The greatest director of the 1990s, according to science
Cinema’s shift away from what we class as ‘Old Hollywood’ – when everyone seemed to talk a bit differently – can be identified somewhere in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when societal attitudes started to change with the rise of the civil rights movement and second wave feminism.
Censorship on the big screen luckily began to ease, allowing for more taboos to make their way into the mainstream and a newfound sense of realism to subsequently emerge. Everything suddenly felt grittier, more grounded in reality, and with movies like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde at the end of the 1960s – with their nihilistic endings and graphic depictions of sexuality and violence – cinema well and truly shifted into the era of New Hollywood.
American cinema got infinitely more creative during these years, giving us the modern blockbuster in the form of Jaws and the sci-fi sensation Star Wars, which changed cinema forever (for better or for worse?) by buoying the concept of the franchise. These films gave us a taste of what would become of cinema in the coming years, though, because after this initial wave of cinematic experimentation started to ease, the 1980s became a wasteland of franchise movies and studio domination, standing in contrast to the more auteur-driven projects that the New Hollywood era championed.
In essence, this era of cinematic innovation inevitably caved in on itself, unable to sustain itself due to cinema’s inherently capitalistic model of production. Ideas became watered down, with the pressures of making easily accessible and commercially successful films triumphing over creativity. Studio control had come back to rule the roost.
And that leads us to the 1990s, a time that was thankfully more reminiscent of the 1970s’ New Hollywood boom. People were getting fatigued by the flashy Hollywood movies of the ‘80s, so out came various indie filmmakers hoping to bring some creativity back to the mainstream. Quentin Tarantino emerged a victor, with Pulp Fiction making a whopping $213.9million against an $8m budget, suggesting that there was potential in these non-studio-driven movies after all.
Indiewood, as it’s often called, gave us filmmakers like David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and the Coen brothers, who have shaped the new American cinematic landscape with their accessible yet idiosyncratic works. But while all of this was going on, there was one filmmaker who wasn’t going anywhere just yet, his popularity ensuring that Hollywood didn’t fully lose its fucking grip on mainstream studio fodder.
Steven Spielberg, who had emerged from the New Hollywood landscape in the 1970s, quickly transitioned into a career full of one goddamn blockbuster hit after another, like ET – the Extraterrestrial and Raiders of the Lost Ark. By the 1990s, he had enough momentum behind him to keep up his streak, resulting in some of the most popular movies of the decade.
In 1993, he made both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, two hugely successful movies which topped the box-office charts and had people flocking to cinemas. He seemed to know exactly what would get millions of people lining up to watch his films, using extensive special effects and grandiose emotional pulls that would have people instantly hooked. The Lost World: Jurassic Park emerged a few years later, similarly grossing hundreds of millions, before the incredibly patriotic Saving Private Ryan climbed the box office charts in 1998. Spielberg was unstoppable.
How he was able to crank out so many massive hits (including two in one year) is actually mind-bending, so there’s no surprise that he stands as the most influential filmmaker of the 1990s according to a scientific study by Livio Bioglio & Ruggero G Pensa. Identification of key films and personalities in the history of cinema from a Western perspective found that Spielberg had the most success and influence of the decade by a significant margin, so while there might have been a significant indie boom, no one was able to usurp Spielberg’s Hollywood blockbuster domination.
