Steven Spielberg names his most shameless movie: “I have no embarrassment in saying that”
Throughout the first 20 years of his career, Steven Spielberg racked up an array of hit movies that any filmmaker would be proud of: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, and the original Indiana Jones trilogy, to name but a few.
In terms of commercial success, he was almost unparalleled in Hollywood, although that created a perception of him as mainly a purveyor of mainstream entertainment. This is why, when Spielberg finished his Peter Pan misfire Hook in the early 1990s, he immediately wanted to jump into Schindler’s List – but then he struck a deal to make a movie he described as his most shameless effort.
In this era, Spielberg was determined to prove to the world – and his critics – that he wasn’t just a filmmaker who made adventure movies and slightly saccharine family films. This was why he was so keen on making the Holocaust drama Schindler’s List – but there was an obstacle in his way. Sid Sheinberg, the president of Universal Pictures who saved Spielberg’s bacon a few times on Jaws, was willing to give the green light to Schindler’s List, but on one condition. Universal had acquired the rights to Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel Jurassic Park in 1990, and Sheinberg wanted Spielberg to make that film before he dove into the incredible tale of Oskar Schindler.
At this time, Spielberg wasn’t exactly excited to get to work on Jurassic Park. He had a hankering to prove himself as a maker of films for adults, yes, but he also couldn’t help thinking of Jurassic Park as ‘Jaws on land’. He also chafed at the idea that he was being driven more by commerce than his artistic impulses, telling The New Yorker, “Maybe when I made Indy Two and Indy Three were the two times I could have been motivated by making money, by an easy slide into home plate.”
However, despite all these reasons not to make Jurassic Park, something kept playing on Spielberg’s mind. When the director was offered the chance to make Jaws 2 in the mid-1970s, he turned it down because his experience on the first film was so exhausting. “I was done with the ocean,” he told Ain’t It Cool News in 2011. “I would have done the sequel if I hadn’t had such a horrible time at sea on the first film.”
So, Spielberg walked away from the franchise he helped create in favour of doing other things. Sadly, though, he then watched as each Jaws sequel got worse than the previous one, which hurt him. He mused, “I was happy and relieved not to have made the movie, but also I wasn’t happy with the sequel.”
At his core, Spielberg couldn’t help feeling like he’d let the franchise fall into other hands when maybe he would have been better placed to make “a good contribution” to it.
Gradually, Spielberg began to think of Jurassic Park as his way of making up for walking away from Jaws. After all, this movie would be another creature feature with horror and adventure elements, which he excelled at. Would it be so bad to push Schindler’s List down the line and commit to making Jurassic Park? He could still prove to people that he was a serious filmmaker, but he could do it after he scratched an itch that had haunted him since Jaws 2.
“I have no embarrassment in saying that with Jurassic. I was really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws. On land,” Spielberg confessed to The New Yorker. “It’s shameless—I can tell you that now.”
Naturally, though, because Spielberg is one of the best to ever do it, the film he considered “shameless” ended up being the highest-grossing movie ever made upon its release. To this day, it’s still one of the most beloved blockbusters of all time.
