Steven Spielberg from Jaws to paws - Brief Article

Interview, Oct, 1999

We caught up with the director Steven Spielberg the week he was leaving Los Angeles to shoot the last big scene in his new film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.

INTERVIEW: Should you let your dog in?

STEVEN SPIELBERG: He's an outdoor dog. He's really a very spoiled cocker spaniel. . . . Elmer, no. No! Go 'way. I don't want him to jump up on you.

We were a little dismayed that you were at the new house, because you are Mr. Nice Guy, and we don't have any dish on you, so we wanted to snoop around your place, check out what's on the walls and your record collection.

I'll tell you what's in my record collection. Topping the list of records I have, about 760 (it changes every week) are soundtrack recordings.

Stock soundtracks?

Three-quarters of the records are stock, and the rest are collector's items. The score that I want more than anything else - and I will trade an original Touch of Evil, one Horse Soldiers, one King of Kings, and any early Tiomkin for it - is The Searchers.

I should have gotten To Kill a Mockingbird. That's the most beautiful.

Oh, I have that! It's funny - I just got that today, because my secretary knows Elmer Bernstein, and she just came over this morning with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Pretty, isn't it? You know another very pretty thing is Jerry Goldsmith's A Patch of Blue. Max Steiner was probably the best composer for film ever to have lived. The one classical composer who was born to score movies and never did was Bartok.

Well, they weren't around.

He was around. Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was commissioned in 1936. See, Korngold could also have become a Bartok or a Sibelius, but he went to movies, and he brought a lot of classical music to film. Just like Prokofiev, who scored a number of Russian movies. Eisenstein used Prokofiev.

I really liked the Jaws music, sort of that "Down to the Sea in Ships" type of thing. Well, John [Williams] and I sat together and listened to a lot of Vaughn Williams and Stravinsky, and then he went off and composed on the piano. John called me over to his house very excited. He sat at the piano and said, "Here's the theme from Jaws." He began playing this very primordial repetition on the lower notes. I thought he was fooling around. I mean "da da Dah da Dah da." I began to laugh, and John said, "Oh, no, this is serious. I mean it. This is Jaws."

We were talking yesterday about how schizophrenic being a director must be. In a way you have to exercise so much control and then you have to give it up at the same time.

Yeah. What you really have to do is . . . you have to become everybody in order to understand where everybody's head is at. At some time in your life you had to have had experience in that area so at least when somebody comes crying to you that the clothes don't fit, you can understand "inseam." I get so wound up in the film that I become selfless to the point where I lose too much weight. All of my regular routine habits go out the window. I don't get enough sleep at night, and basically I become moody and introspective and not the nicest person to be around, and quite possibly entirely celibate for the period of principal photography. In a way you're fucking your movie, and there's very little room for friends, for family, for anything else.

Plus, being only twenty-nine years old you really have the burden of so much responsibility.

The age doesn't really matter to me as it seems to matter to other people. A lot of people think that youth or age is the total sum of your knowledge about anything, and it's absolutely untrue. I think I might have even known more five years ago than I do now.

Are those your happiest moments, when you're losing weight, and . . .?

No, my happiest moments are when I'm putting the picture together in post-production and things are working as rye planned. There are two great rewards that I heap upon myself when I'm directing. The first is when I first get the idea months before and I start shooting, and I jump up and down and I drink my Dr Pepper and I go out and celebrate. And the second nicest moment is when I'm in the editing room and I cut that concept together and it works. The best-laid plans actually paid off. That's the second celebration. In between, the making of the movie is just pure warm shit. I was lucky on Jaws and Close Encounters. . . . I worked with people I liked. But the making of the movie and the routine of making the movie is a lot like being in a Spanish prison for five years on a marijuana breakdown, you know?

It's the circles of hell. It's Dante.

[Francois] Truffaut says the best thing about making a movie, and I can't quote him exactly, but at one point Truffaut said that making a movie is like a stagecoach ride through the Old West: At first you wish for a pleasant trip, and after a while you just hope you reach your destination.

What did you make in that big hangar down in Mobile?

I can't talk too much about the hangars and all the secrets of Close Encounters. I can just say that it's a movie about the UFO phenomenon worldwide. And it just answers some questions I think a lot of people have been asking, if you believe the Gallup poll, about, you know, what that thing is at night when you look up into the sky when you're on a camping trip.