By akademiotoelektronik, 07/05/2022

Steven Spielberg: childhood dreams, cinephilia and history… the obsessions of the king of Hollywood

1. Through Children's Eyes: Encounter of the 3rd Kind+The little green men, played by children, come to meet their fellow human beings on Earth.Read more© Carlotta Films

Adventure filmmaker, science fiction lover, king of the blockbuster, it is the entire Hollywood industry on which, in forty years, Steven Spielberg has imposed his step. He was only twelve years old when, a young autodidact, he embarked on his first film: The Last Gun, a short film shot in 8mm with his father's camera for his scout tribe. During his youth, in self-production, he continued to shoot short films, but also a science fiction feature film: Firelight, freely inspired by the film Le Monstre by Val Guest.

When he was only 21 years old, Steven Spielberg shot Amblin, a short film that got him noticed at several festivals as well as by the Universal studio, which offered him a job as a director for television. This short film, which recounts the journey through the Pacific roads of a couple of hitchhikers, brought luck to the filmmaker who later decided to baptize his production company "Amblin Entertainment".

At Universal, the young Spielberg seized every opportunity that came his way: he directed Joan Crawford in one of the three pilots of the Night Gallery series, shot the first episode of Colombo with Peter Falk in 1971, and slowly headed towards his first telefilm: the highly acclaimed Duel. This unforgettable feature film, during which a motorist is harassed by a heavy goods vehicle without being able to see who is driving, will strongly mark those who were to become early aficionados, sometimes going so far as to forget that he was not was just a TV movie. We understand them: after winning the Fantastic Film Prize at Avoriaz, Duel was released in theaters in a long version in 1973.

At 25, Steven Spielberg already has the makings of a great filmmaker and the studios are opening their arms to him. In 1974, he shot Sugarland Express, his first film for the big screen, with Goldie Hawn in the leading role. In the tradition of Duel, this first film at the cinema is a desperate road movie inspired by a true story, in which a young woman breaks her husband out of prison and takes a policeman hostage to find their child in the town of Sugarland. . Selected at the Cannes Film Festival, Steven Spielberg takes his first steps in cinema by winning the Screenplay Prize. This is also his first collaboration with John Williams, his regular composer, who will sign the music for (almost) all his films.

In 1975, Spielberg obtained $12 million from Universal to shoot Jaws. cinema to bring in several hundred million dollars at the worldwide box office, an amount never before imagined by the studios. At 27, Spielberg has just invented the blockbuster.

However, the still sharp wound of his parents' divorce ten years earlier continues to haunt him and the misunderstanding between the world of adults and that of children is about to become one of his favorite themes. His next film, Encounters of the 3rd ^Kind , tells how humans and extra-terrestrials learn to communicate through music and computers. It's no coincidence: the filmmaker's father was a computer scientist and his mother a pianist.

Through the eyes of children

It is to François Truffaut that Steven Spielberg entrusts one of the leading roles in Rencontres du 3 ^ème Type. This mythical director of the French New Wave distinguished himself by directing children from his first short film: Les Mistons. On the set of the big Hollywood production, Truffaut always gives good advice to the young American director, especially when it comes to shooting very young actors, as in the final scene where little extra-terrestrials come out of their vessel to make first contact with humans. These beings from elsewhere are interpreted by dozens of children in costumes.

"I think he is mainly interested in cinema," said François Truffaut at the microphone of 8 p.m. Antenne 2, February 25, 1978.

For the second time in his debut filmography, the fantastic invites itself into the ordinary. This time, vacationers in Jaws give way to the monotony of an ordinary suburb where the extraordinary bursts in. The spectator will quickly understand that the gaze of a prodigy director who upsets the film industry is always that of a child frustrated by the banality of his daily life, and who uses cinema to transcend his universe. With him, adventure always hides where you least expect it!

This is still the case three years later when, just thirty years old and already several times king of the box office, he reveals his new feature film which will change the history of cinema forever. On an idea of ​​George Lucas, also producer of the film, here is the setbacks of a professor of archeology at the university who becomes an intrepid hero in the field. It's called Raiders of the Lost Ark. These are, of course, the first adventures of the now famous Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), voted best hero of the big screen by Empire magazine in 2015.

In 1982, Spielberg signs the film which brings to its peak his identification with children enchanted by the world, that their disillusioned parents no longer understand. In ET The Extra-Terrestrial, a little boy and his younger sister, residents of a middle-class and isolated suburb, meet a visitor from space whom they must conceal from their incredulous parents. Thirty-five years after its release, ET remains the biggest American hit in the filmmaker's career.

