the camera should move. He’s in his element, in control. He works fast. His crews love him because he knows everything about the technology of making a movie. “He hires the best, then gets out of their way,” says an associate who worked with him for years. “He can be incredibly demanding — he’s impatient — but he’s always the smartest guy in the room and the most hardworking.”
Spielberg knows what his actors need from him: he’ll watch a scene unfold from behind the monitor, but while working with Tom Cruise on Minority Report he sensed that his star wanted him to be in his sight lines, so he stood next to the camera for his scenes. “Movies are always in a state of locomotion,” Spielberg says. “You start with a general idea of how it should feel and then you find you’ve got a runaway train. You have to race to catch up: the movie is telling you what it wants to become, and when that happens there’s no greater feeling.”
Spielberg won’t name a favourite among his movies, but the one he was most dissatisfied with was Hook. “It never achieved what I was hoping for. Neverland was too theatrical, it was too much like a Broadway show,” he says. His most unappreciated films? Always and The Terminal, he says. &
The former boy wonder is playing with a new set of technological toys in The Adventures of Tintin. The freedom of motion-capture animation unleashes his imagination. Taken from The Secret of the Unicorn and two other Herg graphic novellas, this globe-trotting adventure follows the intrepid young reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell), whose purchase of an old model sailing ship at a flea market puts his life in peril.
Hidden inside the model is a clue that will lead to a long-lost shipwrecked treasure. Kidnapped along with his faithful terrier, Snowy (a CGI triumph), by the archvillain Sakharine (Daniel Craig), he is imprisoned aboard a tanker, where he encounters the rowdy, booze-loving Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis).
The straight-arrow hero and the reprobate captain become unlikely partners as they try to stay alive and solve a centuries-old riddle. Teemingly inventive, Tintin has the playful Rube Goldberg-ish propulsion of Spielberg’s 1941, but without that movie’s strenuous comic overkill. Tintin (whose earnest, deadpan visage is more Jude Law than Jamie Bell) and the wild, alcoholic Haddock find themselves in the mythical Moroccan town of Bagghar, where Spielberg pulls off a swooping, breathtaking single-shot chase sequence that would have been impossible to film in live action.
Tintin’s second half may be too relentlessly frenetic for some tastes (I would have enjoyed the 17th-century flashbacks aboard the good ship Unicorn more had all those rotten Pirates of the Caribbean sequels not spoiled my appetite for pirates).
But in this era of incoherently staged mayhem (Quantum of Solace, anyone?), Spielberg’s classicism is a gift. Nor does he use 3-D for cheap thrills. Spielberg is not a gung-ho 3-D fan.
“James [Cameron] and Jeffrey [Katzenberg] hate it when I say this, but 3-D isn’t right for every film. It’s best for animation. When it’s not done right it gets in the way of seeing deeply into the story. 3-D doesn’t pull your heart,” he says.
War Horse harks back to ‘40s Hollywood, with its glossy Gone With the Wind sunsets and, in its leisurely first hour in Devonshire, England, its stately John Ford rhythms. Stylistically, it’s as determinedly old-fashioned as Tintin is up-to-the-minute. Where Tintin has little time for the touchy-feely, War Horse unabashedly pulls your heartstrings.
It’s the story of a boy (Jeremy Irvine), a horse, and war. The horse, Joey, is a thoroughbred bought at a country auction by the lad’s farmer father (Peter Mullan), though he’s not built to plow a field. The boy, Albert, falls in love with the horse, trains him, and then has his heart broken when his drunken, impoverished dad sells him to a cavalry captain (Tom Hiddleston) setting off for war. We then follow Joey through the horrors of World War I, as he is passed from owner to owner.
After the captain is killed in combat, he falls into the hands of two young German soldier brothers, then into the possession of an old French farmer (Niels Arestrup) and his sickly granddaughter, then a German horse master.
He lands at the Battle of the Somme, where Albert, now a soldier, has been commissioned. In the most spectacular sequence, a riderless Joey runs wild through the trenches and the corpse-ridden mud of the battlefield, where he is entangled and brought to ground in a web of barbed wire. This is Spielberg at his visceral best: poetic and fierce.
But War Horse is an oddly disjointed experience, an uneasy shotgun wedding of National Velvet and Paths of Glory. The episodic structure (the script is by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, taking off from Nick Stafford’s stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s young-adult novel) gives the narrative a stop-start feeling, as we’re repeatedly introduced to new characters we barely get to know — and some, like that sickly French granddaughter, we’re happy to leave.
By the time Albert has reappeared in the story, after a long absence, the sentimental contrivances of the plot stick out like sore hooves. I wanted to be devastated — how can you miss with a horse and a boy? — and was surprised not to be.
Here, Spielberg’s prodigious technique and unlimited resources get in the way; the movie feels overproduced and overlong. The story cries out for a fable-like simplicity, but austerity may be one colour that’s not in the director’s paint box.
It’s remarkable how Spielberg can bounce with equal enthusiasm between personal projects like Schindler’s List or Munich and his crowd-pleasing Jurassic Park movies, or a light romp like Catch Me if You Can.
He operates out of responsibility toward his investors. He’ll make one for them, and one for himself. But not cynically: the artist and the businessman reside in harmony inside him, which has enabled him to be a mogul, a producer, and a filmmaker.
His filmmaking career has been built on his uncanny gut instincts — his choices inspired by a book or script that excites him, or, in the case of War Horse, being brought to tears by the stage production in London. He scooped up the rights and had an eight-month window to make the movie while Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital company in New Zealand was transforming his Tintin footage into animation (each frame took five hours to animate). So, two new Spielberg movies for Christmas. He may no longer be a boy wonder, but his boyish wonderment never ceases.
(c) 2011 Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
