The one thing about Hollywood that’s always terrified Steven Spielberg
In many ways, Steven Spielberg is the very definition of Hollywood. Nobody captures the magic of the movies quite like the man from Amblin. As well as tapping into our childlike love of the silver screen, he’s also been able to bring tears to our eyes with some of the most heart-wrenching tales ever committed to film. Few people have been able to play the game as well as he has, leveraging studios to get them to make the films he wants in the way he wants them made.
The movie business can be a daunting place, even for the highest-grossing director of all time. Hollywood is full of people out to serve only themselves, willing to step over anyone who gets in their way and crush the dreams of a young, aspiring creative. That’s not the thing that keeps Spielberg up at night, though. In true, wholesome fashion, the thing that frightens him the most is disappointing his fans.
“The thing that I’m just scared to death of is that someday I’m gonna wake up and bore somebody with a film,” he told Hi Barr. “That’s kept me making movies that have tried to out-spectacle each other. I got into the situation where my movies were real big, and I had a special effects department and I was the boss of that and that was a lot of fun. Then I’d get a kick out of the production meetings – not with three or four people, but with fifty, sometimes nearer to 100 when we got close to production – because I was able to lead troops into Movie Wars”.
He added: “The power became a narcotic, but it wasn’t power for power’s sake. I really am attracted to stories that you can’t see on television and stories that you can’t get every day. So that attraction leads me to the Impossible Dream, and that Impossible Dream usually costs around $20 million.”
Spielberg gave this interview in 1984, a time when $20 million was a lot of money in movie terms. That was the budget of his offering that year, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. His first proper theatrical release, 1974’s The Sugarland Express, had cost just $3m. Even Jaws, the movie that made him a household name and coined the term ‘blockbuster’, had a budget of just $9m. No wonder Spielberg was worried about costs spiralling out of control.
Jaws is actually the perfect example of why Spielberg’s fears will never come to pass. The production was famously troubled, with shooting on open water proving far more difficult than expected. Mechanical failures plagued the shark, derailing plans for it to appear more prominently on screen. But rather than letting this setback sink the film, Spielberg adapted, keeping Bruce hidden beneath the waves for most of the runtime. Ironically, this only heightened the tension, proving that necessity—and creative problem-solving—can lead to cinematic brilliance.
Basically, Spielberg is way too smart and way too invested in delivering a good end product to ever be boring. Even his least popular films are never dull; they just don’t work in the way a good Spielberg movie should.
Over four decades on from that interview, Spielberg’s fears about overcomplicating a picture ring truer than ever. Take the latest Indiana Jones flick, for example. The Dial of Destiny was reportedly one of the most expensive films ever made, but it was an absolute pile of garbage.
