literary lives – Steven Spielberg The pioneer of the modern blockbuster - Part II

Sir Christopher Ondaatje continues to examine the extraordinary Hollywood career of the American director, writer and producer who might well be the most commercially successful movie director of all time. He is the recipient of three Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, as well as four Directors Guild of America Awards.

After a brief setback in which Spielberg felt “burned out and artistically stalled”, he returned to direct Hook, about a middle-aged Peter Pan played by Robin Williams. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, and earned $300 million on a $70 million budget, but was not a critical success.

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton’s adventure genre, caused Spielberg to depart from his usual order of planning and used computer generated imagery provided by Industrial Light & Magic. At the time it became the highest grossing film of all time, and won three Academy Awards. Spielberg’s salary of $250 million was indicative of the success he had attained.

Later that year, Spielberg made Schindler’s List about the businessman Oscar Schindler who helped save 1,100 Jews from the Holocaust. Against expectation, the film was a commercial success and is probably one of the best 100 American films ever made. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Spielberg’s first as Best Director.

In 1994, Spielberg formed his own film studio DreamWorks with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. More creative control, and more distribution control were the main reasons for setting up the studio, which included Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates. He still continued to operate Amblin Entertainment and direct films for other studios. He took a break from directing and did not return to work until 1997 when he directed a sequel to Jurassic Park. He used 3D storyboards, computer imagery, and robotic puppets to produce the highest grossing film of 1997. It made money but was criticised as not being as much fun as the first 1993 Jurassic Park film.

Amistad was the first film released under the Dreamworks label – the true story about events on a slave ship La Amistad, in 1839. It starred Morgan Freeman and Anthony Hopkins, but with a disappointing result. As Spielberg admitted, “it was too much of a history lesson” and underperformed at the box office. Saving Private Ryan (1998), however, starring Tom Hanks, won Spielberg his second Academy Award for Best Director and grossed a successful $481 million.

Either Spielberg sought “action” films, or the studios directed them to him. In 2001 he teamed with Tom Hanks to produce a 10-part HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which won a “Best Miniseries” Golden Globe Award. He was also given A.I. Artificial Intelligence to direct.

“Here is one of the most ambitious films of recent years … but it miscalculates in asking us to invest our emotions in a character, a machine.”

– Roger Ebert Film Critic

Nevertheless, the film won five Saturn Awards and grossed $236 million. Understandably when Spielberg teamed with Tom Cruise to make Minority Report in 2002, it was criticised for “not having enough action”. Catch Me If You Can was another successful film about a

“I have always loved movies about sensational rogues – they break the law, but you just have to love them for the movie.”

– Steven Spielberg

It was another critical success, and he worked with Tom Hanks again successfully in The Terminal (2004) that had mixed reviews.

Spielberg has been a fan of the H.G. Wells book, and the 1953 film War of the Worlds, and he co-produced the 2005 film with Paramount and DreamWorks, starring Tom

Cruise. It was another hit, grossing over $600 million worldwide.

One of Spielberg’s most controversial films was produced in 2005, Munich, about the eleven Israeli athletes who were kidnapped and murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. The film was perceived to be anti-Semitic and did not get widespread positive reviews – particularly by the Hollywood press.

In 1995, Spielberg, now 59, scaled down his directing career and, together with his partners, sold his DreamWorks company to conglomerate Viacom. However, he continued his producing career doing Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Monster House (2006), and co-producing with Clint Eastwood Flags of the Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima with Robert Lorenz, and On the Lot with Mark Burnett about filmmaking.

The fourth instalment of the Indiana Jones series was made in 2008, and Spielberg directed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was his first film not released by DreamWorks. Again, incredibly successful, grossing $790 million but reviewers were critical of Spielberg’s uncharacteristic introduction of alien life in the film.

After shooting the trilogy The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in 2009, entirely computer animated, which was received positively, Spielberg shot War Horse (2011) – the first of four films distributed by Walt Disney. The Pacific (2010) was co-produced with Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman about World War II battles in the Pacific, and followed it with another science fiction film Falling Skies. He also produced the 2011 Fox series Terra Nova about 2149 when all life on Earth was threatened with extinction. He also produced the JJ Abrams thriller Super 8.

The historical drama Lincoln (2012) was directed by Spielberg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, on the final four months of Lincoln’s life. It was acclaimed and was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, winning Best Actor for Day-Lewis.

After 2013, Spielberg directed Bridge of Spies (2015), a Cold War thriller starring Tom Hanks about the 1960 U-2 incident where Gary Powers was shot down over Soviet territory. The film was popular with critics and was nominated for six Academy Awards.

When he was 70 in 2016, Spielberg made The BFG, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book. It was co-produced and released by Walt Disney Pictures and was the first Disney film directed by Spielberg. A year later Spielberg directed The Post, an account of The Washington Post printing of the Pentagon Papers, starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.

“Spielberg infuses every scene with tension and life and the grandeur of the ordinary that he’s always been so good at conveying.”

– The Associated Press

The same year he and other filmmakers made Five Came Back, which discussed the contributions of directors Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler about war-related works. He directed Ready Player One in 2018. Critics again enjoyed the action scenes, but thought the film too long. In 2019 he directed West Side Story, an adaptation of the musical of the same name. Released in 2021, the film received seven Academy Award nominations. It was the last musical that Spielberg would direct.

In 2022, Spielberg directed The Fabelmans – a fictionalised account of his own childhood. Despite the favourable critical reception, and seven Academy Award nominations, the film was too good to be true and was a film Spielberg shouldn’t have made. It would have been far more powerful in documentary form. Perhaps this is still to come. He is certainly the most successful director of all time.

“Sometimes a story speaks to me, even if it doesn’t speak to any of my collaborators … who look at me and say, ‘Gee are you sure you wanna get into that trend for a year and a half?’ I love people challenging me that way because it’s a real test about my own convictions … a subject that may not be popular, but that I would be proud to add to the body of my work. That’s pretty much the litmus test that gets me to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll direct that one.’”

– Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg met actress Amy Irving in 1976 when she auditioned for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She was too young for the role, but she and Spielberg began dating. They broke up in 1979. In 1984, they renewed their romance and married in November 1985. Their son, Max, was born on June 13, 1985. In 1989, they divorced. The divorce settlement of over $100 million is said to be one of the most expensive in history.

Spielberg met actress Kate Capshaw when he cast her in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They married on October 12, 1991. Capshaw converted to Judaism before their marriage. Spielberg and his family live in Pacific Palisades, California, and East Hampton, New York. He has three children with Capshaw, and two adopted children. He also has a stepdaughter, Jessica Capshaw.

• Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the author of The Last Colonial. He acknowledges that he has quoted liberally from Wikipedia.