How three words from his idol built the myth of Steven Spielberg: “You wanna be a picture-maker?”
Some directors are born, and others are made, with Steven Spielberg falling somewhere in the middle, which did nothing to stop him from becoming one of the all-time greats.
For as long as he can remember, Spielberg wanted to be a filmmaker. Of course, there’s a cavernous gap between having a dream and even trying to realise it, never mind doing it for real, and a formative encounter with his idol set the wide-eyed novice on the road to building his legend.
While Spielberg was profoundly influenced by several of cinema’s most iconic auteurs, with Akira Kurosawa, David Lean, and Stanley Kubrick right up there, nobody has cast a bigger shadow over his work than John Ford, who he called cinema’s only “perfect filmmaker,” as if to underline the point.
Throughout his career, it’s become a ritual for the three-time Academy Award winner to rewatch The Searchers before he embarks on his latest production, and while there’ll never be another Ford, Spielberg is the closest thing he has to an heir apparent, in terms of sweeping style and epic scope wrapped up in populist pictures.
Knowing how much he obsessed over the eye-patch-wearing tyrant’s filmography, he was always going to be a paramount inspiration regardless, but a face-to-face encounter between the 15-year-old Spielberg and a typically cantankerous Ford laid down a marker that he’d follow for the rest of his life.
“They tell me you wanna be a picture-maker?” Ford asked him. Testing the youngster, the legendary director asked Spielberg to look at a piece of art hanging on his wall, asking him again, “What do you see in the painting?” He obliged, talking about almost everything but the one thing Ford wanted to hear.
Cutting him off, the only person in history to win four Oscars for ‘Best Director’ asked another question, with those three words informing everything that Spielberg has done since: “Where’s the horizon?” Nobody shot a horizon quite like John Ford, but beyond that, he wanted Spielberg to understand the deeper meaning behind it.
“When you’re able to distinguish the art of the horizon at the bottom of a frame, or at the top of a frame, but not going right through the centre of the frame, when you’re able to appreciate why it’s at the top and why it’s at the bottom, you might make a pretty good picture-maker,” he said. “Now, get out of here.”
Off the young Spielberg fucked, but his creative worldview had been permanently altered. One of Spielberg’s signatures as a director is how he uses background as a key part of his visual storytelling. It doesn’t have to be a horizon, literally, but those words of wisdom from Ford became the backbone of how he frames, constructs, and composes his shots, with each frame having depth and meaning instead of being simply nice to look at.
