The only movie Steven Spielberg phoned in as a director: “Is that all there is?”
Steven Spielberg’s enthusiasm for cinema is pretty much unparalleled. Martin Scorsese might be able to talk a film historian under the table, and Quentin Tarantino might be able to out-know-it-all the most performative cult film aficionado, but no one can compete with how involved Spielberg is in the actual making of movies. He started burning through film when he was 12, invented the template for the summer blockbuster at 29, and has produced over 200 films and television shows since then.
He’s a business mogul, of course, but you get the sense that money doesn’t mean all that much to him, at least in terms of personal wealth. He’s a true believer in the gospel of Hollywood. He revered it as a child and has been instrumental in shaping it as an adult. He’s saved the industry on more than one occasion, breaking box office records and reminding audiences that nothing beats the big-screen experience.
Even a die-hard movie booster like Spielberg can have low moments, though. He admitted that a bad breakup was partly to blame for the extreme violence and darkness in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and had a difficult on-set relationship with Julia Roberts during the filming of Hook. Under normal circumstances, a director being a bit harsh on one of his stars wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but this is Steven Spielberg we’re talking about, a man who is known for being jovial no matter what.
Still, neither of those experiences matched the professional disappointment of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. In 1993, Spielberg made history with Jurassic Park when it beat his own ET to become the highest-grossing film of all time. Later that year, he became a critical darling and Oscar winner for Schindler’s List. He was on top of the world, and when he returned to the world of Jurassic Park for a sequel in 1997, he had every reason to be confident.
From the beginning, however, the production left much to be desired. Spielberg had a family commitment on the East Coast that prevented him from being on set for the first part of filming. The studio set up a fibre optic video link so that he could observe the production from across the country, but for a director who was so accustomed to being hands-on, it wasn’t particularly satisfying.
Beyond that, though, something seemed to have changed for the director. Maybe it was the experience of making a complex drama like Schindler’s List, but whatever it was, the whole experience felt a bit hollow. In an interview, he was surprisingly candid. “I beat myself up, growing more and more impatient with myself,” he said of his time on the production. “It made me wistful about doing a talking picture, because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie.”
By ‘talking picture’, he was presumably referring to a film in which the dialogue and acting are foregrounded rather than roaring dinosaurs. The Lost World involved a lot of cutting-edge special effects and very little character development. In fact, it was much less engrossing on a character level than the first film had been, so it’s no wonder the director felt a little empty while making it. “I found myself saying, ‘Is that all there is?’” he recalled. “‘It’s not enough for me.’”
Sadly, that intuition doesn’t seem to have been on duty when he signed on to executive produce the Jurassic World wing of the franchise, but it has led to a more varied filmography. It’s hard to imagine the man behind Jaws and Jurassic Park making Lincoln and The Fabelmans, and it’s a testament to Spielberg’s lifelong commitment to cinema that he evolved into them.
