The only movies Steven Spielberg was allowed to watch as a child: “I never saw anything”
Since he grew up to become one of cinema’s most imaginative storytellers, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Steven Spielberg was raised in a similar fashion to his friend and contemporary, Martin Scorsese, by absorbing and devouring as many classic movies as possible from a very young age.
He didn’t have a particularly troubled childhood by any means, because you can’t be raised in too much of a broken home if you subsequently mythologise it 70 years later and turn it into a nostalgia-fuelled motion picture called The Fabelmans, but his viewing diet was nonetheless restricted.
The three-time Academy Award winner has always named David Lean, John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, and John Frankenheimer as his four most important filmic influences, but he had to wait until he was given parental approval before he could even see Lawrence of Arabia and The Searchers, his two favourite films ever, for the first time.
As far as Arnold and Leah Spielberg were concerned, their boy wasn’t to be exposed to anything that could potentially warp his fragile little mind. If he wanted to immerse himself in cinema, he’d either need to bide his time until his folks gave him the go-ahead, or surreptitiously try and catch a masterpiece or two when they weren’t around.
In the household, the youngster was told in no uncertain terms that there were certain TV shows he wasn’t allowed to watch under any circumstances, and even when it came to visiting the local theatre, there was only one kind of feature his parents would allow him to see, whether they accompanied him or not.
“I often think that depravity is the inspiration for an entire career,” he mused to David Breskin. “I feel that perhaps one of the reasons I’m making movies all the time is because I was told not to. I was ordered not to watch television. My intake was limited solely to Disney films. I never saw anything with any violence in it.”
Most kids spend a lot of time watching Disney’s back catalogue of animated classics, so there was nothing out of the ordinary there. Bambi should probably be held back until the nippers are a little older, though, seeing as several renowned auteurs and stars have gone on record as saying the infamous scene where the title character’s mother meets her end had traumatised them for life.
As you can probably guess, Spielberg was no different, even if it was another 2D masterpiece that turned him into a crying wreck. “When I came screaming home from Snow White when I was eight years old, and tried to hide under the covers, my parents did not understand it,” he admitted. “Because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare, but to delight and enthral.”
They had the opposite effect on the future filmmaker, who said they made him “a basket case of neurosis.” His parents “tried very, very hard to screen violence from my life” in all forms, but they didn’t account for little Steven being left terrified by Disney’s family-friendly fare, the only thing they’d let him watch.
