The director who influenced Steven Spielberg “more than any other”
It’s been decades since Spielbergian entered the cinematic consciousness, but the style of Steven Spielberg is heavily indebted to several of his most prominent directorial inspirations.
There are elements of Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, and Frank Capra sprinkled throughout his signature aesthetic, which the legendary filmmaker threw into a melting pot of his own making to create something that was distinctly and unmistakably his.
Many of Spielberg’s best and most successful features are evocative of the sense of scale, sweeping grandeur, sentimentality, meticulous world-building, and relatable everyman characters that were prevalent in the work of the auteurs listed above, but one name towers over the rest as it applies to post-production.
Spielberg isn’t renowned for being a hands-on screenwriter or editor in the conventional sense, but given his status as the highest-grossing director in cinema history, he knows exactly what type of stories will draw in a mass audience and how to piece them together in the editing suite to exact the maximum drama, tension, or thrills.
While he stopped short of naming them as a stylistic influence, top marks went to one director for assisting him once cameras had stopped rolling. “The filmmaker who really influenced me more than any other is John Frankenheimer,” he admitted to the British Film Institute. “Not visually, but as an editor.”
Spielberg noticed that “his editing often has more energy than the content of the story,” with Frankenheimer’s 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate an eye-opener. “I realised for the first time what film editing was all about,” and using cuts to enhance the action was a technique he adopted long before he made his official directorial debut.
“I made a number of 8mm films at home and began to experiment with cutting and juxtaposing scenes and tricks in the cutting room,” Spielberg explained of how Frankenheimer left his fingerprints on him even as a teenager. “I learned all the negative things, the things I try not to do in movies.”
He was a long way away from exploding onto the scene as the wunderkind responsible for Duel and Jaws who’d go on to reinvent the face of Hollywood several times over, but Spielberg’s razor-sharp edits can be traced all the way back to Frankenheimer. While he’s faced repeated criticisms for mawkish and saccharine sentimentalism, a barb that very rarely gets levelled at the director is that his films are too long.
As it turns out, Frankenheimer is responsible for that, with Spielberg adopting judicious editing practices at a very early age. Since then, he’s always envisioned the edit when he’s on set, trimming the fat when necessary and tightening up his pictures as and when required to ensure he gets the most out of any given frame.
