Smash hit

While War of the Worlds revisits well-trodden Spielberg territory, it represents a significant advance in the use of digital technology. Not just in the more obvious computer-generated images of the tripod aliens and the havoc they wreak — there are about 400 digital shots in the film — but in the way Spielberg was able to plan.

Although the film, which cost about $130m (£72m), was his longest schedule in 12 years, by industry standards it was moved through preproduction and into production — the shoot was 72 days — remarkably fast. The whole film, from preproduction to release, has taken 10 months, half as long as most big Hollywood movies. Spielberg was able to do that by using powerful new computer technology developed by his friend George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic to previsualise many of the key sequences in the film. Called “pre-viz” for short, the technique animates “traditional storyboards into 3-D digital sequences that not only depict what a scene will look like, but reveal every aspect of a given location, including sets, actors, cameras and crew”, say the producers.

“I wish I had had it on Close Encounters,” says Spielberg, “because the actors had to rely completely on imagination. I hadn’t imagined some of the UFOs when I was directing principal photography. I had to say, ‘Well, it’s this big pie tin up there, and it’s large.’ Here, all the actors had a visual reference. They could see roughly what it was going to look like when the film was done. And that was exciting.”

Spielberg has mixed feelings about the effects of digital technology, however. “I’m as guilty as anyone, because I helped to herald the digital era with Jurassic Park,” he says. “But the danger is that it can be abused to the point where nothing is eye-popping any more. The difference between making Jaws 31 years ago and War of the Worlds is that today, anything I can imagine, I can realise on film. Then, when my mechanical shark was being repaired and I had to shoot something, I had to make the water scary. I relied on the audience’s imagination, aided by where I put the camera.

“Today, it would be a digital shark. It would cost a hell of a lot more, but never break down. As a result, I probably would have used it four times as much, which would have made the film four times less scary. Jaws is scary because of what you don’t see, not because of what you do. We need to bring the audience back into partnership with storytelling.”

That he might suddenly lose his extraordinary facility to touch the vast audience that he has enthralled and captivated for a generation may be Steven Spielberg’s most compelling, and, we trust, his most irrational, fear.

War of the Worlds opens on July 1

Close encounters of a Spielberg kind

Spielberg is an American Dickens, and, like the writer, can be evoked through a roll call of his children: Cary Guffey, the boy taken by aliens in Close Encounters; Elliott in ET; Short Round, the orphan in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; the red-coated girl in Schindler’s List; and Jim, the boy observer of Empire of the Sun.

He ends many of his films, including ET, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Schindler’s List, with a man surrounded by children.

Much of what is known as Spielbergian is encapsulated in the emblematic scene of the boy carrying ET in his bicycle basket (middle left), silhouetted by the moon: suburbia as a dreamscape; children as vehicles for our dreams and fears; the power of the imagination; aliens and ordinariness. Spielberg knows there is no Oz without Kansas.

In Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss disrupts a family meal by building a potato Devil’s Mountain, where the aliens will land, walking a tightrope of hysteria and comedy, a characteristic shading of mysticism and the mundane.

The night-time boat scene in Jaws culminates with Robert Shaw’s gripping monologue describing the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the sharks eating the men, then revealing himself as one of the survivors. From the off, Spielberg directed not just our eyeballs, but actors.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the duel between Indiana Jones and the Arab wielding a million swords, in which Indy resignedly pulls out a gun and shoots him, is a perfect combination of action and humour — a reminder of just how adept Spielberg has always been at reinventing traditional genres.

In the Normandy beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg reinvents the way we visualise war. In reproducing familiar images from newsreels, Robert Capa photographs and movies, he created an iconic image not only of film history, but of history itself.

Adam Simon

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