Steven Spielberg – Hollywood Reporter

Steven Spielberg: A Filmmaker’s Influence

Whenever a filmmaker breaks through to a new creative plateau, Steven Spielberg is usually one of the first to call. It’s one of the more inspiring and grounding things for an artist to receive – that phone call. Instead of a voice from high atop Olympus, it’s Spielberg, excitedly detailing the shots and the poetry and the moments that captivated him, speaking as a peer. The message he gives his fellow filmmakers in those phone calls is pure gold: Stay a fan. Remain in awe of the possibilities in cinema. It’s fun.

What’s more inspiring to me is how Steven has shaped his body of work. His early years were marked by explosive commercial successes, and he was quickly proclaimed the medium’s boxoffice king. But Spielberg’s work has always traveled on another, more personal track.

Viewed in total now, it’s clear his films are a diary as personal as Truffaut’s – from the giddy joys of youth, to the importance of heroes, to an increasing awareness of global history and perspective, to the powers of parenthood and responsibility lurking just below the surface in films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “A.I.”

Haley Joel Osment’s long take of realization of his own mortality in “A.I.” is one of the most autobiographical and revealing moments in film history. Who says personal filmmaking can’t be accomplished in the mainstream?

Many years from now, far more important even than the boxoffice performances, Steven Spielberg’s films will form a complete portrait of a great life lived in public. And that will be one of the greatest joys of cinema, available to generations long after we’re gone.

My only question is this: Who calls Spielberg to congratulate him?

Courtesy of the Hollywood Reporter – Cameron Crowe – March 2002