NEW YORK -- In his recent book, Ready When You Are, Mr. Coppola, Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Crowe, popular assistant director Jerry Ziesmer describes the Steven Spielberg of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as so unassuming that it was shocking when the director snapped into command mode on the set.
That revelation sums up this extraordinary filmmaker. When Spielberg is at his best, his love of the process -- not just his knowledge of movie arts and crafts and his intention to fulfill his vision -- animates him.
The first time I interviewed him, for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg said he regretted I hadn't been able to see him in the editing room, working with his longtime cutter, Michael Kahn. I took that not as director-journalist flattery, but as an honest wish for a reporter to see what he could do. When I spoke with him a year later, at the time of E.T., he overflowed with opinions about contemporary and classic moviemakers and was able to hold forth on every choice of angle, performance, light or music in his own work. This born director was growing in leaps and bounds.
These days, though, Spielberg is both a master craftsman and something else: a much-admired public figure, with Oscars to his credit for Schindler's List, the gratitude of Holocaust survivors and historians for his creation of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and constant scrutiny from trade and business reporters for co-founding the DreamWorks movie studio.
At the recent East Coast press gathering for his new movie, Minority Report, curiosity about his life outside of movies led questioners far afield. They brought up the stalker who threatened him and his wife, actress Kate Capshaw. And they brought up his earning a belated B.A. from Long Beach State. He was glad to get it, he said, while his 85-year-old dad, who valued education over jobs, was still alive. (Spielberg's favorite subjects, not surprisingly, were marine biology and paleontology.)
When I sat down with him for a one-on-one interview, our first in 20 years, he said, "You haven't changed, and that speaks well of you." He hadn't changed either, which speaks even better of him. Throughout this press day, he faced, with grace and good humor, the demands of fame that can prevent an artist from sustaining his focus and maintaining purity of effort.
As Minority Report suggests, Spielberg may be grasping for maturity in too obvious ways, tackling weighty themes and not thinking -- or, more important, feeling -- his way completely through them. It makes you wish he could reach into his present private life and draw a portrait of suburban adults as indelible as those he's rendered of suburban kids. Still, he remains an avid and inventive moviemaker.
Cruise and Spielberg
In a Manhattan hotel, Spielberg shared the spotlight with Cruise as they engaged in successive group talks and individual conversations. Genius trumped glamour: Even when Cruise spoke alone, the subject, much of the time, was Spielberg.
The master of being personable without ever getting personal, Cruise locked eyes with reporters and pushed his and Spielberg 's movie to the max. As everyone knows by now, they met when Cruise was making Risky Business, but it wasn't until the star sent the director an early script of Minority Report that the two began a collaboration. Cruise is ecstatic at the outcome, saying that Spielberg's imagination and ability to tell a story were "just staggering."
In Minority Report, based on a Philip K. Dick short story, Cruise plays John Anderton, the head of the "Pre-Crime" unit of the Justice Department in 2054. This agency stops murders before they're committed, thanks to the predictions of ESP savants called Pre-Cogs. The latest killer they pre-finger is Anderton himself.
Although Cruise takes credit for "deepening" his character by recommending they "start out with a character who has a loss, like the loss of a child," he gave Spielberg full credit for making a movie that delighted both of them.
"It was all Steven," he says. That includes everything from the idea of Anderton "scrubbing the image" of the Pre-Cogs' psychic projection of murder scenes -- manipulating the visual content with flicks of his fingers -- to setting the movie a mere half-century in the future, so that audiences would look at the privacy issues of today and consider "what we're all being asked to give up." Even the reigning motif in the dialogue -- "Everybody runs" -- came from a Spielberg improv on the set, according to Cruise.
Cruise's enthusiastic backing of his film projects is one of his most likable characteristics. He has won praise within the industry for being the opposite of a temperamental artist. But his range remains limited; even his change-of-pace role in Magnolia amounts to a sleazy parody of his usual go-getter screen persona.
In vain critics have tried to analyze the source of his appeal for audiences -- and, even more mysteriously, for filmmakers. What if he's primarily just a nice guy to do business with? And what does Spielberg's increasing propensity for collaborating with gentleman superstars like Cruise and Tom Hanks reveal, if anything, about the state of his art?
Bard to businessman?
Spielberg's greatest achievement as a director, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, came out of his primal feelings and marked him as the bard of suburbia. The passion behind Schindler's List emerged from his rediscovery and embracing of his Judaism; Saving Private Ryan and Amistad, in some ways, grow out of that breakthrough, too.
