The Denzel Washington movie Steven Spielberg turned down for being “too dark”
There aren’t many directors who can claim to cover the same ground that Steven Spielberg has. Throughout his time working in the world of film, Spielberg has been able to make movies in nearly every single genre and have them turn out impressive in some form, whether it’s the sci-fi epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the gritty war drama Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg has never really been one to shy away from grotesque subjects, but one movie became too much for him to take on.
Coming from a young filmmaker who made movies in the 1970s, Spielberg underwent a particular conversion during his time behind the camera. Compared to where he ended up in Hollywood, the director’s original take on violence started as something gritty and almost fun, using monstrous images at will.
Throughout the making of movies like Jaws, Spielberg was not afraid to get as much gore in the film as he thought the script demanded. Even though many wouldn’t expect something easy to watch out of a movie about killer sharks, seeing the images of men getting torn to shreds by the maneater was a lot for blockbuster audiences to process at the time.
Even Spielberg’s take on the Indiana Jones franchise would become fairly intense throughout their runtime, leading to the invention of the PG-13 rating after parents found scenes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom too disturbing for children. While many kids saw those restrictions as an advertisement for potentially exciting films, the massive backlash to the film shook Spielberg to his core.
From then on, many of his most famous films treated violence seriously. Throughout his run of war movies throughout the 1990s, like Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg was moved by the massive pain that could be inflicted by acts of violence, featuring grizzly murders of characters that felt like real people the audience would care about.
When working on his war drama Schindler’s List, though, Spielberg had a movie across his desk slated for Denzel Washington. Written by director John Lee Hancock, The Little Things revolved around a pair of detectives coming across various grizzly murders before finding a loner about town that may be behind some of the dirty deeds.
Even though the film may have fit perfectly with the gritty dramas of the 1990s, like David Fincher’s Se7en, Spielberg had a hard time grasping the concept when initially looking at the movie. While the film was on the shelf before Hancock finished it, Spielberg said that the intense subject matter became too much for him.
As Hancock said: “Steven really liked A Perfect World, my script for it. And so before we ever went into production on A Perfect World, he came to me and said, ‘Let’s do a blind picture deal. … Let’s just do it at Warner Brothers. I wrote a long outline and then talked to him on the phone about it after he read it. And I think I faxed him the outline. … He really liked it. He said, ‘This is really, really good storytelling. It’s just too dark for me right now. I’m finishing Schindler’s List. I can’t live in this dark world again.’ And I understood that completely.”
Not being released until 2021, most of the film remains faithful to what Hancock had been working on, depicting the same gritty drama he had aimed for all those years ago. Even though the movie may not have been the most original screenplay in the 2020s, The Little Things still feels like a relic from a lost time unearthed before the audience’s eyes.
