When Steven Spielberg accidentally ripped off his three favourite directors: “I didn’t consciously do that”
Steven Spielberg is perhaps the most successful filmmaker in Hollywood history, but he felt like he accidentally utilised the style of his three favourite directors when making War Horse.
The rare Hollywood directors who have the chance to make a few successful movies would be so lucky if only one of their credits is remembered as having stood the test of time; however, in the case of Spielberg, it’s hard to find any films that he’s made that aren’t classics.
There’s an argument to be made that he has made at least two of the greatest films of any given decade for 60 years, beginning with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the 1970s, Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET the Extra-Terrestrial in the 1980s, to West Side Story and The Fabelmans in the 2020s, and that’s the kind of money making run that makes you invincible in the industry.
While Spielberg’s work has inspired innumerable young directors to get behind the camera, his own influences have seen him express admiration for many of his peers, mostly being in awe of John Ford, whom he referred to as “the perfect filmmaker”.
Ford was a lifelong film buff who racked up over a hundred credits by the time his career wrapped, and although some of his earlier silent films have been lost to time, Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man are considered to be among the greatest ever made. Given how frequently his epics soaked up the natural beauty of the land he found himself in, it seemed natural that Spielberg, a similar lover of the medium, would look to him for inspiration when making his own World War I saga based on a popular stage show. However, despite the glaring similarities, the director claimed to The Oklahoman that he “didn’t consciously create a tome to John Ford with War Horse”.
“I simply went to England, looked at the locations and became very emotionally involved in how important the land and the sky were going to be,” Spielberg said, adding, “It just seemed like I was going to use wider lenses, and rather than shoot everything in close-up, I was going to fall back and let the land help tell the story.”
It was only after he had gotten deep within shooting in France at the Somme that he realised Ford had used many of the same techniques when shooting in Monument Valley, where he created nearly all of his westerns. Perhaps great minds think alike, because Spielberg found himself applying a Ford-esque approach in personifying the natural environments in which he was shooting.
Even as he pioneered this style, Ford wasn’t the only filmmaker who was known for “celebrating the land that they were shooting their pictures on,” according to Spielberg, who also cited the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and the British director David Lean as artists who took advantage of “how spectacular these locations were”. Kurosawa’s love of his native country came across in his brilliant action films Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood, and Lean examined the beauty of great continents with his war epics Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai.
“Obviously, I become very involved in the look of the film,” he said, “We knew because it’s such an epic story that the land is a character, and nature is a character”. It would seem that the notion of revelling in the beauty of land does not belong to just one filmmaker, but is inherent to the epic genre, and Spielberg is all the better for picking up on it, consciously or not.
