The movie that convinced Steven Spielberg he would never make it as a director: “The bar was too high”
It sounds ludicrous to hear the single most commercially successful director in the history of the moving image almost abandon their dream after watching a movie, but Steven Spielberg really did question whether or not he was cut out for the whole filmmaking thing after his mind was well and truly blown.
Obviously, hindsight is always 20/20 for a reason, so it’s easy to be bemused by the fact a talent who’s accomplished and achieved everything that Spielberg has found themselves plunged into an early onset existential crisis by a solitary feature film that battered him over the head with the belief that no matter how hard he tried, he’d never be able to come close to replicating its majesty.
After all, this is the wunderkind who reinvented cinema forever with Jaws, became the most famous director on the planet by knocking out blockbuster classics without a care in the world, directed the highest-grossing release of all time on no less than three separate occasions, and has three Academy Awards to his name.
That’s without even mentioning that Spielberg never wanted to be anything other than a director. He got his start shooting homemade movies with his friends and family before wasting little time working his way up the ladder from television to film, and he was still only in his late 20s when Jaws shook the industry’s entire business model to its foundations.
Then again, considering the masterpiece that left him so shaken up is well-known for being his favourite feature of all time, it makes a little more sense. It’s hardly a secret that Spielberg holds David Lean’s seminal Lawrence of Arabia on the highest possible pedestal, which is why his first time experiencing the sweeping epic in all of its glory had such a monumental – and almost disastrously negative – effect on his aspirations.
“I remember the time I almost gave up my dream of being a movie director,” he recalled in the documentary Spielberg. “When the film was over, I wanted to not be a director anymore. Because the bar was too high. It was the first time seeing a movie I realise that there are themes that aren’t narrative story themes, they are themes that are character themes, that are personal themes, and at the heart and core of Lawrence of Arabia is: who am I?”
Spielberg has always held himself to high standards, but at least his stance has softened over time. Lawrence of Arabia was so good that he was ready to abandon the only dream he’d ever had, whereas he’s since been happy to concede that he’ll never make anything as good as The Godfather. Few people have been able to reach the bar set by either Lean or Francis Ford Coppola’s greatest works, and there’s absolutely no shame in that.
