Steven Spielberg on Film, Family and Working in Canada

From storytelling to spectacle, his name is synonymous with the best of Hollywood screen magic. Kim Izzo sits down with the masterful Steven Spielberg to discuss his latest summer movie and, yes, Montreal bagels.

“You could be happy here. I could take care of you. I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you. We could grow up together, E.T.” —Elliot, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

That promise was spoken in what many consider Steven Spielberg’s greatest and certainly most beloved film, yet those words could easily stand in for the filmmaker’s own pledge to us. His movies have captivated, provoked and uplifted our hopes and dreams for more than four decades and counting. It doesn’t matter your age; there’s a Spielberg film for you.

When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to see Jaws, but my older siblings did and regaled me with terrifying re-enactments of pivotal scenes—perhaps the reason why I never learned to swim. But even as an eight-year-old, I recognized that there was something afloat because all the teens and adults were talking about the movie with such excitement. To my young mind, it was a spectacular mystery why everyone was so gleeful about being terrified. Of course, the answer was they were being entertained. Although at the time—the summer of 1975—they couldn’t possibly know that they were also seated in the front row at the launch pad of an artist’s masterful career.

“Steven Spielberg is one of cinema’s greatest narrative filmmakers and the greatest director of the collective cinema experience since Hitchcock,” says Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival. “What I think is most interesting about him is that he directs not to individual viewers and not usually as personal expression but as dialogue with a large audience. In the ’70s and ’80s, he made movies for crowds the way Bruce Springsteen wrote songs for stadiums. That’s in no way a diss. It’s how his films gain their enormous emotional and visceral power.”

Filmmakers from younger generations concur. “I think that what a lot of people will tacitly admit to themselves is that Steven has a level of visualisation and talent that just isn’t available to most of us,” says writer-director Shane Black, The Nice Guys and Iron Man 3. “To me, he is almost like going to film school, and I will endlessly go through Spielberg’s films shot by shot with the slow motion button just to see how he did it.”

Forty-one years after Jaws, Spielberg’s latest summer movie, The BFG, will be released on Canada Day. The film has garnered positive, even gushing, reviews after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It has also drawn comparisons to E.T. not only for the subject matter but also because the screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, who passed away last fall, wrote both pictures.

Spielberg on the red carpet with wife Kate Capshaw during Cannes this past May.

“You’re going to need a bigger boat.” —Brody, Jaws

When I finally did see Jaws, it scared the daylights out of me even though I knew what was going to happen. But it was that film and another blockbuster two years later—Star Wars, a movie written and directed by Spielberg’s buddy George Lucas—that was responsible for my attending film school in the ’80s. My fellow students and I all idolized Spielberg. I recall one heated debate about whether he looked better with or without his beard—a conversation that was initiated by the male students who all copied his trademark look of jeans, sneakers and ballcap. Suffice to say that when I find myself at The Ritz-Carlton New York, seated on a sofa across from him, the moment feels surreal enough to be from one of his movies. All that’s missing is a beam of blue-white light and a John Williams soundtrack. But I’m nervous. What if he’s not the mensch that I want him to be?

Spielberg is smaller than I imagined. Even though I knew he wasn’t a big man, his work has loomed so large in my imagination that I somehow expected him to tower over me. Though to be fair, I’m 5 foot 10 to his 5 foot 7. Dressed nattily in a tweed jacket complete with waistcoat, tan trousers and hiking sneakers while wearing his trademark glasses (but minus the ballcap), we chat briefly about my film school—yes, I talked about me—and bemoaned the loss of actual film and how the magic of an editing room with reams of unspooling celluloid and moviolas was gone forever. But we are here to talk about The BFG and, following on the heels of adult dramas Lincoln and Bridge of Spies, I was curious what drew him to another children’s tale.

“I thought it was a beautiful relationship. It was two extraordinarily different characters, not just because BFG is getting crumbly in his very elderly state,” explains Spielberg. “But that Sophie is so young and curious, and she brings so much youth out of BFG, and BFG is able to put so much wisdom into Sophie. It was just a lovely two-hander. And it reminded me of my own relationship with my grandfather, Fievel, from Russia.”

He had read the book to his children, Max, now 31 (with first wife, Amy Irving), and continued to read it as a bedtime story to his other kids (with second and current wife, actress and artist Kate Capshaw), Theo, 27, Sasha, 26, Sawyer, 24, Mikaela, 20, and Destry, 19. He also has a stepdaughter, Jessica, 39, from Capshaw’s first marriage. Initially developed by screenwriter Mathison, Spielberg’s long-time producing partner Kathleen Kennedy (now president of Lucasfilm) acquired the rights to the book and brought the project to him.

