The one genre Steven Spielberg is desperate to try: “It’s eluded me all these decades”
While Jaws wasn’t Steven Spielberg’s first film, it was the one that put him on the map and changed Hollywood forever. The terrifying shark story saw people flock to the cinema during the summer of 1975, sheltering from the sun and the potential threat of being eaten alive at the beach, resulting in one of the first proper blockbuster phenomena.
From here, Hollywood’s trajectory shifted, with the subsequent release of movies like George Lucas’ Star Wars and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind continuing the trend of massive movies with wide appeal. The latter was another hit for Spielberg, although his next film, 1941, failed to reach the same heights. That didn’t matter too much, however, because the filmmaker soon released a string of incredibly successful movies that would cement him as one of Hollywood’s most reliable figures.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, the action-adventure vehicle starring Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, earned Spielberg praise, while the charming sci-fi movie, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, captured the hearts of adults and children alike. The filmmaker proved that he worked best when he was making commercially accessible movies with a sentimental or nostalgic edge, leading to further successes over the coming years that spanned genres, from the historical drama The Colour Purple to the dinosaur thriller Jurassic Park.
In fact, it often seems as though Spielberg is not bound by genre at all, even working on strikingly different projects at the same time. The same year he was making Jurassic Park, he was also helming Schindler’s List, the moving World War II drama that’s a far cry from killer dinosaurs. The filmmaker has explored everything from adventure fantasy films to sci-fi, horror, war, and animation, but there’s one genre he’s yet to try that he has never felt well-equipped enough to throw himself into.
Still, he is hopeful that one day he will get round to it, because it seems as though Spielberg plans to keep making films for as long as he is physically able to. Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, he revealed that he has “an appetite for a western, which I will someday hopefully do. It’s something that’s eluded me for all of these decades.”
It’s interesting that Spielberg has never tackled the western genre before, especially considering that he has consistently made epic blockbusters, which is something he could easily transplant his own approach to the western into. The filmmaker is a huge fan of the genre, however, and he even dramatised a pivotal moment in his young life in which he met western legend John Ford for his film The Fabelmans.
He cites the director’s 1956 movie The Searchers as his favourite. He watched it when he was nine years old, sneaking into a movie theatre and subsequently having his mind blown by the scale of the epic John Wayne western. You can see the influence of these expansive and rather patriotic westerns in Spielberg’s work, and maybe one day we’ll see the director’s interpretation of the quintessentially American genre.
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