By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 3, 2006; N06
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.
A: All of us think we've cracked the code until the moment we fail.
Q: The director Stanley Kubrick thought you had. I read that Kubrick ["Dr. Strangelove," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Shining"] would call, collect, from his estate in England to ask why one film or another was a blockbuster or a flop.
A: He would never call collect. But Kubrick did keep calling. He thought I had a crystal ball, and I spent years trying to convince him I did not. So whenever one of my films came out and failed, like "Empire of the Sun" [1987, about a British boy in a WWII Japanese internment camp], I'd phone and say why the heck did I make that one? Stanley and I used to laugh about that. After a couple of back-to-back successes, I thought I knew something. There are trends. You follow it until the public grows tired of it. It doesn't take a crystal ball to know the public will go to see a "Harry Potter" sequel or that the second "Pirates of the Caribbean" will make more money than the first.
Q: You get brought a lot of projects. You could have made a "Harry Potter" or a "Spider-Man" or even "Meet the Parents," no?
A: And I would have done those projects had they been brought to me 10 years earlier, but I had moved on in my life. In my 50s, I had other interests. "Spider-Man" and "Harry Potter" would have appealed to me in my 40s.
Q: Did it take a long time to mature? Is that a fair question? When others might have moved on, you were still making dinosaur movies . . .
A: I think that's true. I think I grew up making movies. When I was 25 years old, I was really 18. I've always felt younger than my actual age, maybe by a decade -- or more. So, I wouldn't even consider when I was making "Close Encounters" to even read a book like "Kramer vs. Kramer." It was not within my reach to even imagine directing a picture like "Kramer vs. Kramer" [the 1979 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep], though I was the person handing Robert Benton his Academy Award for Best Director. It was a great honor, but I remember thinking, as I passed the Oscar to him, I'll never make a movie as mature as "Kramer vs. Kramer" because I'm not mature enough.
Q: That's some self-knowledge.
A: I envied films like "Annie Hall" [Woody Allen, 1977] and "Mrs. Miniver" [William Wyler, 1942] and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" [Frank Capra, 1939]. I envied them but never thought I'd be able to have even a conversation with the filmmakers who made them.
Q: Why?
A: I thought I'm good at something so I better stick with what I'm good at. I never gave myself a chance. Until the book "The Color Purple" came along.
Q: Because here was a white man, a white director, telling a story of black experience. With Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey? It was nothing like "Jaws" or "E.T."
A: When I read the book it frightened me, because I thought this is a book that Bob Benton should do, not me. But people kept hounding me. It took everybody, including Quincy Jones, who kept saying that I should develop it. I fell in love with it, with the characters, and suddenly it became something that wasn't so inconceivable.
At this point, Spielberg excuses himself for several minutes. His longtime collaborator, the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, has come by. His dog is dying and Spielberg explains later that he is not only immensely fond of Kaminski but also his dog Larry, who often visited the sets. Spielberg says that when his own old Labrador was put down, it was done at his home, while the dog lay on his lap. "After it was over we sat there for an hour telling stories about him," Spielberg says. "But I couldn't watch them take him away."
Q: When you released "The Terminal" with Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2004, you said that one reason for choosing that project was your feeling that the audience, the country, needed a good laugh and a good cry. What does the country need now? What are we in the mood for?
A: I don't know. There was a referendum yesterday. It was really against the Iraq war. And the country spoke and everybody is listening. And the country has done a miraculous thing. It is rewriting itself. I don't know how to write to that. I wouldn't play to that. I'm part of that. To me that is separate to art, to storytelling. I don't plan to create a movie voicing this. I tend to compartmentalize.
Q: But politics clearly seeps into your work. I'm thinking of "Minority Report" and "A.I." and . . .
A: It did, certainly, when I made "War of the Worlds," a big commercial film, and a film that would not have been as dark had 9/11 not happened. I thought you can't make a disaster movie today in the shadow of 9/11 without acknowledgment of what people do in a crisis. In this case it was giant alien tripods walking amongst us. But I'm sure the film wouldn't have been so dark without 9/11.
Q: How so?
A: It is literally darker. It is twilight. People are carrying signs with photographs of the missing. And putting fliers on walls with phone numbers -- have you seen this person? -- images that were iconic, tortured images indelibly imprinted on all memories from 9/11. That was the most obvious carryover to a big commercial Hollywood movie about aliens attacking Earth.
Q: Your feelings about aliens have obviously changed over the years.
A: No, not really.
Q. In "Close Encounters," the humans want to go up in the spaceship. Richard Dreyfuss wants to walk toward the light. The aliens are like really smart, squishy children. In "War of the Worlds," the aliens want to make us into plant food.
A: One bad-alien movie doesn't make me Simon Legree. I still believe there's greater good in neighboring civilizations off our planet than there is at this moment on our planet. So I still believe E.T. does live somewhere out there among the stars. And I will always believe it, all my life.
Spielberg says this emphatically.
Q: What was the hardest movie to make?
A: "Schindler's List" was certainly the most emotionally devastating experience I've had -- and not only the production but the postproduction and having to view the images we achieved over and over and over again.
Q: You filmed scenes at the gates of the real Auschwitz.
A: It was actually harder to visit than to shoot there.
Q: Why?
A: Whenever I looked at the gates of Auschwitz at 2 in the morning, and chills ran down my spine, all I had to do is look at the familiar, which is the craft of filmmaking -- our electricians on ladders putting up the lights and the grip department laying dolly track and extras being made up -- which for me is a safety zone. Whereas tourists who go have no safety blanket, just the dark reality of the place and the doubly stark proposition that this could happen again easily.
Q: Not too long ago, I read that you used the words "before I retire . . ."?
A: I was being glib when I said that. I don't have any retirement plans. I couldn't imagine not directing. When I watch Clint Eastwood at 70-something years old doing some of his best work in the last two years -- of his whole career. When I see him achieving his personal best over the last three movies -- with "Mystic River," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Flags of Our Fathers" -- it just gives me hope. I think directors are working longer than they ever did before, and the directors continue to stay in touch with their audience. One would think they'd lose their communication skills. But it's your body that grows old. Your mind and your heart stay as young as you can imagine.
