Steven Spielberg self-censored for years believing he would be rejected, but everything changed in 1993 – Film News

The director had just released Jurassic Park, but was tormented by the image people had of him.

It’s difficult to think that a film director like Steven Spielberg, who has been making films for six decades and has accumulated so many successes that we can’t count them on both hands, has gone through difficult phases, full of fears and insecurities.

At the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, the American filmmaker already had a long list of films that made cinema history: from those that allowed him to stand out in the industry, like Jaws, to those that established him as one of the most important directors of his generation, like ET — The Extra-Terrestrial or the Indiana Jones saga.

However, some disappointments also began to accumulate in his filmography — some that would gain greater recognition over time — and part of the industry began to petrify him as a filmmaker who only made blockbuster family films.

Steven Spielberg even showed interest in other genres and tried to make more adult films like Empire of the Sun and The Color Purple — which were nominated for 11 Oscars, but didn’t win any.

That second half of the 80s marked a very different stage in his cinema and only the subsequent episodes of Indiana Jones still lived up to the box office successes he was used to.

Steven Spielberg experienced ups and downs at that time, but the reality is that he wasn’t particularly satisfied. The director sought artistic maturity in himself, but felt that this was not what the public would accept from him.

In streaming: Steven Spielberg made one of the most expensive series in television history and also one of the best of his career

In fact, as he acknowledged in an interesting interview with The New Yorker in 1994, he censored himself for years, leaving behind ideas “of a political and social nature.” Fortunately, Steven Spielberg decided to make Schindler’s List and changed both his own image in the industry and the way he saw himself.

“I had to become that. It took me years before I was ready to do Schindler’s List. I had a lot of projects on my shelves that were political in nature and had a social reading. They even had ‘political correctness’ stamped on them. And I I didn’t make those films because I was censoring that part of me saying to myself, ‘This isn’t what the public will accept from you.'”

“What they will accept from you are emotions, goosebumps, awe and that kind of thing,” Steven Spielberg said to himself about the vision he felt the public, the industry and critics had projected onto him after some criticism that hurt him badly. .

“I was afraid people would say, as many have said about The Color Purple, ‘That’s not his shoe size. That’s the wrong style. What is he doing? Who is he trying to become? He wants to be Martin Scorsese? Who does he think he is?’ I had heard all these criticisms.”

However, Spielberg launched with Schindler’s List and did some of the best work of his career — and also some of the work he’s most proud of. The film is an adaptation of the book by Thomas Keneally that told the story of Oskar Schindler, a Nazi businessman who began employing Jews in his factory in Krakow and ended up saving eleven hundred of them from the extermination camps.

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