Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg is a director, born 1946.

Steven Spielberg grew up in Cincinnati and Phoenix, studied film in college and got his start directing television, including episodes of Night Gallery and Columbo. The television film Duel in 1971 is where the ability is already fully visible: a man, a truck, no explanation and ninety minutes of escalating geometry. His theatrical debut was The Sugarland Express in 1974, which also began the collaboration with John Williams, who has scored all but five of his features.

Jaws in 1975 invented the summer blockbuster more or less by accident, in large part because the mechanical shark kept failing and the film had to imply the threat instead. What Spielberg does better than anyone is stage information: where the camera is, what the audience knows before the characters do, and how long to make everyone wait. The kitchen in Jurassic Park, the landing in Saving Private Ryan and the first bicycle in E.T. are the same skill applied at three different temperatures.

The serious half of the career started with Schindler's List in 1993, released in the same year as Jurassic Park, which is a ridiculous thing for one director to have done. Since then he has alternated deliberately: Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Lincoln and The Post on one side, Minority Report, War of the Worlds and Ready Player One on the other. The Fabelmans, late on, turns the camera on his own childhood.

He is the highest-grossing director in history, holds three Academy Awards, twelve Emmys, four Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, an honorary knighthood, the Kennedy Center Honor, the AFI Life Achievement Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Where to start with Steven Spielberg

Jaws is the start, and it is still the best-directed thing he has made. Fifty years of blockbusters have copied its structure and almost none have matched its patience about withholding the monster.

From there, Raiders of the Lost Ark for pure craft, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the suburban childhood he essentially invented as a subject, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the strangest and most personal of the early run.

Schindler's List is the pivot, and it is worth watching in the knowledge that he made it the same year as Jurassic Park. For later Spielberg, Munich is the toughest and least sentimental film in the filmography, while Catch Me If You Can is the most relaxed and charming.

To see the whole talent in miniature, before any of the fame, watch Duel, made for television in 1971 with a truck, a car and nothing else.

The Spielberg films that invented the summer blockbuster

A mechanical shark that would not work forced him to shoot around it, and modern popular cinema came out the other side. Jaws is the origin, Raiders is the most purely enjoyable thing he made, and Jurassic Park proved once more that he stages spectacle better when the effect is mostly withheld.

When Spielberg went serious, and whether it worked

The second career, where the technical brilliance is turned on history. Schindler's List is the one that finally won him the Academy's respect. Saving Private Ryan opens with twenty minutes nobody has matched, and Bridge of Spies and The Post are the late, talky, quietly angry films.

The Spielberg films about children and absent fathers

Once you notice it you cannot stop. E.T. is a divorce film with an alien in it, Hook is Peter Pan as a man who forgot his kids, and A.I. is the bleakest version of the same wish. Close Encounters ends with a father choosing to leave, which the film treats as triumph.

The later Spielberg blockbusters, ranked honestly

Not everything after 1998 lands, and the interesting thing is watching a master of staging work with material that fights him. War of the Worlds is genuinely frightening for an hour, Ready Player One is the most impersonal, and Crystal Skull is the one everyone uses as a punchline.