The movie Steven Spielberg was “goaded” into directing
An utterly titanic figure in the world of filmmaking, Steven Spielberg‘s brilliance has illuminated the global cinema screen since his emergence in the 1970s. The list of Spielberg’s achievements as a director is seemingly endless, and he’s delivered some of the best-loved films ever made.
Having brought the world Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, to name but a few, it’s fair to say that Spielberg’s name has become forever tied to the medium of cinema itself, and his legacy is one that will continue to shine brightly long after the final credits have rolled.
With so many excellent movies to his name and undoubtedly so many more that he never took on, it’s always interesting to consider how Spielberg came to his projects, and there’s a fascinating insight into his 2005 science fiction action thriller War of the Worlds, based on H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel of the same name and starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbins.
“We’ve talked about this for a couple of years when we were looking for another project to do together,” Spielberg once told Female. “I told Tom that I wanted to do this book since I read it in college before I was even a filmmaker. I wanted to do some version of it at some point.”
However, merely having a passion for Wells’s original novel was not the only reason that Spielberg took on its adaptation and in the same interview, he explained that the public and critical perception of him led to him to try and prove what many people thought was wrong.
“Maybe it was just the idea that everybody over the years said here was the guy who can’t make a scary alien movie that goaded me into thinking, why can’t I try my hand at the kind of film that Ridley Scott made when he made the first Alien, which is one of my favorite scary science fiction movies,” Spielberg added. “It’s just something that I always wanted to do.”
From there, Spielberg was on board with a genuine passion project, but even so, that did not necessarily mean that the production was all smooth sailing. The director explained that the scene with thousands of people running left him fearful that someone would be badly or even fatally injured.
“That was the most difficult for me,” he admitted. “I was on edge for four days because of the vast amounts of crowds at night running on very narrow streets. So for me, that was the most anxious time during filming, and I couldn’t wait for those scenes to be over.”
The film ended up being a resounding commercial success and was praised by critics for its treatment of Wells’s novel and the modernisation of the action sequences. However, even Spielberg admitted that the end of War of the Worlds did not live up to his own expectations. “I never could figure out how to end that darn thing,” he once noted.
Check out the trailer for War of the Worlds below.
