He is not an immediately impressive presence. He is small, perhaps only 5ft 7in, and his frame is slight and wiry, which makes his head look big. He’s not exactly shy, but he doesn’t fill a room. Yet, as Spielberg sits across the conference table from me, fidgeting with a can of Diet Coke, I sense within seconds what I’ve felt only with a couple of other people I’ve ever met: his absolute, hawk-like focus. Whatever the tumult around him, he can filter out the irrelevancies to concentrate completely on the issue at hand. If he is asked a question, he answers it quickly, without affectation, without having anything to prove, without dissembling. He just wants to deal with it and move on to whatever is coming up next in his day. He’s not abrupt or humourless; in fact, he’s often funny. He just knows how to cut away the fat, which he must have to do all the time.
Spielberg is not just the most successful director in the history of Hollywood — Empire magazine readers just voted him the greatest director of all time, which even he might consider a stretch. But he has directed many of the most influential and financially successful American films of the past 30 years, in a bewildering array of genres, among them Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and, now, War of the Worlds. He has won numerous awards, including best-director and best-picture Oscars for Schindler’s List, and a best-director Oscar for Saving Private Ryan. From Jaws onward, the success of Spielberg’s films has helped redefine the notion of the Hollywood blockbuster and changed the very structure of the studio system, even affecting the kinds of films that Hollywood now makes.
Spielberg is also a producer, not just of his own films but of highly successful ventures such as the Back to the Future series, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Men in Black, Twister and dozens more. He is a television producer, making series such as Band of Brothers and Taken. He is a studio head, the creative genius behind DreamWorks, which he established 11 years ago with the music mogul David Geffen and the former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg: it has been responsible for Oscar successes such as American Beauty and smash hits like Shrek. He has been instrumental in committing to film the memories of Holocaust survivors, establishing the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which has recorded more than 50,000 survivor testimonies. He is involved in numerous other charities and philanthropic causes. He is richer than Croesus, worth billions of dollars. He is active in Democrat politics. And he has seven children, one with his first wife, Amy Irving, the rest with his second wife, Kate Capshaw, including two who are adopted.
Any one of those hats would be enough to overwhelm most people. Yet Spielberg insists that he copes with it by leading a mundane life. “I don’t work weekends,” he says.
“Weekends are for my kids. And I have dinner at home every night when I’m not physically directing a movie — I get home by six. I put the kids to bed and tell them stories, and take them to school the next morning. I work basically from 9.30 to 5.30, and I’m strict about that.”
Despite his crushing workload, it’s clear when you sit down with him that Spielberg has lost none of his restless curiosity, childlike enthusiasm or the astonishing energy that fired him when he made his first Hollywood film, The Sugarland Express, at 26. Now, 33 years later, when he talks about his latest film, War of the Worlds, his eyes still light up and the words come tumbling out.
Yes, War of the Worlds is, like ET and Close Encounters, about aliens and the possibility of life beyond our own. Yes, it will thrill audiences with astonishing special effects, terrifying, implacable three-legged alien monsters and great chase sequences. But, like ET, Close Encounters, Minority Report and much of Spielberg’s other work, it is also, at heart, a film about family, about absent fathers, about suburbia, about escape, about coping with fears — and, of course, about redemption.
Spielberg first read HG Wells’s 1898 novel when he was at college. Of course, growing up in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, he sated himself with the late-night alien-invasion TV movies of the mid-1950s, such as Earth vs the Flying Saucers, and saw the 1953 War of the Worlds movie, too. Indeed, his first full-length feature, Firelight, which he made at the age of 17, and which has long since been lost, was about alien invaders. And he owns what may be the only extant copy of Orson Welles’s script for the harrowing 1938 radio play of The War of the Worlds. But film-goers comfortable with Spielberg’s previous depictions of aliens as benign beings will be in for a rude awakening. “This is not one of my cute suburban movies,” he warns, with a wry smile. “I happen to believe ‘they’ are out there, and ‘they’ are nice, or I wouldn’t have made ET and Close Encounters. This is a little bend in my road. I think I can have a lot more fun and make a better action movie if the aliens are bent on our destruction.
“This film focuses on one family even more than it focuses on the global invasion. It really is through their eyes, which I think makes it more unsettling, more unexpected. It was important to me to make a movie that wasn’t starring generals in uniforms, and astronomers and prickly scientists and weapons managers, and theorists talking about how to destroy this alien invasion. And I think, in the shadow of 9/11, there is a relevance to how we are all so unsettled in our feelings about our collective futures.”
Tom Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced, hard-drinking dock worker and pretty much absentee dad whose ex-wife leaves their two children with him for a rare weekend visit. Shortly afterwards, he watches as an enormous, three-legged war machine emerges from the earth and destroys everything in sight. From that moment, Ferrier and his kids are on a Spielbergian run for their lives.
“What Tom brought to the role was the antithesis of who he is in real life,” says Spielberg. “He plays a bad father in the movie, and that’s the biggest departure, maybe, in Tom’s whole career, to play a negligent, deadbeat dad.” What Spielberg says he likes most about Cruise, with whom he also made Minority Report, is that he has “an infestation of charisma”.
It is not hard to find deeper meaning in the more obviously important films that Spielberg has made in the past 15 years, and for which he has rightly been praised: Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, The Color Purple, even Amistad. But what is surprising about Spielberg is that, like Alfred Hitchcock, he takes on genre films — what Graham Greene would have called “entertainments” — that were often developed for other directors, yet imbues them not just with unique Spielbergian visual flourishes, but with his own deepest fears and dreams. War of the Worlds, like many of his most powerful and affecting entertainments, taps into the same themes, fears and dreams that have obsessed Spielberg since he was a child, that have fuelled his work since he became an adult film-maker, and that helped to change the meaning of cinema. His adolescence in a broken home, growing up as an outsider, a Jew in gentile American sub- urbia; fears and dreams that haunt and inspire him to this day, of flying, of threats to his and his family’s security. “I think every film I make that puts characters in jeopardy is me purging my own fears,” he admits, “sadly only to re-engage with them shortly after the release of the picture. I’ll never make enough films to purge them all.”
