Steven Spielberg has for many, already from an early childhood, been the director that sparked the magic of movies. The critically acclaimed documentary director Susan Lacy portrays the stunning career of Steven Spielberg, in her film titled Spielberg. Spielberg is one of the world’s most influential movie directors, and the documentary shows how he has reinvented himself over and over again throughout his career. It also offers a very intimate view of how his personal life and, in particular, how his relationship with his father has influenced his movies and the characters in his movies. This can be seen more or less throughout all the movies he has directed.
Furthermore, we get an understanding of the many chances that Spielberg took, especially early in his career, for instance with regards to how he shot Jaws. He decided to shoot all scenes involving the sea, at sea, rather than at a lake or in a studio. It had to look real, it had to be authentic! This lead to numerous challenges that neither he or his fellow crew members had foreseen, such as difficulties with proper lighting, and how the waves and currents made it difficult to shoot the various scenes with the boats wobbling and drifting of in different directions. However, he stuck with it and the end result became an enormous success!
The documentary shows how relentless and dedicated Spielberg can be once he sets his mind to something. How he, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas influenced each other, sparred and pushed each other to further improve their work. It seems that this tight camaraderie around the love for film-making elevated their skills and made them significantly better than they otherwise would, if working in solitude.
The documentary also covers his struggles with his background as a Jew and how he re-united with his faith so many years later, and how it strongly impacted his life when making Schindler’s List, which undoubtedly comes through in how emotionally strong and authentic this movie turned out in the end.
Spielberg has worked a with a lot of the same people (in his crew) for most of his career. He is described as having an almost unbelievable intuition for how to shoot a scene in terms of which lenses to use, lighting, camera angles and how the camera should move, that baffles even the most experienced directors. Even more surprisingly, it seems that he has had this uncanny ability ever since he started out filming in his early teens, and has only further improved and perfected this intuitive feel over the years.
The film offers a wonderful portray of a very interesting director who has touched most of us with one or more of his many movies, and is highly recommended to better understand him as a person and also what goes into the process of movie-making at this level.
The official Spielberg trailer
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