The director who wanted to murder Steven Spielberg: “If I can kill Spielberg, I will kill Spielberg”
For the most part, Steven Spielberg is a pretty popular guy in filmmaking circles, with very few people having a bad word to say about him. However, even the most wholesome directors can have enemies, and the highest-grossing director of all time has one who wants him dead.
It’s OK not to enjoy every single one of his pictures, but it’s hard to actively dislike someone who’s made Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan, five flicks that will always be remembered as masterpieces of their chosen genre, if not cinema in general.
Spielberg’s populist leanings haven’t always enamoured him to the auteurs who’ve made their name in the experimental, avant-garde, or boundary-pushing arenas, but going on the record as saying you’d happily seize the chance to murder him if it was ever presented seems like it’s several steps too far.
Jacques Rivette once called him an asshole, so it’s not as if the three-time Academy Award winner is universally beloved in auteur circles. However, that’s nothing compared to the tirade Alejandro Jodorowsky unleashed in his direction, with his hatred for Spielberg running so deep that he’d even managed to dislodge Walt Disney as his most hated filmmaker ever.
“I hate Spielberg, because none of his movies are honest,” he told Bright Lights. “His violence is ill, it’s not honest. He shows an ill violence, as though he was the father of history. He hates Jews, because he is Jewish. He is making business with that, with Europe. He is a fascist, because America is the centre of his world.”
That might sound like a highly specific criticism being levelled towards the particular films that are steeped in Jewish identity, whether it’s Spielberg’s or not, but Jodorowsky hammered another, much sharper, nail into the coffin of his character assassination: “If I can kill Spielberg, I will kill Spielberg.”
“There are a lot of movie-makers I like, and there are others I hate,” the maverick behind El Topo and The Holy Mountain continued. “But what I hate the most is Spielberg. And second Walt Disney.” They’re still two peas in a pod, though, or at least that’s the way he put it across, in rather graphic detail.
“I think Spielberg is the son from when Walt Disney fucked Minnie Mouse,” Jodorowsky declared, conjuring a mental image of the man who built the ‘Mouse House’ creating the beast with two backs with his second most famous mascot, leading to one obvious post-coital conclusion: “And then there was Spielberg.”
There are directors who don’t like other directors, and then there’s Jodorowsky volunteering to kill Spielberg and describing him as the bastard child of a one-night stand between Walt Disney and Minnie Mouse. Needless to say, he’s not a fan.
