The one movie Steven Spielberg doesn’t like to watch
American director Steven Spielberg joined the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick as an eminent name of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ era over the latter 20th century. The 76-year-old director has worked his socks off over the past five decades to bring us beloved classics like Jaws, E.T., Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Jurassic Park. These movies are just the very tip of an iceberg oeuvre that places Spielberg in a position of unrivalled cinematic divinity.
Spielberg knew he wanted to create movies from a very young age. Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, he began making simple films, and in 1958 he made a short western which won him a Boy Scout merit badge. The scout troop screening was met with laughter and applause and had Spielberg instantly hooked.
Six decades on, the American director has earned three Academy Awards, from eight nominations in total for ‘Best Director’ Oscars. The Fabelmans, his latest film released last November, was a semi-fictional account of his childhood story and subsequent rise to prominence.
While shooting the movie, Spielberg had his childhood home reconstructed. “When I first saw my house being rebuilt, my childhood home being rebuilt on a sound stage, my first thought was, ‘Is this going to be the most self-indulgent thing I’ve ever asked people to accompany me through? Is this $40 million of therapy?'” Spielberg told Lauren Laverne during his recent Desert Island Discs appearance on BBC Radio 4.
“I didn’t know really what I was doing, except I was answering a need,” he added. “I had been recently orphaned by the loss of both parents [and I wanted] to recapture some of those memories in some way that wouldn’t seem too indulgent to actors I really respected, like Michelle Williams and Paul Dano and Judd Hirsch. So it was a tightrope for a while.”
The Fabelmans appeared to take stock of Spielberg’s success to date. Although it doesn’t appear to mark his final cinematic entry, he was moved by the Covid-19 pandemic to embark on the project.
During a January 2023 interview with The Daily Star, Spielberg explained that he created The Fabelmans in response to his apocalyptic concerns. “I was terrified [Covid-19] was an end-of-days, and epic-level event, I mean an extinction-level event, that was happening to the world,” Spielberg said. “If I got the chance to make one more movie, it was going to be this story.”
The movie was well calculated and achieved widespread acclaim as ever, earning seven Academy Award nominations and five from the Golden Globes. Though it didn’t scoop any Oscars, Spielberg picked up the ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama’ trophies at the Golden Globes.
As Spielberg returned to his childhood, it reminded us of the scope covered across his expansive catalogue. His work could have us fearing sharks, dinosaurs, religious persecution and war, but he also implored child-like wonder in movies like E.T., The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG.
If Spielberg were to look back on his career from an apocalyptic mindset, his Oscar-winning movies like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan would probably sit among his most cherished projects. However, on the flip side, he does have several regrets. His 1991 children’s movie Hook is undoubtedly one of them.
The movie starred Robin Williams as a reimagination of Peter Pan, in which the titular hero has grown old in the real world with a regular job and family. In the updated story, Peter Pan revisits Neverland to defeat the evil Captain Hook, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman. Despite just about turning a profit, Hook was broadly panned by critics. During an interview with the Kermode & Mayo Film Review programme in 2012, when he was promoting Lincoln, Spielberg described Hook as one of his worst moments as a filmmaker.
“I want to see Hook again,” he said, revealing that he finds the movie hard to watch. “I still don’t like that movie. I’m hoping someday I’ll see it again and perhaps like some of it.”
In 2018, Spielberg brought the movie up again when Empire asked him whether he’d ever felt that he wasn’t able to fully immerse himself in a project while shooting. “I’ve made a few films like that,” he said. “I felt like a fish out of water making Hook. I didn’t have confidence in the script. I had confidence in the first act, and I had confidence in the epilogue. I didn’t have confidence in the body of it. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, and I tried to paint over my insecurity with production value, the more insecure I felt about it, the bigger and more colourful the sets became.”
Watch the trailer for Hook below.