But now Spielberg is in the place where most successful directors wind up: He's exhausted his obsessions and gone looking for properties. When you talk to him about his new projects, you don't sense the same bone-deep engagement you did when he was talking about his earlier films. At age 55, has the suburban child-poet become a middle-aged suburban businessman?
Both he and Cruise come across like spokesmen for wholesome priorities. "Tom's greatest love are his children; that comes first in his life," Spielberg tells the assembled reporters, and adds: "We have that in common." (He describes Report co-star Colin Farrell as radical partly because he uses "the F word.") Later he says: "I didn't worry about the world until I had my children. And then I got worried about being protective of them. And that's why I made Schindler's List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan; that's why Minority Report is darker than Spider-Man. It's about leaving things behind for them."
But is tackling more superficially serious subject matter a true sign of growing up for an artist whose trademark used to be his playful command of the medium? And is looking outside himself -- generally, toward history -- the key to making adult movies? It comes as a relief to hear Spielberg say, "The fact of the matter is, it's fun to experiment, and both Tom and I saw Minority Report as a grand experiment. We tried different things and messed around with the form."
Still, when Spielberg and his kindred spirits in the 1970s "messed around" with movie forms, they followed trains of experiment all the way from engine to caboose. Martin Scorsese reinvented street dramas, George Lucas space operas, and Brian De Palma Hitchcockian thrillers, just as Spielberg did monster films in Jaws and flying-saucer pictures with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. By contrast, Minority Report, like Spielberg's reworking of Kubrick's script for A.I, is a mishmash -- eye-catching but frustrating in its forced melding of '40s whodunit, '50s paranoid sci-fi and the kind of summer thrill ride Spielberg keeps insisting it isn't.
Spontaneous pundit
I wonder whether these pictures might have turned out differently if Spielberg were still having the daily conversations about movies he had "back in the day" with peers like Scorsese and De Palma. "I do miss that," he admits. "I kind of miss that old New Wave feeling -- it was like the abstract expressionists in New York, sitting around SoHo, sipping demitasses."
These days, his interaction with other filmmakers falls more into the show-biz tradition of amiable high jinks. Why does Cameron Crowe, for instance, make a cameo in Minority Report? "Payback for Vanilla Sky," Spielberg explains. When Spielberg visited that movie's set, Crowe had roped him into a scene as a joke on Cruise; the walk-on turned into a two-hour job. So on Minority Report, Spielberg called Crowe for an all-night shoot at the downtown subway station in Los Angeles. "I want you on the set at midnight," Spielberg remembers telling him. "And I kept him there till 3:30 in the morning."
During our one-on-one conversation, I want to catalyze Spielberg back into being the spontaneous pundit he was at the time of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and E.T. (1982) -- a high-spirited fellow whose spritzing appreciation of diverse filmmakers anticipated the film-critic-cum-auteur persona of Quentin Tarantino a decade later.
I don't have to struggle.
Right away, he shoots down my notion that he couldn't have made this dark fantasy without first working on the Kubrick-derived A.I. -- another ambivalent look at the future. "I could have skipped A.I. and still made this film exactly the same way," he says.
But what about the use of classical music as a backdrop to the scenes of Anderton "scrubbing the images" of mayhem? Isn't that like Kubrick playing classical favorites behind sequences of rape and carnage in A Clockwork Orange?
"No. Tom Cruise's character puts that classical music in there because he's looking at images of loss of life and grotesquerie that would desensitize anybody. That's why he puts the music on: to narrow his focus and remove distractions, so he can do his job of figuring out where the murder is going to happen. Not to intensify his feelings, which is what [Malcolm] McDowell does in A Clockwork Orange."
What about the scene in which Cruise's eyes are pried open like McDowell's in A Clockwork Orange?
"That's the most easy, identifiable symbol! But that's an interesting thing, too, because it never read like A Clockwork Orange in the script -- it simply read like an operation. That moment should be considered a friendly nod in Stanley Kubrick's direction, but the whole movie should not be taken as a nod to Stanley. It's more of a nod to old-fashioned 1950s futurists like Philip K. Dick and their paranoid kind of point of view."
Trying a film noir
Spielberg hired Scott Frank to write Minority Report's screenplay because he admired his adaptations of Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty and Out of Sight, and he wanted Minority Report "to be like an old-fashioned film noir murder mystery. I just thought there was a lot to be said for a genre that hadn't been seen in this country since Chinatown."
What about L.A. Confidential? I ask.
