The movie that means everything to Steven Spielberg: “An icon of courage”
Steven Spielberg, one of the most formidable filmmakers of his generation, gets asked for his favourite movies quite a lot. If you’re the man behind such incredible pictures as Jaws, Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones series, Schindler’s List, and dozens of other magnificent movies, then chances are people will want to sit down and understand the major influences in your life.
Thankfully, Spielberg has always been keen to offer such insight. A true lover of movies, as demonstrated in his autobiographical flick The Fabelmans, Spielberg has always taken the time to mention the films that have shaped his own cinematic outlook. One director who was featured in The Fabelmans and who seems to come up a lot is the remarkable John Ford.
In an interview with the American Film Institute, Spielberg once explained: “I try to rent a John Ford film before I start every movie, simply because he inspires me. He’s like a classic painter, he celebrates the frame, not just what’s inside it”. It’s easy to see why. Ford’s work relies so heavily on framing the drama at hand that his movies feel like moving paintings, scrolling across our imaginations with potential. It’s something that helped to mould Spielberg into a movie director.
However, there is another director who can claim to perhaps having the most determined effect on Spielberg as a filmmaker, Orson Welles, and perhaps most notably, his movie Citizen Kane.
One of the most famous movies ever made, and a near-constant in any list of ‘greatest movies ever made’ worth its salt, Welles’ story of deciphering a dying man’s final words is simple on first glance, but it is both a lesson in storytelling and refusing to yield to your artistic will.
In a conversation with the AFI, Spielberg explained: “It means everything to me, Citizen Kane is, if not the icon, an icon of courage. I’m talking about the courage of the filmmaker. The audacity. It’s about courage and audacity.” It’s a bold statement, but one that certainly rings true. The picture is famous for being brutally knocked back by many studio executives as the first-time director, Welles, attempted to make a feature-length production with no apparent skills to achieve such a feat.
Roger Ebert would call it a “miracle of cinema that in 1941 a first-time director; a cynical, hard-drinking writer; an innovative cinematographer, and a group of New York stage and radio actors were given the keys to a studio and total control, and made a masterpiece.”
Welles himself believed this lack of skill or prior knowledge to be the real reason Citizen Kane would turn out to be such a triumph, explaining: “I didn’t know what you couldn’t do. I didn’t deliberately set out to invent anything. It just seemed to me, why not? And there is a great gift that ignorance has to bring to anything. That was the gift I brought to Kane, ignorance.”
Spielberg also recognised this, but mainly attributed the movie’s success to Welles’ complete determination. Imagining Welles’ thinking, Spielberg continued: “I’m making this my way. I’m going to deepen the focus, I don’t care how many layers those actors sweat off. We’re going to see from one inch to infinity in every shot. We’re gonna see ceilings. We’re gonna tell a very convoluted mystery story about a man’s life…”
The place Citizen Kane holds in Spielberg’s heart is clearly deeply connected to his own experience. He doesn’t see it simply as a remarkable story and movie but as a feat of resilience and a guide to making his own pictures. He also simply concedes: “It is just one of the greatest movies ever made. And I think many people are going to agree, this is one of the great American experiences in the cinema.”