Other characters in his cinema will be emblematic of this divide between adults and children, parents and offspring. The famous confrontation between Indiana Jones and her father Henry, played by Sean Connery, is a flagrant symptom of this. Twenty years later, the relationship will be reversed when Indiana Jones will meet her own son in the guise of Shia LaBeouf. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), in Jurassic Park, also finds it difficult to bear the presence of children around him. If Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) becomes a liar and a con man in Catch Me If You Can, it's mainly to get his parents' attention and impress them.

Robin Williams in Hook, embodying a version of Peter Pan who would have renounced the Imaginary – and therefore his homeland, aging at the same time, perhaps best symbolizes this Spielbergian rivalry between the world of adults and that of the youngest. A theme also dear to the author Roald Dahl, from which he will adapt Le BGG – Le Bon Gros Géant in 2016.

celluloid dreams

As we have said, it is through cinema that Spielberg enchants the world and gives flesh to his childhood dreams. His cinema also testifies to great mastery and immense respect for the history of the 7th Art. Because before becoming the emblematic filmmaker of a generation, the inventor of the blockbuster from the new Hollywood is above all an outstanding film buff.

The Indiana Jones saga is the most striking indicator of his love for films seen during his youth. The first three installments of the franchise, set in the 1930s, are perpetual homages to the major Hollywood genres of the time. The codes of cape and dagger film and adventure cinema are the main sources of inspiration for this franchise which diverts the language of chivalry embodied by Errol Flynn to mix it with the universe of Skull Island. of King Kong. The second part, Le Temple Maudit, begins with a dance scene also inspired by musicals set in cabarets of the time, such as Chercheuses d'or in 1933.

In "Films of the 1980s" (2002, Taschen), Jürgen Müller applies this reading to the third part of the saga, The Last Crusade.

It is this trinity that we find in each part of Indiana Jones, in particular in The Temple of Doom where the adventures of the hero are punctuated by the blunders and the brilliant blows of Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) and Demi -Moon (Jonathan Ke Quan).

When Steven Spielberg finds his legendary hero again at the end of the 2000s for a fourth part that spectators no longer expected, it is by following a rigorous chronology that he no longer situates the action in the 1930s, but twenty years later, in 1957. The Nazi enemy naturally gave way to the Bolsheviks and the genre to which we refer is no longer the adventure film, but science fiction, emblematic of the 1950s. fans, it is only natural that the archaeologist finds himself confronted with the little green men.

It is moreover with this genre that Steven Spielberg confronted himself the most throughout his career, first with optimism at the end of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s, then with a pessimism that we do not did not yet know at the dawn of the new millennium. For him, science fiction never takes place in distant, very distant galaxies, as with his friend George Lucas, but always at home, on Earth. Contrary to the cinema of his childhood, it is with benevolence that the flying saucers land in Encounters of the Third Kind and in ET The Extraterrestrial.

With Jurassic Park in 1993 and its sequel, The Lost World in 1997, the director once again embraced his fascination with 1930s monster films and modernized the King Kong myth thanks to novels by Michael Crichton. But this time his speech is tinged with a warning about the dangers of genetic manipulation. Some cinephiles will even have fun seeing it as a parable on the possible drift of a cinema assisted by digital effects.

The day after the death of his friend Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg decided to adapt a project the master had been working on for a long time: AI Artificial Intelligence. In the near future, humans compensate for the loss of loved ones by adopting androids that look like them. It is in this context that a robotic little boy will finally be abandoned by his adoptive parents. He will then be condemned to seek his mother for the rest of his existence, which could well last for millennia.

If the meeting between Kubrick and Spielberg did not make everyone agree, it is with more success that Minority Report, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick, and first collaboration with Tom Cruise came out. Three years later, they meet again for the remake of The War of the Worlds. Indeed, the novel by HG Wells had already been brought to the screen in 1953 by Byron Haskin. In Steven Spielberg's version, space invaders grow a strange plant on Earth that feeds on human blood. The tone has changed.

And what about the homage to slapstick comedy that is 1941, the nod to pirate movie and Disney classics that is Hook, and the fantasy film behind the romance Always screen of Audrey Hepburn)? Moreover, Spielberg's immense cinephilia does not only fuel his most entertaining films. It will also serve to find the right tone for his historical explorations.

storyteller, storyteller

Since The Color Purple (1985, first infidelity to John Williams, since it is Quincy Jones who supervises the music), Steven Spielberg offers himself periods of rest far from the frenzy of blockbusters to reinvest in more personal projects. immense fortune that it generates. Starring Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, it depicts the destiny of a black family at the beginning of the ^20th century, thus exposing the difficulties of this community in finding its place within American society after centuries of slavery.

