The Oscar-winning classic Steven Spielberg’s team wouldn’t let him direct: “I wish I could have made that”
Even though his filmography is hardly lacking in Academy Award-winning classics, Steven Spielberg could have added another to his collection if the people running the production company that he founded had even bothered to ask him first.
Under normal circumstances, he shouldn’t have been losing too much sleep about it. After all, the number of movies that he’s directed that have won at least one Oscar in any category makes for impressive reading and stacks up against any other filmmaker in the business, past or present.
Jaws and Jurassic Park won three, Close Encounters of the Third Kind nabbed one, Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET the Extra-Terrestrial claimed four, Schindler’s List was awarded seven, and Saving Private Ryan seized five, and those are only the Oscar-winning pictures that are regarded among his definitive films.
Still, the one that got away stung that little bit more because it wasn’t just an awards season favourite; it became only the third movie in history to claim the ‘Big Five’ by winning ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. In an alternate timeline somewhere, there’s a world where Steven Spielberg helmed The Silence of the Lambs.
Could he have pulled it off, though? That’s the big question, and one worth thinking about. As one of cinema’s greatest-ever directors, it stands to reason that he could, simply because he’s that good. On the other hand, an R-rated psychological horror that’s drenched in darkness and despair is about as anti-Spielbergian as it gets, and nobody wants a watered-down Hannibal Lecter.
With eyes on making a quick escape from development hell, Orion Pictures had teamed up with Gene Hackman to acquire the rights to Thomas Harris’ novel before it was published, with the legendary actor eying both the director’s chair and one of the leading roles as either Lecter of Jack Crawford.
When his family told him that he shouldn’t make such a violent movie, the two-time Oscar winner bailed, sending the project back to square one. At that point, it was offered to Amblin Entertainment, who quickly turned it down because the staff couldn’t imagine their exalted leader making that kind of picture.
“After I saw The Silence of the Lambs, I thought, ‘I wish I could have made that,'” Spielberg confessed to the Los Angeles Times. “The material had actually come to us, but my company passed on it because they felt it wasn’t in character. We’ve spent so many years in a cinematic mindset here, even my staff tends to pigeonhole me.”
The employees who worked for Spielberg gave The Silence of the Lambs the old heave-ho because they didn’t think it was something he’d be interested in, a conclusion they’d reached by working for a company that almost exclusively churned out high-concept, audience-friendly blockbusters designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, so it’s easy to see why they passed. Instead, his big 1991 release was Hook, a movie he doesn’t even like.
