A Young Spielberg
Steven Spielberg gets to “live his dream” everyday making movies that reflect his own life and childhood. His creativity and imagination is what has led him to become one of the most influential people in America (due to LIFE magazine) and is a big influence on directors today. So much, that directors will ask for his help while they are in production, and quite often his advice will be brought into the movie. Directors from Cloverfield, Star Trek, and Premium Rush sought out advice on these films from Spielberg. Matt Reeves (director of Cloverfield) says that he had “sent Spielberg a cut during post-production with the hope that he would give them creative notes.” And sure enough, the ending of the movie had been Spielberg’s idea and ended up helping the movie a lot. From what our team has found, Spielberg stands very tall over the film industry today because of the amazing creativity he has shown through past movies. Everyone wants a little piece of his uniqueness seen in their movies!
From many different articles and interviews Spielberg talks about the big impact that his childhood has had throughout his life and movies. Dealing with a lot of moves and his parents divorce may be the reason to his creativity, or it could just be the natural ability that many genius’s hold. Whether this has led to his creativity or not, these things have influenced him enough that he brings them into his movies, which Spielberg talks about in an interview with 60 minutes. Films such as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind have missing fathers who left their families behind. Not only does he tackle some emotionally powerful issues for himself, but he has also made some of the most amazing adventure movies for his time.
One of the biggest aspects of his career, is the intensity of the real life characters he has brought into his movies. At the time of Jaws and Jurassic Park, these things weren’t even imaginable and through his creative imagination he was able to achieve something that was unlike anything the 70’ had developed. Who would have thought (at this time period) that a movie could be made with realistic dinosaurs and sharks? This takes a lot of dedication and thought to accomplish such things; no one could have done this had they not had the wild creativity that Spielberg has continually shown us on the big screen. In one interview he talks about how the shark they were using became broken, so when it came time to film he didn’t have anything to work with! So through this, he thought of his audience and brought them into the scene. This is when he used the water as his resource and went from there. He literally created something with nothing. This screams genius, and really shows what a creative mind can bring to the plate.
For a list of resources and citations, please visit our team’s citations and links page.
The Genius of Steven Spielberg 