Steven Spielberg names the “number one experience of my career”
Bursting onto the scene as cinema’s newest wunderkind before spending the next half a century continuing to establish himself as one of the all-time great directors, Steven Spielberg has been given the opportunity to work with a litany of legends.
While he never develops his movies with an actor in mind, a combination of his reputation and the level at which he operates has nonetheless drawn plenty of icons into his orbit. And yet, one of them stands out as being the single best collaborative experience he’s ever had with a performer.
It isn’t Tom Hanks, either, even if the duo struck up the most prolific partnership of Spielberg’s career after working together on several features and a trio of TV shows. Nor is it Tom Cruise, the A-list megastar who anchored Minority Report and War of the Worlds to such memorable effect.
The three-time Academy Award winner has cast Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Harrison Ford, Christopher Walken, Christian Bale, Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, John Hurt, and countless other irreplaceable names during a legendary career, but none of them took the number one spot.
Even though he rejected the part the first time it was offered his way, Daniel Day-Lewis eventually relented and agreed to headline Spielberg’s Lincoln. The method man’s reputation often proceeds him, and in the filmmaker’s case, he lived up to the lofty expectations and then some.
“For me, he is like the experience of my career,” Spielberg told The Economic Times. “He was the number one experience of my career, in terms of working with an actor. He transformed himself and became completely unrecognisable. I have never seen that happen before. Also, none of my films have ever had these demands on any actor.”
Spielberg suggested that “for a movie of this genre, whoever inhabits Abraham Lincoln needs to become Abraham Lincoln.” For his money, “Lewis is the only actor who could have pulled it off,” which is quite the inadvertent kick in the teeth for a certain Liam Neeson.
After all, the Schindler’s List star was drafted in to top-line the ensemble after Day-Lewis had turned it down, but he ended up dropping out five years after his casting was announced when he came to the sudden realisation he wasn’t the right guy for the role. In a full circle moment, Spielberg’s number one candidate re-entered the fold, and the end result was over $275million at the box office.
Not only that, but Lincoln snagged a dozen Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, winning two of them, one of which went to Day-Lewis in the ‘Best Actor’ category. And to think, Spielberg would never have gotten his “greatest experience” if the leading man stuck to his guns and kept the film at arm’s length.
