Steven Spielberg

Born: 18 December 1946, Cincinnati, Ohio
Nationality: American
Active since: 1971
Best known for: Jaws, E.T., Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Lincoln

Who they are

Steven Spielberg invented the modern Hollywood blockbuster with Jaws in 1975 and has, in the half-century since, alternated between the spectacle-driven films that defined the industry he helped create (Close Encounters, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones sequels, Ready Player One) and serious historical dramas that work in an almost entirely different register (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The Post).

He has been nominated for Best Director nine times and won twice (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan). He co-founded DreamWorks in 1994. He is, by a wide margin, the highest-grossing director in the history of cinema, with cumulative worldwide box-office in excess of $10 billion before adjusting for inflation.

The remarkable thing about Spielberg is the back-to-back filmography. Jurassic Park and Schindler's List shot consecutively in 1993. War of the Worlds and Munich released in the same year. He releases serious historical drama at the rate other directors release their entire careers.

Directing style & recurring concerns

Camera as guide

Spielberg moves the camera as a method of teaching the audience how to feel. The dolly into Roy Neary's face in Close Encounters. The long unbroken shot pulling Indiana Jones into the temple in Raiders. The vertigo of Captain Miller's POV on Omaha Beach. The camera is rarely static, never showy, and almost always doing emotional work that the cutting then completes.

His longtime DP collaborators — Janusz Kamiński for the last thirty-plus years — have settled into a visual approach that uses lens flares, hand-held instability, and desaturated colour grading for the serious films, and more controlled steadicam and Panaglide work for the adventure films.

Faces of children

Spielberg's most-quoted compositional trademark is the child's face looking up — at the spaceship, the dinosaur, the truck, the alien. The technique works because Spielberg trusts the audience to read the face for awe rather than telling them what to feel. He learned it from John Ford, whose Westerns repeatedly framed reaction shots before showing what was being reacted to.

The serious films share a structural concern

From The Color Purple through Lincoln, Spielberg's prestige dramas are interested in how decent people behave inside systems that punish decency. Schindler is a profiteer who finds himself unable to keep profiteering. Miller is a teacher conscripted into command. Lincoln is a politician who must compromise to do good. The films keep returning to this question.

Filmography

1971 — Duel (TV). His debut feature, made for television. A truck stalks a businessman across the desert. Patricia Highsmith would have approved.
1975 — Jaws. Invented the summer blockbuster. The shark malfunctioned, forcing Spielberg to imply rather than show. The constraint made the film.
1977 — Close Encounters of the Third Kind. First-contact film with no aliens-as-villain. Played in IMAX, scored by Williams.
1981 — Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pulp adventure raised to the level of art direction. Launched four sequels.
1982 — E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Domestic fairy tale; one of the highest-grossing films of all time on release.
1985 — The Color Purple. First major dramatic departure. Eleven Oscar nominations, zero wins — a contested result.
1987 — Empire of the Sun. Adapted from J.G. Ballard. The film Christian Bale's child performance has never been surpassed in.
1989 — Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sean Connery joins as Jones senior. The most affectionate Indy film.
1993 — Jurassic Park. Industrial Light & Magic's CGI dinosaurs changed VFX forever.
1993 — Schindler's List. Filmed back-to-back with Jurassic Park. Won Best Picture and Best Director.
1997 — Amistad. Slave-ship mutiny and the Supreme Court case that followed.
1998 — Saving Private Ryan. The Omaha Beach landing rewrote what war on film could look like.
2001 — A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Inherited from Stanley Kubrick. The most divisive film of his career; the case for it has grown.
2002 — Minority Report. Philip K. Dick adaptation. Visual influence on a generation of UI design.
2005 — Munich. 1972 Olympics aftermath. One of his most morally complex films.
2011 — The Adventures of Tintin. Motion-capture animation. Underrated.
2012 — Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis won his third Best Actor Oscar.
2015 — Bridge of Spies. Cold War legal drama with a Coen brothers screenplay.
2017 — The Post. Pentagon Papers. Hanks and Streep.
2018 — Ready Player One. Adaptation of Ernest Cline's novel. A blockbuster about blockbusters.
2021 — West Side Story. Musical remake. His best-shot film of the decade.
2022 — The Fabelmans. Semi-autobiographical drama of his own teenage years.

Where to start

If you've never watched a Spielberg film:

Saving Private Ryan (1998) — If you want the most technically accomplished example of his serious-film mode.
Schindler's List (1993) — If you want the film widely considered his masterpiece.
Jaws (1975) — If you want to see the blockbuster being invented in real time.

Influences and contemporaries

John Ford, Frank Capra, David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks. In turn, Spielberg has shaped almost every major American director who came up in the 1980s and 90s, from J.J. Abrams to Robert Zemeckis to the Duffer Brothers.