The director Steven Spielberg flew across America to yell at: “He was screaming at him”
You don’t become one of the most powerful people in Hollywood by being a pushover, but even with all the success that he’s had, Steven Spielberg is still a man not to be fucked with.
The filmmaker has built an empire, and his status as the highest-grossing director of all time and the person with the most ‘Best Picture’ nominations to their name only reiterates that his word is almost always law, and if anyone gets in his way, they should prepare to be taken down a peg or two.
Not that he’s a tyrant, though. Almost everyone who’s collaborated with Spielberg over the last 50 years hasn’t been crawling out of the woodwork to share horror stories, but he was a bit of a firebrand in his younger days, which came screeching to a halt when Kathleen Kennedy read him the riot act.
However, if his name is on your picture, and that picture is on the verge of disaster, then the three-time Academy Award-winning legend will hop on a private jet, fly all the way across the country, and touch down with one goal in mind: tearing you a brand new arsehole.
The unlucky recipient was Jan de Bont, who was helming 1996’s disaster blockbuster, Twister, which was backed by Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. When word reached his ears that the set was close to mutiny, he took matters into his own hands and sought to resolve the issue once and for all.
The day before, de Bont had shoved a camera assistant, who fell down the ditch they were shooting in. After refusing to apologise, cinematographer Don Burgess and his entire crew walked off in protest, and they were quickly joined by the audio crew, then the wardrobe department. “It had been brewing,” Rodgers remembered, but Spielberg refused to let it boil over.
Within 24 hours, de Bont had been summoned to the airport closest to Twister‘s Oklahoma base of operations. “The ramp came down on the Learjet, and Spielberg walked down it, and he never touched the ground,” Rodgers recalled. “He just stood there yelling at Jan. He never even got off the plane.”
The dressing-down was intense, with the DP sharing that Spielberg “was just fucking yelling, pointing his finger at him, screaming at him.” All in all, the ET and Jaws mastermind was only there for about 15 minutes, all of which he spent “barking” at de Bont, before the door to his private jet closed and he left, “without him even stepping off,” Rodgers added.
There are hands-off producers, and there’s Spielberg, who was so incensed by the stories of de Bont losing the faith of his crew that he felt like he had no other option but to embark on a brief odyssey across the United States, for the sole purpose of giving him a bollocking.
