Steven Spielberg reveals his favourite modern filmmaker: “That’s the hope for the future”
Looking at everything he’s accomplished during one of the most successful careers in cinema history, there’s never going to be another Steven Spielberg, and the man himself doesn’t want there to be.
He’s a three-time Academy Award winner, the single highest-grossing director of all time, the man who revolutionised the industry when Jaws laid down the template for the summer blockbuster that Hollywood still follows today, and he’s the only filmmaker to helm the top-earning film ever released on three separate occasions.
That’s only a fraction of his accomplishments, with Spielberg dedicating his life to altering the landscape of the industry without sacrificing his signature artistry. Whether he’s making actioners, fantasies, sci-fi spectaculars, political thrillers, dramas, musicals, or biopics, every single one of them is distinctly Spielbergian.
However, he’d be the first to admit he drew his influences from those who came before. If science were to take John Ford’s sense of grandeur, David Lean’s taste for the epic, Akira Kurosawa’s eye for shot composition, Frank Capra’s sentimentality, and John Frankenheimer’s robust editing practices, then the concoction that emerged on the other side would look an awful lot like Spielberg’s style.
He’s long since become that monolithic figure the generations who follow in his wake seek to emulate, but he’d much rather they carve out their own niche. In fact, he actively shot down the notion of anyone being the second coming of Spielberg before singling out the modern auteur he admires the most.
“I never look at it that way,” he told Time when quizzed on the next Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. “I really look at it as, ‘Who is daring to buck the convention and really tell stories in a language they founded?’ I mean, those are the kinds of movies that really excite me. One of my favourite filmmakers today is Jordan Peele.”
The writer and director behind Get Out, Us, and Nope quickly mastered the art of crafting crowd-pleasing genre films that occupy familiar parameters but are injected with an unmistakable sense of individualism that balances wide-ranging appeal with resonant thematic and socially conscious undercurrents. He’s a massive Spielberg fan, too, and the appreciation is mutual.
“He has found a way to take a popular concept right from the culture and give it the Jordan Peele spin,” Spielberg continued. “Kind of like the peel off the rind, and you find a really original thought inside every single one of his films. I think other filmmakers like Jordan; that’s the hope for the future.”
Nope was Peele’s most overt nod to Spielberg yet, with the movie carrying shades of the classic Amblin era, but it remained the work of a single-minded auteur who knew exactly what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. Pressure doesn’t come much greater than being named a favourite of one of the best ever, but Peele has shown enough to indicate he can live up to the billing.
