| Biography: |
In 2005, Steven Spielberg was rated the greatest film director of all time by Empire magazine.[192] In 1997 a Wall Street sell-side analyst said, "There are only two brand names in the business: Disney and Spielberg".[193]
After watching the unconventional, off-center camera techniques of Jaws, Alfred Hitchcock praised "young Spielberg," for thinking outside of the visual dynamics of the theater, saying "He's the first one of us who doesn't see the proscenium arch".[4][194]
Some of Spielberg's most notable admirers include Robert Aldrich,[195] Ingmar Bergman,[196] Werner Herzog,[197] Stanley Kubrick,[198] David Lean,[199] Sidney Lumet,[200] Roman Polanski,[201] Martin Scorsese,[202] François Truffaut,[203] David Lynch[204] and Zhang Yimou.[205]
Spielberg's movies have also influenced many directors that followed, including Adam Green, J. J. Abrams,[206] Paul Thomas Anderson,[207] Neill Blomkamp,[208] James Cameron,[209] Guillermo del Toro,[210] Roland Emmerich,[211] David Fincher, Peter Jackson,[212] Kal Ng,[213] Robert Rodriguez,[214] John Sayles,[215] Ridley Scott,[216] John Singleton,[217] Kevin Smith,[218] Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino,[219] and Gareth Edwards.[220] In 2016, Jeffrey Katzenberg said of Spielberg: "You can take James Cameron, Chris Nolan or Martin Scorsese - all brilliant and in many ways his peers, but look at quality and consistency, and no one compares."[221]
British film critic Tom Shone has said of Spielberg, "If you have to point to any one director of the last twenty-five years in whose work the medium of film was most fully itself – where we found out what it does best when left to its own devices, it has to be that guy."[222] Jess Cagle, the managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, called Spielberg "...arguably (well, who would argue?) the greatest filmmaker in history."[223]
Spielberg's critics complain that his films are overly sentimental and tritely moralistic.[224][225][226] In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, Peter Biskind summarized the views of Spielberg's detractors, accusing the director of "infantilizing the audience, reconstituting the spectator as child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection."[227]
Critics of mainstream film such as Ray Carney and American artist and actor Crispin Glover (who starred in the Spielberg-produced Back to the Future and who sued Spielberg for using his likeness in Back to the Future Part II)[228] claim that Spielberg's films lack depth and do not take risks.[229][230]
French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard stated that he holds Spielberg partly responsible for the lack of artistic merit in mainstream cinema and accused Spielberg of using his film Schindler's List to make a profit off tragedy while Schindler's wife, Emilie Schindler, lived in poverty in Argentina.[231] In defense of Spielberg, critic Roger Ebert said "Has Godard or any other director living or dead done more than Spielberg, with his Holocaust Project, to honor and preserve the memories of the survivors?"[232] Author Thomas Keneally has also disputed claims that Emilie Schindler was never paid for her contributions to the film, "not least because I had recently sent Emilie a check myself."[233]
Film critic Pauline Kael, who had championed Spielberg's films in the 1970s, expressed disappointment in his later development, stating that "he's become, I think, a very bad director.... And I'm a little ashamed for him, because I loved his early work.... [H]e turned to virtuous movies. And he's become so uninteresting now.... I think that he had it in him to become more of a fluid, far-out director. But, instead, he's become a melodramatist."[234]
Imre Kertész, Hungarian Jewish author, Nazi concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, criticized Spielberg's depiction of the Holocaust in Schindler's List as kitsch, saying "I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life and the very possibility of the Holocaust."[235] Veteran documentary filmmaker and professor Claude Lanzmann also labeled Schindler's List "pernicious in its impact and influence" and "very sentimental".[236]
Stephen Rowley wrote an extensive essay about Spielberg and his career in Senses of Cinema. In it he discussed Spielberg's strengths as a filmmaker, saying "there is a welcome complexity of tone and approach in these later films that defies the lazy stereotypes often bandied about his films" and that "Spielberg continues to take risks, with his body of work continuing to grow more impressive and ambitious", concluding that he has only received "limited, begrudging recognition" from critics.[226]
Shia LaBeouf, who worked with Spielberg on a number of films including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and various DreamWorks productions (notably the Transformers film series), described his experiences working with the director in a wide-ranging interview with Variety in 2016. He stated, "I grew up with this idea, [that] if you got to Spielberg, that’s where it is – I’m not talking about fame, and I’m not talking about money. You get there, and you realize you’re not meeting the Spielberg you dream of. You’re meeting a different Spielberg, who is in a different stage in his career. He’s less a director than he is a fucking company." He went on to discuss his on-set actor/director relationship with Spielberg, as well as the films they made together, "Spielberg’s sets are very different – everything has been so meticulously planned. You got to get this line out in 37 seconds. You do that for five years, you start to feel like not knowing what you’re doing for a living." He concluded his point by stating: "I don’t like the movies that I made with Spielberg. The only movie that I liked that we made together was [the first] Transformers [film]." Later in the interview, LaBeouf recited and criticised the advice given to him by Spielberg following the mixed reaction to both Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and LaBeouf's performance in the film. He claims Spielberg told him not to read about himself in the media, but LaBeouf felt irritated by what he perceived to be non-advice and a lack of understanding, saying "There’s no way to not do that. For me to not read that means I need to not take part in society. The generation previous to mine didn’t have the immediate response [of the internet]. If you were Mark Hamill [in Star Wars], you could lie to yourself. You could find the pockets of joy, and turn a blind eye to the shit over there."[237] |