(Photo by Henry Leutwyler/Contour by Getty Images)

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Spielberg did not invent the blockbuster—which has erupted into a succession of soulless tent poles and superhero movie franchises, a far cry from the humanity he brings to the screen—he was simply in the right place at the right time.

“They give me a lot of credit or they give me a lot of blame for creating something that my forefathers had done time and time again. Gone With the Wind was a blockbuster in 1939. Rudolph Valentino invented the first cultural blockbuster when he played The Sheik. There have been blockbusters since The Great Train Robbery or even since Méliès made A Trip to the Moon in 1902,” he says emphatically. “The only credit that I’ll take when people say that about Jaws is I am responsible for discovering the summer as a great time to open a movie and get a lot of people going to that movie. But it wasn’t my decision to open Jaws in the summer. That was [Universal Studio head] Lew Wasserman’s decision. So I didn’t even make that decision.”

While that may be true, his name remains synonymous with the term. When asked to name his favourite summer blockbuster of all time, comedy legend Dan Aykroyd (who starred in his own blockbuster, Ghostbusters, in 1984 and appears in this summer’s highly anticipated all-female reboot) names a Spielberg film. “Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs should retake the Earth immediately!” Same for TIFF director and CEO Piers Handling: “Jaws started the blockbuster phenom. It arrived in the summer, was smart, beautifully filmed and conceived and scared the living daylights out of everyone. A horror film set in bright sunshine.”

“It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.” —Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Spielberg is 69 (he will turn 70 in December) and has been blessed with excellent genes. Both his parents are still alive and well—mother Leah Adler is 96 and father Arnold is 99. And always by his side is wife Capshaw, 62. The couple are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary this year—an unusual marriage milestone in Hollywood.

“Twenty-fifth? Oh my God, I better go shopping,” he laughs when I remind him. “Kate’s the love of my life, and we just love being together. We love talking together. And we love playing in the world together, and I think that the secret of a strong and durable marriage is that the person you’re most excited to talk to at the end of the day is your spouse.”

“Whoever saves one life saves the entire world.” —Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s List

Spielberg grew up in Arizona in a non-Jewish neighbourhood. As he told 60 Minutes in 2013, people would spew slurs such as “The Spielbergs are dirty Jews.” The taunts and bullying got to the young boy who tried to hide his religion and told people his last name was German. He spoke openly of denying his faith and that as a child he was the outsider, telling Lesley Stahl he was “like the kid that played the clarinet in the band…which I did.”

Years later, he made peace with his Judaism, fuelled by his wife’s conversion to the religion prior to their marriage. He has credited her with his renewed faith, which led him to direct Schindler’s List in 1993. One year later, Spielberg founded the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, which recorded video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses of the atrocity. Currently, the collection has amassed more than 53,000 video testimonies.

If struggling with religious identity wasn’t tough enough for the young Spielberg, then at 19, his parents’ divorce caught him off guard, and he became estranged from his father for decades even though it was his mother who ended the marriage. But the family trauma fuelled one of his greatest hits, E.T., which he has said began “with me trying to write a story about my parents’ divorce.”

Loneliness and isolation is a theme that ripples throughout all of his films, which is part of the magic that makes them resonate with millions. “[His films are] in many ways the same movie: an outsider comes to the rescue of a threatened group and gains entry to that group as a result,” explains Bailey. “His films have shown a remarkable technical ambition and esthetic variety, but thematically they’re very much of a piece. That’s what makes him an auteur.” Which is something that Spielberg would agree with. “I just think as an artist you keep working those things out subconsciously,” he explains.

Exploring these recurring themes, Spielberg’s films have spanned genres and subject matters. Back in 1975, you could be forgiven for not imagining the director behind Jaws would explore childhood trauma as he did in E.T. and The BFG, race in The Color Purple, Amistad and Lincoln, the horrors of both world wars in Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List and War Horse, technology and science in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The list goes on. Though there was a time when he might have envisioned a different future, telling an interviewer in 1982, “There will be some day when I’ll probably get old and go on the lecture circuit and talk about all the movies I should have made.”

He says now, “That was spoken from the naiveté of youth. The privileges of youth, I could say anything I want and get away with it. Now I can look back and say that was a pretty naive comment to have made.”

Is he surprised how his life turned out? “Of course, because you never know where it’s going to take you, and so I’ve just gone along for the ride. I feel like I’m riding on the coattails of my own career and I don’t even know where that’s taking me.”