The movie that lost Steven Spielberg his entire family
Ever since he first dipped his toes into dramatic waters with 1985’s The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg has sought to alternate between the crowd-pleasing blockbusters that made his reputation and hard-hitting dramas that tackle powerful – and often true – stories.
The best example inarguably came in 1993 when Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List were released six months apart, with the former becoming the highest-grossing release in the history of cinema prior to the latter winning him a pair of Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ in amongst seven wins in total.
Following the arduous undertaking that saw him helm a boundary-pushing and game-changing fantasy and a haunting drama in quick succession, it would be another four years before a new Spielberg movie was released. As fate would have it, his return happened under almost identical circumstances, albeit with vastly diminished returns.
Seven months after The Lost World: Jurassic Park failed to live up to the impossible expectations set by its predecessor, the historical drama Amistad arrived. A notable box office disappointment that marked his lowest-earning effort as a director since The Sugarland Express in 1974, audiences simply didn’t take to a film that nonetheless earned four Academy Award nominations.
They weren’t the only ones, though, with Spielberg revealing that not even his nearest and dearest were won over by the movie. “They walked out of Amistad. I lost my whole family. All my young kids, you know,” he told Roger Ebert. “I wouldn’t ever show them the middle passage and I didn’t let them see the very beginning and they were bored by the legal stuff. They left.”
While children were hardly the target demographic for the story of the titular slave ship sailing to America and being the location for an uprising on the journey, actively withholding the more violent and heated aspects of Amistad were hardly going to endear it to the Spielberg children, either. Their dad may have directed it, but being shown parts of it in isolation doesn’t exactly paint the clearest of pictures.
It’s since been re-evaluated as one of Spielberg’s most overlooked movies, but it’s always been clear that Spielberg didn’t think it was marketed correctly or even strongly enough. Referring to “the lawsuit that got more publicity than the movie itself”, author Barbara Chase-Riboud took legal action after claiming Amistad liberally lifted details from her 1989 novel Echo of Lions, which was eventually settled in February 1998.
Amistad is a solid film without being one of Spielberg’s best, and the passage of time may have even convinced his youngest children to give it a second chance, knowing they’re now in a position to watch it without having their old man decide what is and isn’t suitable for their impressionable eyes.
