“I couldn’t wait to get off the picture”: how the legend of Steven Spielberg was forged in misery
It’s been a very long time since Steven Spielberg hasn’t been able to get what he wanted, with the director having spent almost half a century as the most famous movie director on the planet.
The balance between art and commerce has always been at the heart of cinema, and it’s not an outlandish suggestion to say that nobody to have ever picked up a megaphone and stepped behind a camera has ever managed to strike that balance as deftly as Spielberg has.
He may not be the greatest auteur to grace the silver screen—even if there are plenty of people who’d suggest that he is—but he’s undoubtedly the one who found the best balance between telling powerful, personal stories and convincing audiences to turn up in droves to catch his latest work.
Spielberg is the only director in history to have accrued a lifetime box office of $10billion, which puts the exclamation point on it. He’s made several of Hollywood’s greatest-ever films, and the common thread between them is that whether it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, or Jaws is how they’ve balanced widespread acclaim and adulation with earning power.
The easiest way to examine Spielberg’s standing as offering the best of both worlds is to compare him to the three auteurs he calls close friends who all emerged around the same time. On a commercial level, George Lucas is the only one who matches up, and he eventually ended up dedicating his entire career to a single property before walking away from filmmaking altogether.
Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have created multiple classics between them, but they never came close to reaching the box office heights achieved by Spielberg despite the quality of their work. Scorsese even makes films comparable to his old buddy in terms of budget, but the highest-grossing title in his filmography has been out-earned by no less than nine Spielberg flicks.
And yet, it was abject misery that initially forged his legend, with the wunderkind finding himself ill-equipped and perilously close to being rumbled as out of his depth on a production that went over its allocated budget, well behind its planned schedule and suffered a mishap after mishap along the way.
At the time, alarm bells were ringing around studio headquarters as Jaws struggled with what should have been a relatively straightforward conceit. It’s a B-tier thriller about a man-eating shark, and a ragtag bunch of characters set out to kill said shark, save the day, and safeguard the future of the local population.
Of course, it was anything but, with the shoot so fractious that Spielberg couldn’t have been more thrilled when he finally called it a wrap and got the hell out of there. “I just couldn’t wait to get off the picture,” he admitted, per Vanity Fair.
Adding: “I just couldn’t wait to get back to Los Angeles, get on that airplane in Boston in Logan Airport and fly as quickly as a plane could take me back home.”
It’s easy to look back in hindsight and say Spielberg was always destined for the very top when Jaws revolutionised the way blockbusters were marketed and released, became the highest-grossing film there’d ever been at that point in time, and transformed the relatively untested director into a high-flying superstar who had their pick of the projects from that moment forward.
While all of that was entirely true, there’s an alternate timeline where Jaws went off without a hitch, and it could have altered Spielberg’s trajectory completely. It wasn’t until 1941 that he realised he was starting to get a little too big for his boots, with his ability to ride the waves caused by his nightmarish breakthrough feature instilling him with a confidence that soon crept dangerously towards arrogant territory.
However, it was the horrendous experience of Jaws that made him into the filmmaker he’s been ever since, with misery being the making of Hollywood’s most successful director ever.
