The impossible Steven Spielberg movie “no filmmaker can wrap their head around”
As a young kid, Steven Spielberg never gave it much thought as to why he was particularly drawn to filmmaking. He just knew that he loved the control it gave him, and the way it made him, quite literally, see and feel life through a completely different lens.
“I think it was just a realisation that I could change the way I perceived life through another medium to make it come out better for me,” he once said. “I was making these little 8mm rinky-dink movies, and I knew that made me feel really good about my life, and possibly I could bring some other people into this amazing medium, to enjoy what I was putting together.”
Spielberg is and has always been a major film buff. This has been fundamental to his impact as one of the leading forces in Hollywood, the underbelly of what makes him so well-versed in all things emotion and action, knowing exactly which buttons to press and where to apply pressure to get the right reaction from the audience.
A forerunner when it comes to adventure, Spielberg also knows how to mix both ends of commercial and cultural appeal. Before starting any project, he’ll bring it all back to basics, back to the fundamentals of storytelling through the one film he sees as the ultimate blueprint: The Bridge on the River Kwai. Anything that needs a sprinkling of adventure will always begin with a re-watch of Bridge, reminding him of all the ways to effectively pull off “anything that has a lot of scope”.
This stretches into almost all of his adventure classics – Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, Jurassic Park, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and more all have that adventurous sweep of Spielberg flavouring, that expansive “scope” that pulls you into his worlds and his characters with effortless ease, before bringing you safely back to earth feeling like you’ve just lived through it all yourself.
To outsiders and many in the film world, it seems like Spielberg never really stops. But a downside to how prolific he made himself – and how immersed in film that his name became – is that many of his masterpieces became overlooked. Not in the sense that they’re underappreciated, because anything Spielberg sticks his name to will never go unnoticed. Overlooked in the sense that there’s so much of him everywhere that he starts to be taken for granted.
Director Steven Soderbergh once touched upon this in an interview with Deadline, using Spielberg’s sci-fi epic Ready Player One as an example of a gem that became overlooked because of the ubiquitous nature of his work. He praised Spielberg as someone who was destined to be a filmmaker, and everybody in the industry knew it, too. He also said he’s inherently “unpretentious” in the way he talks about his work and the world of film.
However, he then explained why Ready Player One astonished so many of his peers. “There are things that he’s done that if any other filmmaker had made them, these would be their career best,” Soderbergh mused. “But he’s done it so often that he gets taken for granted. I mean, there’s no filmmaker that I’m aware of that can wrap their head around what he did on Ready Player One.”
He went on: “You get any group of directors together, and they’re like, ‘I don’t even understand how that’s possible, what he did in that film’. And that’s just one of two films he made back-to-back [after 2017’s The Post]. Anybody else after any one of these things he’d done would be on bed rest for three years.”
