The “extraordinary” movie Steven Spielberg needs everyone to see: “You should all treat yourselves”
When you’re the one and only director in cinema history to have seen your filmography amass upwards of $10 billion at the global box office, working on smaller-scale, experimental features becomes a thing of the past, and it’s been a long time since Steven Spielberg has made anything fiscally intimate.
Yes, it’s accurate to call The Fabelmans as intimate as it gets for the director, since he produced, scripted, and helmed a passion project that doubles as his most personal and emotional effort to date. However, because he’s Steven Spielberg, it still cost $40 million to make, which is hardly chump change.
In fact, it was the cheapest picture he’d made since Amistad, which cost $39 million back in 1997, and there’s little chance he’ll ever return to the micro-budget arena again. The three-time Academy Award winner is arguably blockbuster cinema’s definitive director, but he still keeps his ear to the ground.
Mainstream, studio-backed escapism designed to put the largest number of butts in the highest amount of seats was what gave him such a legendary career, but as a staunch defender of both the medium and the theatrical experience, Spielberg hasn’t completely abandoned his interest in more experimental fare.
It doesn’t get much more experimental than a Russian film that made history as the first feature to be shot entirely in a single, unbroken take, with Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark matching its innovation with ambition by following an unnamed narrator who traverses 300 years of history while wandering through Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace.
Spielberg isn’t associated with a deep love and encyclopaedic knowledge of international cinema to the same extent as the likes of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, but Russian Ark‘s 96 minutes were more than enough to convince him that it was something as many people as possible needed to see.
“Russian Ark is one of my favourite films,” he said. “It’s a 95-minute movie all done in one shot. It was done in a museum in Saint Petersburg. I don’t know if you’ve all seen Russian Ark, but you should all treat yourselves to it. It’s one shot. He only did three takes; the first two stopped after 20 minutes because there were mistakes, but the last take went right through to the end.”
The iconic director called it an “extraordinary experience” to sit through as an audience member, even if it’s not something he thought he could handle. “I would not want to make a movie in one shot,” he admitted, even he probably could if he really wanted to, since he’s one of the all-time greats.
Russian Ark was an impressive cinematic achievement, and praise doesn’t come much higher in industry circles than having Spielberg instruct a captive audience that every single one of them should do themselves a favour and find out why he’d endorsed it so enthusiastically.
