The Moviemakers: Spielberg

I'll just get you to clap.

Perfect.

I'm an experienced clapper.

It feels like I'm overstating it when I say

that Steven Spielberg is American cinema.

He's somebody that everybody knows the name of,

and everybody's seen one of his films in the world,

and that's quite incredible.

He's unparalleled in his ability

to get people in the cinema.

And that's been over a couple of decades.

His movies have impacted, shaped,

or just found their ways into almost everyone's lives.

Are you trying in, by selecting movies

that involve kids to somehow recapture the feeling

of the early years when you were 10 years old?

I got a feeling that you're looking for something.

In each movie, it's the same scene going,

the kids going down the stairs and the toys mirror.

Is there something that happened someplace

in your childhood that you're going after?

My parents never bought me enough toys.

They got, they always gave me something, but not enough.

And I think I'm making up for lost time.

I put toys in my movies.

I have kids who were spoiled.

I was sort of spoiled when I was growing up.

And at the same time, I think all of the kids

in my movie are real level-headed.

They're normal people.

They're not extraordinary people.

And that's very important to me

because I grew up in suburbia in Arizona,

very normal lifestyle.

I think he felt isolated a little bit in Arizona

with his parents who were having a tempestuous marriage.

He felt not part of a gang at school

and felt a bit of a loner.

He wasn't somebody who was a jock or a sports boy.

He wasn't somebody who had a huge following

within the school, and he felt a little bit isolated.

His father helped create the first data processing machine,

and his mother was this concert pianist

who also ran a restaurant.

And she was very creative, he was very analytical,

and Spielberg was sort of trapped between his parents.

Didn't really connect with his father very much,

but did with his mother.

Did something special happen

or in the movies that you're trying

to compensate for a dull childhood?

Well, my childhood was anything but dull.

I had a mother who was a concert pianist.

She had chamber music concerts in the living room.

I had three younger sisters who would paint,

spray paint things on my walls,

and break all of the toys that I did have.

And I had dogs that were never housebroken,

and I had parakeets that flew around free

that would not go into the cage and just,

you know, would sit on the curtain rods

and drop all over the curtains.

And I lived in a zoo, a wonderful,

happy middle class American zoo.

And if anything, a lot of my movies sort of, you know,

reflect the beautiful chaos of when I grew up.

And it was his mother who really encouraged him

to start filming with a little camera in his backyard.

And that's what sort of helped him find his tribe.

So he had this group of friends that he made films with

and created all sorts of adventures with in the desert.

And this was a way to really carve his own path

and feel that he understood what he was doing

and had his own agency as a kid.

So I think it was something that he felt he could

be the master of his destiny over.

But was there a single shattering experience

or, I mean, maybe, I don't know if it's called mystical

or spiritual, but there's a spiritual aspect

to certain scenes that recur from movie to movie

with the contact with the lights or that thing,

did that happen in your life?

No, but maybe I wanted it to happen but it never did.

And maybe because I want things like that to happen.

I want to go on an UFO.

I want my best friend to be an extraterrestrial

from 3 million light years away.

You know, I'd like to go on a shark hunt.

I make movies about things I wanna be, not things that I am,

not things that I've been, but things that I desire.

And that's my fantasy.

I can play out my life and my fantasy through film,

and I'm very lucky that studios give me money

to be a kid all my life.

Spielberg just had an affinity with films

from a very, very young age

and was watching very grown up movies.

I mean, he was very typical, I think,

of a young person growing up in '50s, '60s America,

for whom movies really were a definition

in many ways of American life.

And the tall palm trees

are the colorful setting of what is known

as the home of movie stars.

It's just a short drive to any of the studios

and the swank Wilshire Boulevard

with a fashionable shops equal or better,

those of any place else in the world.

It all started from an original Spanish land grant

to Maria Rita Valdez in 1887, and in.

Hollywood film is often been described and called,

you know, the Great American Art Form.

And there's a good reason for that in many ways,

because many people see American life

imprinted on the movies.

You know, that's really

where they take their influence from,

where they take ideology and values from.

As a city, which is in the confines

of Greater Los Angeles, it was founded in 1906

and incorporated in 1914,

just before the new-born movie industry

made Hollywood a pretty famous place.

Immortals like Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford,

John Barrymore, and Harold Lloyd were its early citizens,

and succeeding generations of stars

have made this their home.

The city has grown to tall buildings and elegant hotels,

the epitome of wealth and style.

And it's all confined in an area just a little bit

over five and a half square miles.

The big attraction for visitors are the movie star homes.

And although we can't give addresses,

Hollywood Backstage can show you some of the homes

in their very picturesque settings.

He grew up on the films coming out of the '40s and '50s

of classic American directors, John Ford, Howard Hawks,

I guess most particularly Alfred Hitchcock.

And you can see in Spielberg's movies the influence

of those kind of classic directors.

Ford, a Western director, Howard Hawks, comedy screwball.

Hitchcock is different.

And in some respects, Hitchcock and Spielberg

don't match up very easily with each other.

But then, that's part of the influence, I think.

Part of the thing that Spielberg's generation identified

with was a mixture of classic American film mixed

with European and world avant-garde cinema.

He cites people like Kurosawa, Ozu, Godard, Truffaut,

those kind of directors who were also beginning to seep

into the consciousness of the baby boom generation

who were gonna transform Hollywood by the end of the '60s.

I think I would've functioned very, very well

in the 1930s and '40s being a movie director.

I think in a sense that was really my era.

And my favorite movies still to this day come

from the '20s, '30s, '40s, a little bit into the '50s.

One of the films that was absolutely key

to him was Lawrence of Arabia.

He saw that, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia

on a big screen, and that's something

that he talks about now as something

that really made him find that he couldn't be

on any other path, but to be a director.

Up until that point, he liked films, he enjoyed making them,

but that really galvanized him into a future

that had to be in directing movies.

Steven Spielberg came to Los Angeles fairly early

in life and very quickly just got immersed

within movie culture.

He was quite a precocious teenager

and having decided he wanted to direct,

he then basically broke into Universal Studio's back lot

by jumping on a tram for a tour.

And then when there was a bathroom break,

not coming back to the tram

and sort of wandering around the back lot.

And he'd sort of inveigled his way

into working in film that way.

And he'd impressed some people.

So he'd done a short film called Amblin,

which had impressed with its ability and it its competency.

But he hadn't really been tested that much outside of TV

even though he'd been directing, you know,

Joan Crawford at the age of 20 on TV shows.

He hadn't been tested in a big film.

So Jaws was his sort of opportunity to show what he could do

with a budget and with a big screen.

So it was a real make or break for him.

If it didn't work, then maybe he wouldn't

get another opportunity.

But if it did, then maybe it would take him

where he wanted to go.

Where his heroes were making films as well.

Before Jaws, Hollywood was

in like this really interesting place

because the studio system had disintegrated,

had fallen apart.

The Hollywood studios had started kind

of going into television.