“One of the few true visionaries”: the director Steven Spielberg called the Shakespeare of cinema
These days, Steven Spielberg is used to being called one of the most important and influential filmmakers in modern cinema, but not many directors have set out with the intention of becoming an inspiration.
Well, some of them probably have, but for the most part, all any aspiring auteur dreams of is making the movies that they want to make in exactly the way that they want to make them without being held back or compromising, but there’s only a small percentage who actually get to live that particular dream.
It’s only going to get harder, too, with modern Hollywood increasingly defined by rules, restrictions, and non-negotiables imposed from the boardroom, with Spielberg one of the small few, alongside the likes of James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino, who have almost unlimited creative freedom.
Even Martin Scorsese is making films for Netflix and Apple, and he’s dedicated himself to the preservation of film history while being a vocal proponent of the theatrical experience, so not even legends are immune to going where the money is and teaming up with streaming services to realise their vision.
His Amblin Entertainment outfit might work with streamers, but you’ll never see a Spielberg flick released exclusively on demand. He grew up with the big screen, he won’t consider anything smaller, and the directors he’s indebted to the most made the kind of sweeping epics that simply don’t play as well anywhere other than a packed auditorium.
The easiest way to sum up the three-time Academy Award winner’s visual style is that he’s a little bit John Ford and a little bit David Lean, with a touch of William Wyler and a sprinkling of Stanley Kubrick. There is, of course, another, and the inimitable Akira Kurosawa may be the biggest filmic touchstone of them all.
“He was the pictorial Shakespeare of our time,” Spielberg said. “What encourages me is that he is the only director who, right up until the end of his life, continued to make films that were recognised as classics.” Kurosawa was 75 when Ran was released, which makes a bit of a mockery of Tarantino suggesting that “old-man filmmakers” always lose their touch.
Spielberg made Ready Player One and West Side Story in his 70s, and those movies couldn’t be more different from each other, showing his mastery of both massive-scale escapist cinema and the effortless way he could adapt to a musical, a genre he hadn’t been anywhere near before, so he’s living up to the template that Kurosawa had laid down decades beforehand.
He also described the Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Ikiru maestro as “one of the few true visionaries to ever work in our medium,” a label that he wasn’t applying lightly. He’s right, obviously, since Kurosawa is one of the greatest to ever do it, with Spielberg adamant that his contributions to cinema are every bit as important as those William Shakespeare made to the theatre.