But it's not just American history that interests him. Two years later, with The Empire of the Sun, Spielberg retraces the occupation of China by Japan and the Second World War on the Pacific side through the eyes of a young James Graham (Christian Bale), locked up in a prison camp during the whole conflict. This Second World War, precisely, Steven Spielberg is preparing to explore it more in depth in the 1990s by signing two films which will be controversial, but will each earn him an Oscar for Best Director.

In 1993, just after his amusing Jurassic Park, Spielberg became the first director in history to break a taboo: make a feature film fictionally recreating the Auschwitz extermination camp with Schindler's List. If his film was very widely applauded around the world (especially for the black and white photo of Janusz Kaminski, taking over from Douglas Slocombe with the director), some critics were more ambivalent when discovering the film. In N°43 of Vingtième Siècle, Revue d'Histoire, François Garçon signs a text entitled: "Between the Holocaust and terror, 'Schindler's List'."

Complimentary about how the filmmaker managed not to fall into certain traps of historical reconstruction and demonstrated a certain talent as a director, the critic nevertheless expressed reservations which can be summed up in these lines:

After Amistad, a historical reconstruction on the end of the slave trade in the ^19th century, the Hollywood prodigy revives the controversy for Saving Private Ryan, a humanist story of the search for a young soldier who must return home. and the fate of the section responsible for finding him. It's the first scene that will be talked about the most: an ultra-violent – ​​and therefore realistic – reconstruction of the landing of June 6, 1944 experienced from the point of view of the first American soldiers to set foot on the beach.

In order to achieve his goals (to become the first filmmaker to take on these subjects with accuracy), Steven Spielberg had to revise his classics, retain the best finds from pre-existing war films and free himself from their clumsiness. Despite the presence of Tom Hanks, Vin Diesel and Matt Damon in the credits of Saving Private Ryan, we find the big show of the day the longest without falling into the pitfall of glamour.

After a break in the early 2000s when he allowed himself to adapt two miscellaneous facts with shift and lightness (Stop me if you can in 2002 and The Terminal in 2004), Spielberg returned to more serious subjects with the consequences of taking of hostages of Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Games in 1972 (Munich, 2005). And then here he is in the First World War, retracing the conflict through the eyes of a horse that goes from owner to owner in Cheval de Guerre, adapted from a children's novel by Michael Morpurgo. This is an opportunity for the humanist director to recall that apart from the 18.6 million human beings killed between 1914 and 1918, ten million horses also died.

With Lincoln, a feverish portrait of the ^16th President of the United States, Spielberg offers a third Oscar for Best Actor to Daniel Day-Lewis in 2013. He reunites with Tom Hanks for The Bridge of Spies and Pentagon Papers, two films set in the early 1960s and 1970s, he freely draws inspiration from spy films and paranoid thrillers of the time to reconstruct two episodes in the history of the United States where ordinary heroes played a crucial role in an international scandal.

At the service of its public

As he showed in 2011 with The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Spielberg knows how to please his fans around the world. Asked several times about the similarities between Indiana Jones and Hergé's hero, here he is, with Peter Jackson in production, launching an episode of the Belgian comic strip in motion capture, the actors originals giving way to a digitized version of their performance. Undoubtedly, the success was greater on our side of the Atlantic. In France, it is even one of the biggest successes of his career with Les Dents de la mer, ET, the first three Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park.

It is in this same spirit of communion with his audience that Steven Spielberg decides to adapt in 2017 Ready Player One, a science fiction novel intended for a young readership which pays homage to the Hollywood master and to all the pop culture that engendered. By modestly skimming most of the references to his career, the director who changed the history of cinema and single-handedly gave birth to a new generation of spectators delivers without a doubt the most Spielbergian of his films.

Ready Player One takes place in the near future, in a world devastated by overpopulation and adult corporatism. But a band of dreamy teenagers doped in the pop-culture of the second half of the twentieth century will oppose them. Everything goes there: from cinephilia to contemporary history via video games (which Spielberg is particularly fond of) to mainstream literature... If Ready Player One is originally a declaration of love to the filmmaker in the form of novel-youth, the film is an affectionate response from the director to his fans.

Born in 1946, with almost 60 years of career to his credit, Steven Spielberg can boast of having brought in more than ten billion dollars in revenue for the Hollywood industry and brought together nearly one hundred million French spectators in cinemas. . Figures that no other filmmaker can claim to date.

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