Will Steven Spielberg ever realise his dream of making a western?
Thanks to his status as one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg has spent decades being in the position of making any movie he wants. And yet, there remains one glaring omission from his filmography that he’s yet to rectify.
For the most part, anything Spielberg touches turns to gold, so there’s no straightforward explanation as to why he’s never gotten around to tackling a western. It’s a genre he’s loved since childhood, and he’s admitted on multiple occasions over a number of years that it’s on his to-do list, but the stars still haven’t aligned.
Spielberg is the single highest-grossing director in history and the only filmmaker to have helmed the highest-grossing film of all time on three occasions. He’s got three Academy Award wins from 24 nominations, and he made two of his most recent movies for the sole reason they were long-time itches that had gone unscratched.
The director had always wanted to make a musical but never had, and West Side Story had been a favourite since he was ten years old, so he remade it. When he did, he crafted an instant classic that’s already being spoken about as one of the greatest musicals ever made, one that notched seven Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
Having never truly dabbled in autobiographical filmmaking, he had to get that out of his system, too. The genesis for making The Fabelmans a reality came from Spielberg’s own insistence that he try something completely different. “I started seriously thinking, if I had to make one movie I haven’t made yet, something that I really want to do on a very personally atomic level, what would that be?” he asked himself. “And there was only one story I wanted to tell.”
Even before West Side Story, the western was the other elephant in a room that was about to get a lot less crowded. “I was asked that question over the last 40 years of my career – if not longer – and I always said a musical was the one thing I haven’t done,” he said to Yahoo. “The thing I neglected to say, which I’ve never done, and the one genre that I haven’t really tackled yet, is the western. So, who knows, maybe I’ll be putting on spurs someday.”
He’s named John Ford as one of his favourite directors and major inspirations, The Searchers and Stagecoach are among his most cherished movies, the Indiana Jones trilogy wore those influences on its sleeve in a number of thematic and aesthetic ways, his fondness for sweeping panoramas is tailor-made for the genre, and Spielberg has acknowledged that many of his features – including Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and War Horse to name a few – are indebted to the Western in one way or another.
The director has dabbled in chase thrillers, shark attack stories, war epics, sci-fi, period pieces, light-hearted comedy, crime capers, literary adaptations, and almost every offshoot of cinema under the sun, and yet there’s not a single western among his filmography. He hasn’t done it yet, he knows he hasn’t done it, and he even knows fine well that it’s the last unconquered frontier of his career, so what gives?
He’s Steven Spielberg, so realistically, all it should take is a phone call to a studio head telling them that he wants to make a western, and it’s off to the races. Then again, he was more than four decades into his filmmaking odyssey before he touched base with the musical, so perhaps he’s biding his time for the perfect screenplay to come to his attention.
The man is already approaching 80, and not to sound too morbid about it, but he’s significantly closer to the end of his career than he is the beginning. If it doesn’t come to pass, then Spielberg never mounting a western would be one of cinema’s greatest tragedies.
