STEVEN SPIELBERG says he has turned to comedy for his latest film because audiences need escapism more than ever from a world in crisis.

The Oscar-winning director was speaking last night at the 61st Venice International Film Festival, which opened with the European premiere of The Terminal, his comic drama about a passenger who becomes trapped indefinitely in an airport in a Kafkaesque state of perpetual limbo.

“I wanted to do another movie that could make you laugh and cry and feel good about the world,” Spielberg said. “This is a time when we need to smile more, and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times. People do need relief from the headlines.”

Spielberg has made some of the highest-grossing films, including Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET and Jurassic Park. His 1994 Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List, won seven Oscars.

The Terminal reunites him with Tom Hanks five years after they received five Oscars for the D-Day epic, Saving Private Ryan. The Hollywood actor, who also won Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, said that comedy could often make more of an impact in “capturing the truth”.

The Terminal is based loosely on the real-life experience of an Iranian, Merhan Karimi Nasseri, 59, who became marooned for years in a Paris airport after the fall of the Shah. The new film avoids direct political references, however. The setting is transposed from Paris to New York and Hanks’s character, Viktor, is from Krakozia, a fictitious Eastern European country. He arrives at John F. Kennedy airport, just as a military coup has abolished his country’s government and rendered him effectively stateless.

The US does not recognise the new government, so, with a passport from nowhere, he is unable to enter the country. He remains stranded for months in the terminal until the war at home is over.

Spielberg, who was stranded at an airport for 24 hours in 1978, said: “Almost everybody has been stuck in an airport. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t spent longer sitting in an airport chair than on the airplane ride itself at some point. Airports have become small microcosms of society.”