The filmmaker who inspired Steven Spielberg the most: “More than anyone else”
In a career spanning over five decades, Steven Spielberg has graced many movie studios with his association by creating epic films with them—Jaws, Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, you take your pick. And yet, in his heart, he owes it to Disney and its creator, Walt Disney, for the “incredible power” that shaped and influenced him as a filmmaker.
Throughout his long and illustrious career, Spielberg has only worked with the ‘House of Mouse’ once to create the fantasy film The BFG, based on Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel of the same name. The heartwarming plot depicts a young orphan kidnapped by a kind-hearted giant who decides to show her the good in the world by protecting her like no one ever had.
The film was a major deviation from the kind of films the director had been making for years at this point. In a chat with the Smithsonian Mag, he claimed it was the story’s insistence on the “size of your heart is what really matters” that attracted him to it. Maybe it was the admiration he felt for Disney and its founder, something he freely spoke about in a conversation with Front Row Features weeks before the film’s release.
It would feel more apt if it was names like Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick prominently affecting Spielberg’s vision as a filmmaker, but it was Walt Disney—“more than anyone else”— who made him “aware of the power of cinema”. He described how Disney has “the power to seize you in a choke hold and not let you go, and often when it finally releases you, you come out feeling unredeemed because you’ve been terrified. Disney was the first time I realised you could be scared half to death and then rescued minutes later. Not hours later, minutes later.”
Disney is mostly forced to live with this misconception that all it does is make cheesy fairytales lost in a protected fantasy world. But there is no ignoring the studio’s portrayal of darker moments, like Frolo’s song about Esméralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame that openly depicts his descent into darkness and the lust he felt for her that bordered on him either having her or killing her.
Spielberg recognised this “incredible power” that Disney possesses where it would “create images that were so frightening you had to turn away from the screen, but then suddenly those images would turn into a beautiful moment of transcendence”. When the Disney creations do embrace the clichés about dragons and damsels in distress, Spielberg finds that the studio turns the latter into “the proactive heroine”, a storytelling choice that influenced him. “It also made me feel that it was OK to scare as long as there was light at the end of the little vignettes of darkness,” he added.
Making The BFG gave the three-time Academy Award winner the ability to dabble in the same vision as the film depicted “one of the strongest young women” Spielberg had ever worked with. “She takes the BFG by his lapels and tells him, ‘It’s crocodile, not crocodile dilly’, and BFG doesn’t have an answer for you. He doesn’t have a response. He just sort of flaps his lips and goes, ‘Um, um, um, sometimes I don’t know what I’m saying.’”
The director did not work with Disney after The BFG, but the studio went on to make the films that had inspired Spielberg as a young filmmaker.
