“I learned the greatest lesson of my career”: how Steven Spielberg turned disappointment into greatness
Hubris can be a dangerous thing, even for the most talented and experienced filmmakers. However, Steven Spielberg was at least fortunate to realise fairly early in his directorial career that there was only so long he could fly by the seat of his pants until the wheels started coming off.
As the director of Jaws, the highest-grossing release in history at the time and a genuine trailblazer who changed the face of cinema forever, the wunderkind had every right to be supremely confident in his own abilities. That was especially the case when he followed it up with Close Encounters of the Third Kind immediately after.
That gave him two consecutive smash hits that earned in excess of $800million combined at the box office, with Jaws securing an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Picture’, while Close Encounters gave him his first nod in the ‘Best Director’ category. From the outside looking in, it felt as though Spielberg could do no wrong.
Unfortunately, his next production saw him fly a little too close to the sun, with wartime comedy 1941 failing to reach the heights expected of Hollywood’s premiere behind-the-camera upstart. It wasn’t an unmitigated disaster, but it was a huge disappointment given how audiences had been conditioned to expect nothing but the best from Spielberg. Part of the reason why the film creaked under the weight of its own ambition was his self-assuredness.
Of course, nobody is going to make it in the industry if they don’t believe in themselves. However, Spielberg was buying too much into his own hype when cameras began rolling on his movie 1941, only for the director to discover that he was nowhere near as bulletproof as he believed himself to be.
Wanting to try his hand at comedy was fair enough as a broadening of the horizons, but as Spielberg conceded to the Directors Guild of America, “I felt like I was made of Teflon. I felt that anything I put on film was going to succeed.” That proved to be his undoing, with 1941 excessive to the point of self-indulgence, something that wouldn’t have happened were he not swept up in his own increasing mythology.
That’s something he was happy to admit in the aftermath, though, noting how “I just became so precious and indulgent about getting everything right,” which saw the movie go over-schedule and over-budget to a level even greater than the notoriously troubled Jaws production. His name alone wasn’t enough to guarantee success or acclaim, but that was swiftly rectified once Spielberg held his hands up and recognised the problem.
He “sobered up when it was over” and described the experience as being the place where he “learned the greatest lesson of my career,” having been “humbled” by his inability to coalesce his vision into a satisfying whole that stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the films that turned him into a directorial superstar. Just like that, it was time to knuckle down upon the realisation that not everything he touched was destined to turn to gold without a lot of hard work and elbow grease.
For evidence that 1941 inadvertently worked wonders for Spielberg for its failings, look no further than his list of credits throughout the rest of the decade. He followed it up with Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Temple of Doom, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, and The Last Crusade.
