Steven Spielberg

Ga.Pi. News Ga.Pi. News Steven Spielberg The Guardian - Jan. 19, 2018 Two days later, I am sitting opposite “And I saw the documentary. And it Spielberg – now 71 and looking like didn’t help.” Shortly after The Sixth Sense be- a kindly college professor, a sweater came a global sensation, its director, over his shirt and tie and under his As he told Daly, he doesn’t like to M Night Shyamalan – hailed on the jacket – about to ask the man him- overanalyse his own work too much, cover of Newsweek in 2002 as “the self. He is the most commercially for fear that the attempt to under- next Spielberg” – told an interviewer successful director in cinema histo- stand the source of all this creativity that, years earlier, he had realised ry, the man behind ET, Jurassic Park might cause it to dry up. the one ingenious trick that made and dozens more. So what makes a As it happens, The Post has a cou- Steven Spielberg movies so spec- Spielberg film? tacularly successful. Like a soft-drink ple of Spielberg hallmarks. There is manufacturer who had stumbled on He answers by noting that he re- the familiar clash of idealism against the secret recipe for Coca-Cola, Shy- cently saw Spielberg, a two-hour pragmatism, the brave soul (or amalan could not believe his luck. documentary by Susan Daly, detail- souls) ready to stand up for what’s What was Spielberg’s killer formula, ing each stage of his storied career. right, against the vastly bigger forc- Shyamalan was asked. He would not “Even having looked at that docu- es pressing them to back down. say. Merely by under- mentary about myself, I still cannot In Bridge of Spies, Hanks was a standing it, he had lawyer pressured struck commercial to cut corners who gold and he did not insisted, instead, plan to share it. on the primacy of the constitution. In It didn’t quite work The Post, Hanks is out that way for Shy- a journalist taking amalan, who has the same stand. never matched the (Both films join Lin- - Nico Tavernise - Alexsnail - David James Carlos Barria - - Nico Tavernise heights of that first coln as hymns to hit. But I thought of the virtues of the his imagined reve- US constitution.) lation as I watched And – like those Spielberg’s latest fleeing the shark, film. The Post stars the dinosaurs, or Meryl Streep and the relentless truck Tom Hanks as Kath- in Spielberg’s debut arine Graham and movie, Duel – the Ben Bradlee of the good guys have to Washington Post, the face down an im- duo who took on the placable bully. Nixon White House in 1971 to publish the But The Post has an added quality that some ear- Pentagon Papers, the US Depart- honestly tell you what attracts me to ment of Defense’s own secret histo- lier Spielberg movies may have a project and what presses my but- lacked: an uncanny topicality. That ry of the Vietnam war that laid bare tons and what gets me to say yes. I decades of government dishonesty. is not wholly coincidental. The di- can’t tell you.” rector first read the script for The It is a timely, absorbing story, beauti- Really? No clue as to what the com- Post just 11 months ago, deciding fully acted and masterfully told. But mon thread that connects his work instantly that he wanted to make what is the essential ingredient that might be? this story of a Republican presi- makes it a Spielberg movie? Where dent at war with the press – and is the neat narrative trick that Shya- “There’s a couple of movies that, he wanted to make it right now, malan thought he had spotted, the yes, I see my dog tags around the assembling screenwriters, crew trademark device that means The neck of the film, like anything that and A-list stars (including Streep Post sits in a canon that includes has to do with dinosaurs or intrepid and Hanks making their first film Jaws, Indiana Jones and Schin- archaeologists.” But more widely? together) in a fraction of the usual ph. Gage Skidmore - Jaap Buitendijk GianAngelo Pistoia/A.P. © Concept & design: GianAngelo Pistoia • Photos: Gage Skidmore dler’s List? He shakes his head and smiles. time. 9 4 5 10 Ga.Pi. News Ga.Pi. News “The level of urgency to make the per. For those who were inspired to first. But to the Times, the Post was movie was because of the current go into the trade by Alan J Pakula’s a provincial, local paper – barely a climate of this administration, bom- All the President’s Men (“arguably rival at all. barding the press and labelling the the greatest newspaper movie ever truth as fake if it suited them,” Spiel- made,” says Spielberg), with its