The classic Steven Spielberg called the “most dangerous” movie he’d ever seen
Many of the industry’s greatest-ever filmmakers have been branded as tyrants, misanthropes, tough taskmasters, prickly customers, and abrasive personalities at various points in their careers, but none of those things apply to Steven Spielberg.
Spending almost half a century knocking out hit after hit after hit, pushing the boundaries of technological innovation and commercial success, winning multiple Academy Awards, and becoming the highest-grossing director in history would surely frazzle more than a few nerves, but nobody ever has a bad or even remotely negative word to say about Spielberg.
Of course, that’s entirely explainable by looking at a filmography prone to schmaltzy sentimentality, but the bearded legend has made more than his fair share of important and powerful films. The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, and Munich are just some of them, but one word that never gets used in association with Spielberg is dangerous.
That’s not to say he plays it resolutely safe each and every time he steps behind the camera, but it can also be said that his filmography lacks the more visceral, furious, and menacing side of cinema. Still, that doesn’t mean he’s completely oblivious to a dangerous movie when he sees one, as he discovered during his college years when he saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange for the first time.
“It was the first movie I ever saw where the character you were supposed to journey with gets away with murder,” he said to the Los Angeles Times. “I thought it was one of the most dangerous things I’d ever seen.” He’s not wrong, with the incendiary literary adaptation giving rise to huge controversy during its initial run in cinemas.
A Clockwork Orange was even named specifically in multiple real-life murder cases, with the backlash and negativity growing so all-encompassing that Kubrick pulled it from cinemas in the United Kingdom in 1973, and it wouldn’t be made widely available to watch on either television or home video until after his death 26 years later.
Although Spielberg and Kubrick were cut from diametrically opposed thematic and stylistic cloths, the two ended up forging a long-standing friendship that the former admitted was rather one-sided. “It was sort of a one-way street, I’d tell Stanley everything I was doing and Stanley would never tell me anything he was doing,” he offered. “Stanley was a benevolent inquisitor. He’d absolutely pump you dry of any knowledge you might have that he might find compelling.”
Presumably, having extracted all of the necessary knowledge from their many conversations, Kubrick decided that Spielberg was the only person capable of completing A.I. Artificial Intelligence, with the 2001: A Space Odyssey director’s producer and assistant Jan Harlan and widow Christine approaching him directly with an invitation to steer it across the finish line following the iconic auteur’s passing.
