Missteps from a master: Steven Spielberg’s five biggest movie regrets
Being the single most commercially successful director in the history of cinema would illustrate paying customers are inclined to believe that Steven Spielberg rarely puts a foot wrong, but by his own admission there have been several missteps along the way.
Obviously, the iconic filmmaker loves cinema too much to disown or distance himself from any of his features, but he has been open in pointing out mistakes and regrets that he’s been left with. All of them came about under very different circumstances but proved impactful enough that he felt compelled to try and absolve his self-perceived sins.
His breakthrough feature reinvented the entire concept of how to market and sell movies to the masses when the media blitz that accompanied Jaws saw it become the highest-grossing release ever in the summer of 1975, but it wasn’t an entirely positive experience for the directorial wunderkind.
Spielberg’s regrets didn’t even have anything to do with the notoriously troubled production, either, but the effect it had when people did finally decide to go back in the water. The three-time Academy Award winner admitted that “I truly, and to this day, regret the decimation of the shark population” that happened as a result of Jaws, where eager trophy hunters went out in their droves to bag a great white of their own.
Wartime comedy 1941 was the first major misstep of Spielberg’s career in terms of its critical and commercial response, leading him to feel as if “it was like I had committed a war crime” that even managed to anger John Wayne. He wasn’t embarrassed by the film itself, although he retrospectively believes that his over-confidence got the best of him after everything he’d been touching had a habit of turning to gold.
Helming the top-earning film of all time for the second occasion wasn’t all sunshine and roses for Spielberg, who said “I really regret having that out there” long after the decision was made to remove the firearms present in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in post-production and have them replaced by walkie-talkies, with the director copping to what he called “a mistake” that shouldn’t have been made.
Even when he segued into prestige drama for the first time, he held his hands up and confessed that “perhaps I was the wrong director to acquit some of the more sexually honest encounters” in The Color Purple, with Spielberg facing criticism for paring down the love story between characters Shug and Celie in part because he was “shy,” but also to attain a PG-13 rating from censorship boards.
It might be a beloved favourite, but for Spielberg, he’s not a fan of fantasy adventure Hook. A lack of confidence in the screenplay led to professional insecurities setting in the longer the production rumbled on, leading the director to offer the frank opinion of “I so don’t like that movie.” A lot of people do, but the person who made it isn’t one of them.
In the grand scheme of his back catalogue, they’re little more than minor quibbles, but it just goes to show that not even talents of Spielberg’s calibre are immune from self-criticism – and occasionally self-loathing – once the dust settles.
