Path to greatness: the movies that drove a teenage Steven Spielberg to fame
The old adage states that ‘if you’re good enough, then you’re old enough’, something that applied to Steven Spielberg and his determination to become a director. He was only a youngster when he first broke through, but he was already well-versed in shooting his own films long before his official debut.
His first official production was 1968’s 26-minute short Amblin’, which premiered on his 22nd birthday, while his first feature-length undertaking came three years later in Duel. He was only 28 years old when Jaws was released in the summer of 1975 to become the highest-grossing release cinema had ever seen, not to mention a trailblazing production that completely altered the complexion of the entire industry.
Accomplishing all that before even turning 30 doesn’t come as a surprise, considering Spielberg has since gone on to become renowned as not just one of the greatest directors of all time but the single most successful in terms of ticket sales, box office takings, and earning powers. Still, even a decade before Amblin’, he knew exactly what he wanted his career path to be.
He made his first home movie at the age of just 12, and the following year, he mounted a full-blown amateur feature that ran for 40 minutes, with Escape to Nowhere serving as a pivotal formative experience. He may have only been 14 when he called action on the war story, but he knew how to corral a cast and crew into shape after roping in dozens of his friends and classmates to occupy positions on either side of the camera.
Spielberg even got his parents to perform the driving sequences because nobody else was old enough to take the wheel, while his mother ended up playing a German soldier, too. It wasn’t without its issues, though, seeing as the state police were called when passers-by caught a glimpse of a huge group of teenagers parading around the desert in Nazi uniforms, which would have been quite a tricky thing for the prodigious Spielberg to explain.
Nonetheless, he’d been well and truly bitten by the filmmaking bug, with Escape to Nowhere leading into Firelight, which marked his first dalliance with a genre he’s soon become intrinsically associated with. The story finds a band of scientists investigating mysterious lights in the sky and a string of abductions, placing him into the realms of sci-fi that he’d soon master through Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Firelight was a larger-scale production thanks entirely to Escape to Nowhere, which won an amateur filmmaking competition that saw Spielberg rewarded with a brand new 16mm camera, which he traded for an 8mm so he could afford more film to match his ambitious plans for his follow-up. Firelight played at his local cinema when he was 17, and admittedly only made a profit of one dollar. Still, it instilled in the teenager the confidence and belief that he knew he had what it took to succeed in Hollywood.
Interestingly, the war and sci-fi genres have yielded several of Spielberg’s very finest works, something that wouldn’t have been lost on him after Escape to Nowhere and Firelight first set him on the path to greatness, outlining that the kid with big dreams had all the potential in the world to conquer cinema.
