Growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona, Steven Spielberg never thought he would eventually become old Hollywood. He was busy teaching himself how to make spaceships fly, and later sneaking into the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, hoping to be the new guy in town. If you’ve seen any of his early films, you understand why he’s made it. Unlike your neighbor and his backyard videos, Spielberg’s adolescent films have elaborate locations, props, and believable performances.
It is no longer any surprise when Spielberg resurrects dinosaurs or raises alien tripods out of the ground to vaporize humans. That’s what he does best. But everyone’s been waiting for another Indiana Jones, the old-school adventure with real action and few special effects. Even the director didn’t realize how much he’d missed it until it came time to wrap Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
“The last day of shooting was awful because I didn’t want it to end,” says Spielberg. “Harrison [Ford] didn’t want it to end, Karen [Allen]; none of us wanted it to end. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.”
Set in the 1950s to account for the 20-year gap between sequels, Spielberg promised that Indy IV would still feel like the original trilogy. He shot epic action using as few digital effects as possible. The only modern advance he used was pre-visualization, a new program that lets directors edit animated sequences before they film. This way they can plan their filming needs more carefully.
“I get to make the movie before I actually make the movie,” explains Spielberg. “The only bad thing about that is it takes about 25% of the spontaneity out of making on-set discoveries because you fall in love with the pre-vis and you don’t give your imagination a chance to fly so much when you’re on the set. I had to fight that urge to stick with pre-vis by throwing out a lot of pre-vis if I thought I had a better idea the day I was shooting the actors.”
New Hollywood still honors Spielberg’s achievements. This past February, the Visual Effects Society gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award for making films that push the boundaries of technology. The young men (it’s still a predominantly male business) responsible for creating Transformers and squid-faced Davy Jones look up to Spielberg’s body of work.
This group of computer artists probably only dressed up in tuxedos this one night of the year, while Spielberg attends many Hollywood galas. He feels most at home among the techies, though. Most of these artists taught themselves their craft, much like young Spielberg did one Saturday afternoon in his bedroom.
“I wanted to do a movie about UFOs,” Spielberg recalled. “I remember grabbing this black poster board and taking a pin and just stabbing thousands of holes in this black poster board all day long. I took a little 8mm movie camera and I shot the poster board. I took the camera, rewound the film, and hung this little plastic spaceship from two strings that I painted black so they didn’t show up.”
The 13-year-old Spielberg waited two and a half weeks to see his footage developed. Now he can program it in the computer before he even hires the actors. In any era, filmmaking is not about the nuts and bolts to Spielberg. Old or new, dreaming will always be the key.
“The most important thing is the story and the performances that tell that story,” says Spielberg. “The visual effects basically just allow you to tell your story on a stage that isn’t practical to do in reality today. Special effects should be a way to help the story be told, but it shouldn’t be the end-all of storytelling. It should be the is-all, but not the end-all.”
Colleagues like James Cameron are shooting their new movies in 3D with high-tech digital cameras, omitting film entirely. For the duration of his career, Spielberg insists on old school technique. “I’m a film guy,” he says. “I shoot my movies on film but the industry is tipping towards digital conversion.”
Spielberg looks ahead to new technologies that can bring even greater dreams into reality. “I think we’re all heading inexorably towards three-dimensional reality movies,” he says. “There’s going to be more 3D coming at us than the inventors of 3D in the 1950s ever imagined.