he- These days, says Spielberg, the old berg tells me, recalling the sense roic tale of Bob Woodward and Carl obstacles he details so painstakingly of offence he felt at documented, Bernstein exposing Watergate, The in his film – the need to have enough provable events being branded Post is a delicious prequel: it argues coins in your pocket to call a source fake news. “I deeply resented the that the victory over the Pentagon from a payphone or the rigmarole of hashtag ‘alternative facts’, because Papers emboldened the Washing- booking two seats on a plane to ac- I’m a believer in only one truth, ton Post to keep fighting Nixon, all commodate boxes filled with secret which is the objective truth.” the way to his resignation in 1974. papers – have gone. But the inky (For anyone who knew Bradlee, hassles of what he calls the “ana- So The Post shows a silhouetted Hanks does not disappoint: he gets logue era of hard copy” have been Richard Nixon pacing the White the macho swagger of the walk, the replaced by new challenges, chiefly House, while we hear the disgraced growl in the voice, just right.) the sheer number of breaking stories former president’s voice – taped on and the speed of the news cycle, his own, notorious recording system But Spielberg insists his film is no “which is less than 24 hours. Some- – as he tramples on the first amend- nostalgia piece looking backward to times it’s 24 minutes. The intensity is ment, seeking to use the might of the days when US journalism was tenfold what it used to be.” his office to hobble the free press. in its pomp. “I think there’s a high- No one needs to mention Donald er standard of journalism today than If The Post feels timely, it is not sole- Trump for his shadow to loom over there even was then,” he says. For ly because Americans are witnessing this movie. that he credits today’s competi- anew a pitched battle of president v tive landscape, with the Post and press. The central human story of the Journalists will lap it up, of course. the New York Times jostling daily film is the transformation of Graham, Like James Graham’s stage play for exclusives on the Trump White the Post’s owner – who had taken Ink, it features one sequence lov- House. Back in 1971, that duel was, the helm of the paper only after her ingly recreating the old process of the director says, “a one-way street”. husband’s suicide – from a hesitant, hot metal – the clanging of heavy, Bradlee was furious that the New self-doubting Washington society blackened machines – once neces- York Times had beaten him to the hostess, into a decisive, steely wom- sary to produce a printed newspa- Pentagon Papers, publishing them an who refuses to be pushed around. 9 6 7 10 Ga.Pi. News Ga.Pi. News Accordingly, Spielberg repeated- ly shows us Graham/Streep as the only woman in a room full of besuited men, interrupted by men, talked over and down to by men, even those supposedly junior to her. We watch as she develops the strength finally to turn around and say: “Enough.” When, in February 2017, Spielberg picked up The Post’s script, original- ly written by 31-year-old Liz Hannah, he can’t have known how resonant it would become. “I didn’t know because the sexual as- sault tsunami hadn’t happened yet. Of course it had been happening for decades and decades, but this par- ticular 8.2 earthquake had not yet occurred.” Was he aware of what certain men were doing in his industry? “Certainly aware of the existence probably all the way back to William Shakespeare’s time of the casting couch, and the prevalence of sexual abuse and sexual intimidation in the old Hollywood of the 1920s, 30s and 40s.” But he has been a player in Holly- wood for nearly 50 years. Surely he must have seen something? “There was some inappropriate be- haviour years and years ago inside my own company, which we dealt with and dismissed the person in- volved in that. But I’ve always had small companies with no more than 70 employees, and my companies have always been run by women. I find when companies are run by women, there’s less of a chance for men to get away with that kind of be- haviour.” And what about Harvey Weinstein himself? Surely that was not a sur- prise? “I knew that he was a bully, and I knew that he was a very intimidating com- petitor. But I learned for the first time about his sexual proclivities when I read the [New Yorker] storyby Ronan Farrow.” There is one scene in The Post that Spielberg tells me he improvised on the day.

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