How many movies has Steven Spielberg produced that he didn’t direct?
Producing is the next logical step in the careers of many high-profile directors, who use the goodwill they’ve built up from a slew of hit movies to take more ownership over their creative direction and often use their name to provide a platform for other filmmakers to succeed. That said, Steven Spielberg hasn’t produced many pictures where he isn’t the one behind the camera.
Think of Hollywood’s marquee directors, and the chances are high that they didn’t start producing their own work until after they’d already made it: Christopher Nolan didn’t earn that credit on a Hollywood film until The Prestige; it was Terminator 2 for James Cameron, Shutter Island for Martin Scorsese, Death Proof for Quentin Tarantino, Notorious for Alfred Hitchcock, while Clint Eastwood only produced two of his first eight features despite being an onscreen superstar by the time he made his directorial debut.
Spielberg is no different in that regard; ET the Extra-Terrestrial was the first time he produced one of his own movies, and he was already the biggest director in the business by that point, having previously helmed Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of the 29 he’s made since then, the only ones he hasn’t also produced are the Indiana Jones sequels, his two Jurassic Park films, Hook, Minority Report, and War of the Worlds.
As an executive producer and the co-founder of Amblin Entertainment, the three-time Academy Award winner has been prolific: Spielberg has backed more than 50 films as an EP, but very rarely does he take the plunge as a full-blown producer. In fact, it didn’t happen for the first time until 1991, and since then he’s only been listed in a similar capacity on a further eight pictures.
Producing only nine movies he didn’t direct is sporadic to say the least for someone as powerful and influential as Spielberg, and there’s almost always a good reason why. His first producorial credit was 1991’s animation An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, the sequel to the 1986 original he developed from the ground up alongside helmer Don Bluth.
Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima were originally intended for Spielberg to direct; Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha began life as his follow-up project to Saving Private Ryan before he was talked out of it, and he was the one who approached Bradley Cooper to star in Maestro after briefly considering picking up the directorial baton from Martin Scorsese, while Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple was the adaptation of the musical based on the novel that Spielberg had steered to 11 unsuccessful Oscar nominations.
That leaves JJ Abrams’ Super 8, which admittedly makes a lot of sense when it’s basically an Amblin homage in every way, Lasse Hallström’s literary adaptation The Hundred-Foot Journey, and Chloé Zhao’s revisionist historical drama Hamnet as the only three pictures Spielberg has ever produced that he didn’t originate or initially plan to direct himself.
Has Steven Spielberg ever directed a documentary?
Much like producing, directors spreading their wings and segueing into documentaries has also become a familiar rite of passage for some of the industry’s biggest names.
Martin Scorsese has built an entire secondary career out of it, while James Cameron has parlayed his lifelong love of the ocean into several factual features, never mind the likes of Werner Herzog, Ron Howard, John Ford, Ava DuVernay, and Todd Haynes, all of whom have dabbled to varying – yet equally successful – effect.
However, Spielberg has never shown any inclination to join their ranks, keeping his focus solely on narrative films instead. He’s appeared as a talking head in many docs and executive produced several, including Laurent Bouzereau’s Don’t Say No Until I Finish Talking: The Story of Richard D Zanuck and Music by John Williams, James Moll’s The Last Days, and János Szász’s A Holocaust szemei, the latter pair through his position as the founder of the Shoah Foundation, the nonprofit organisation he founded after Schindler’s List to preserve the audiovisual history and education of the Holocaust.
