Steven Spielberg names “the most paranoid movie” he’s ever seen
Throughout his career as one of the most acclaimed movie directors of all time, Steven Spielberg has explored a number of themes, but one of the most frequent is the nature of paranoia. In several of his motion pictures, the Ohio-born filmmaker has dived headfirst into the most anxiety-inducing human experience.
Looking back at his filmography, we can see a number of widespread examinations of paranoia. For instance, Jaws detailed the fear of what lurks beyond our vision under the ocean waves, while Schindler’s List focuses on the kind of paranoia that arose between Polish and German citizens during the Second World War.
Elsewhere, particularly in his science fiction movies, Spielberg again looked at paranoia. In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, he posed questions about AI that we are still considering today, while Minority Report thought about the ethics of criminality and Close Encounters of the Third Kind posited ideas about the existence of alien lifeforms.
Simply, paranoia has always been important to Spielberg and his confrontation of the phenomenon has invariably led to some of his greatest movies. In fact, Spielberg once spoke of the “most paranoid” movie that he has ever seen, Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 political thriller The Parallax View.
Starring Warren Beatty, Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss, based on Loren Singer’s 1970 novel of the same name, the film focuses on a journalist’s investigation into a secretive organisation called The Parallax Corporation, who deal in the lucrative yet shady business of political assassination.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Spielberg had thought of Pakula’s film as being so anxiety-inducing and suspicious. Speaking with Sight and Sound, Spielberg had once noted, “The Parallax View was the most paranoid movie I’ve ever seen, next to Mickey One. This movie’s more like The French Connection, as brutally realistic within a dramatic story-telling structure.”
The other movie that Spielberg mentioned is Mickey One, directed by Arthur Penn and once again starring Warren Beatty, plus Alexandra Stewart and Hurd Hatfield. The 1965 neo-noir crime film tells of a stand-up comic who begins to worry that the mob are closing in on him for a hit after he amasses big gambling debts and tries to take on a false identity.
Of course, there is also mention of William Friedkin’s 1971 action thriller The French Connection, in which Gene Hackman plays a NYPD detective in the hunt of a French heroin smuggler. At the time, Spielberg was speaking about Close Encounter of the Third Kind, which deals with its very own kind of paranoid leanings, and he found crossovers with his favourite paranoid movies.
“I think our film does to UFOs what The French Connection said about crime in the streets and narcotics and New York City,” the director said. “It’s more of a movie than it is a film, really. It’s quite entertaining, and it’s about people and not about events, but it’s about people who are innocent until they are ensnared by the event and then have to rise above it.”
Still, the likes of The French Connection, Mickey One and certainly The Parallax View all seemed to inspire Spielberg to deliver his own brand of paranoia in his 1977 science fiction drama film, with him looking into the starry skies to wonder and even fear as to what might be lurking out there.
