Steven Spielberg & the Next Crusade

He Can Make Any Film He Wants -- and He Wants His Choices to Surprise Us

"I find it much more interesting to try things on that people may not think I look good in," Spielberg says of new projects. (By Gerard Burkhart For The Washington Post)

LOS ANGELES -- Steven Spielberg, the most financially successful film director of all time, occupies a peaceful corner of the busy Universal Studios lot, in a secure compound that looks as if it were teleported from Santa Fe. It is all warm tile and smooth stucco, a palette of earth tones, surrounded by a lush garden. At lunch, his employees gather for healthful foods, taken communally, in an open-air courtyard where they are visited by hummingbirds.

Spielberg turns 60 later this month, but he retains the uniform of youth, dressed down in Hollywood Mogul Casual -- the slipper-soft shoes, brown cords, a pullover. He is most often photographed wearing a ball cap. Films he directed and/or produced have done a worldwide box office of $12.7 billion, a figure not adjusted for inflation.

On the day after the midterm elections last month, he sits beneath a small antique child's sled, which is protected by museum glass and mounted on the screening/conference room wall. It reveals itself to be Rosebud, the film prop used in Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, "Citizen Kane."

Q: I have to assume, at this point, you can make any movie that you want?

A: Yes.

Spielberg says this without pause, without false modesty, and awaits the next question.

Q: So you decide, "I'm going to make 'Gone With the Wind' as a musical." You could?

A: Yes, because now there is always someone who will write a check for any dumb idea of mine. But where are the emperor's new clothes, you know? That is why I have to be doubly careful not to embarrass myself and others by bringing something like "Gone With the Wind: The Musical" to [Paramount Pictures chief] Brad Grey's doorstep. I would never do that to Brad or myself.

In his rooms, Spielberg has arranged his collection of Norman Rockwell paintings. Rockwell feels like a telling choice -- art demonstrating great craft and good aim, but art that is popular and commercial, and sentimental, too, which is what film critics mean when they describe a movie as "Spielbergian." One of the Rockwell paintings in the hallway is titled "High Dive" and it depicts a scrawny kid atop the 20-foot diving board, cowering.

Q: You still take chances, though, just not crazy chances? You get up on the high dive.

A: I'm in an exploration stage of my career, where I find it much more interesting to try things on that people may not think I look good in. I have to be careful not to go along with the popular trend and go about repeating myself. Which is my greatest fear.

Q: But for the big movies, for action-adventure films like "War of the Worlds" or the next installment of the "Indiana Jones" franchise, have you cracked the code? Meaning, if Steven Spielberg makes this movie, then boy, we will print money.