"I never saw L.A. Confidential as a film noir. I saw it as a good crime drama. Chinatown is film noir -- as I see it, everybody has a fatalistic view of their outcomes, and there's an ennui hanging over everybody's head. The lighting is always bright on one side and dark on the other, and there are lots of shadows.
"I never had a chance to play around with film noir before. So I thought it would be fun to take this futuristic story, which has its own phylum, and crash it into a murder-mystery whodunit. And then wrap all that inside a film-noir style. That's what challenged me -- not one thing, but the combination of things."
But '50s sci-fi has its own world-view; in Dick's story, for example, the Pre-Crime system works. Doesn't that clash with Spielberg's worldview?
"That's right," he says. "I immediately, when I read the story, said he's got it all right, except he believes what Anthony Quinn says to Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia: 'Oh, it was written.' And I agree, most of the time, with what O'Toole says as T.E. Lawrence: 'It's not written until I write it.' You can change the course of your existence.
"I believe not in predeterminism, but in self-determinism. You can basically write your own script. You can't do it all the time and you can't do it consistently, and there are times when you suddenly look to heaven and say that wasn't my plan. But we have to try, we have to think we have a choice. It would be awful to think we're being moved around some big chessboard and we're not determining our own lives."
To Spielberg, that's a metaphor for him resisting plum opportunities like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and moving away from choices that threatened to pigeonhole him as a new Disney.
"It's a very personal subject for me. I've taken control of my life by making choices that aren't the favorite choices of other people. But they're not living my life -- although they'd certainly like to order from the menu and have me serve it up to them.
"For many years I did that. All my Indiana Jones sequels, and Jurassic Park, came out of me wanting to give the audience what it wanted. Even, to an extent, The Color Purple. But as I get older and try to take stock of myself and try to see 'Who am I?' when I'm not trying to please, I realize that I'm not the same person who made E.T. That's not to say I couldn't make E.T. again, but I wouldn't want to make E.T. again."
'Delicious epiphanies'
The only masters he is trying to please today, Spielberg says, are his family and himself.
"With Minority Report, I needed to find something in the story that I'd never done before with motion picture film and with actors. I wanted to do a complicated plot that pays off deliciously the way Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much pays off when somebody realizes that Ambrose Church is a place, not a person.
"I like those delicious epiphanies you get in Hitchcock movies, or John Huston movies like The Maltese Falcon. I love that stuff, and I wanted to feel what it must have been like for them 50 or 60 years ago to weave a mystery and fool some of the people some of the time."
There are, of course, some inevitable differences between Spielberg's web-weaving and Huston's. Depression and postwar mean streets gave film noir and the novels that inspired it a distinct social background. Minority Report shows us horrifying patches of inner cities, but also portraits of a consumer society in which everything is so fluid and interactive that a newspaper updates itself as you read it and the brand-name displays in stores scan your eyes and talk to you directly.
"I didn't want to show that the future was ugly," Spielberg says. "I wanted to show that in the future we were going to have many violations of our privacy and civil freedoms, and that we have only ourselves to blame.
"Because we obviously also had a choice to stop this thing before it went so far and obviously we didn't. Because people enjoyed it, they welcomed the existence of a hyper-interactive system of spot-target advertising; then it bled out to targeting dreams and nightmares and finding out if you're going to be a threat to society and coming to get you when you're flipping burgers in the back yard in front of your children. And that interests me. That whole thing is the future that scares me, and because I'm frightened by it, I'm attracted to it."
Was there a danger of affecting the viewer with sensory overload?
"A lot of overload is on the cutting-room floor. What's in there is just enough, I think, to give you a sense of period and place and yet not distract from the story and mystery. Most of the special effects in the movie serve you up the mystery and give you all the clues. You have to look at a special effect to understand how Anderton is going to find out who and why he's going to kill in 36 hours. The majority of effects are disguised as story; the rest of the effects are eye candy."
Has Spielberg gotten the proportion right in Minority Report? For some of us, the cliffhanger episodes on a vertical superhighway or in a Lexus factory are his way of doing what used to be called sugarcoating the pill. But maybe we should concentrate on those large sections of the film that go right -- the exciting introduction of the Pre-Crime system, or the engaging, almost musical-comedy-like sequence when John Anderton and a Pre-Cog dodge police in a mall.
Having oscillated between entertainer and artist for decades, Spielberg in this middle phase of his career could become the sort of creator whose preferences in story and in style transform his material as naturally as a painter's line. Judging from Minority Report, he's halfway there.