The Steven Spielberg movie Steven Spielberg hates the most: “There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling”
Although he’s always been known as a fairly modest chap, Steven Spielberg will be more aware than most that as the single most successful director in cinema history, he’s under more pressure than almost anybody who’s ever stepped behind the camera when it’s time to deliver his next picture.
His track record speaks for itself after Spielberg made a constant habit of pushing the summer blockbuster to new heights. Jaws changed the face of the industry forever and revolutionised the way films were marketed and sold to the masses from that point on, and that was only the beginning.
Spielberg’s seminal shark attack thriller became the highest-grossing hit of all time, an accolade very few filmmakers have ever attained. And yet, all it did was lay down a marker, and the wunderkind continued blazing a trail in the years and decades that followed.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind? It was the second top-earning release of 1977 behind Star Wars. Raiders of the Lost Ark? The highest-grossing movie of 1981. ET the Extra-Terrestrial? The highest-grossing film ever, and a ‘Best Picture’ nominee. Jurassic Park? The highest-grossing film ever, yet again. Schindler’s List? ‘Best Picture’ winner. Saving Private Ryan? It was the biggest World War II movie in box office history at the time.
Needless to say, Spielberg has been responsible for countless classics and multiple masterpieces, but even he misses the mark every now and again. No director boasts a 100% success rate, although there are plenty of people out there who’d disagree with the director’s choice for the weakest entry in his back catalogue.
“I wasn’t happy with Temple of Doom at all,” he admitted of the first Indiana Jones sequel. “It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist. There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom. The danger in making a sequel is that you can never satisfy everyone.”
He planned to make a follow-up that was markedly different from its predecessor but still set in the same world, which is exactly what he did. Clearly not to his own satisfaction, though, after resigning himself to the fact that by trying so hard to hit the middle ground between doing something new with a familiar face and appealing to the section of the audience who wanted Raiders of the Lost Ark in different clothing, “You lose both ways.”
An almost identical crisis of confidence came when Spielberg sought to recapture Jurassic Park’s lightning in a bottle a second time with The Lost World, which might explain why it remains the one and only non-Indy sequel he’s ever made.
Temple of Doom may not manage to reach the heights of Raiders, but it’s nowhere near as abject as Spielberg believed it to be. Besides, thanks to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he did a stellar job of ensuring that barely anyone would consider it the worst in the franchise.
