Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated ed. by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated ed. by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman Lawrence Baron (bio) Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated. Edited by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 212 pp., ISBN 9781496824028 (pb), US $30.95. One can gauge how much attitudes toward Steven Spielberg’s movies have changed between the publication of the first edition of Steven Spielberg Interviews in 2000 and the updated version by comparing Lester Friedman’s introductions to each. In the former, Friedman laments the dearth of scholarship about Spielberg’s films and attributes this neglect to the preference of academics to analyze auteurs and neglect commercially successful filmmakers like Spielberg for pandering to popular taste. Until the interview on Empire of the Sun (1987), Spielberg dwells on the vicissitudes of financing films, their box-office success, and his goal of entertaining audiences. As he turns his attention to topics such as the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993), slavery in Amistad (1997), and the carnage of war in Saving Private Ryan (1998), his responses to questions become more substantive and thoughtful. Conversely, the introduction to the revised edition highlights the scholarly recognition of Spielberg as a serious director. Friedman cites a spate of books published in the interim by film studies scholars including Nigel Morris, James Kendrick, Dean Kowalski, Andrew Gordon, Richard Schickel, and Friedman himself, that acknowledge Spielberg “as a supremely skilled filmmaker unafraid [End Page 240] to tackle significant, and sometimes, controversial issues” (ix). While Spielberg has never abandoned action-adventure or fanciful fare, over the past two decades he has inverted recurring themes from earlier films. The benevolent aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET: The Extraterrestrial (1982) morphed into the menacing tripods from The War of the Worlds (2005). Rather than marvel at the wizardry of science and technology, Spielberg now warns against their potential for authoritarian abuse and dehumanization in works from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report (2002) to Ready Player One (2018). Moreover, his films increasingly venture into the realm of politics, exploring the bureaucratic obstacles to granting asylum in The Terminal (2004), the moral ambiguities of lobbying in Lincoln (2012), and the cycle of violence arising from Israel’s targeted assassinations of terrorists in Munich (2005). One wishes that Friedman would have expanded the introduction to include a review of the Spielberg scholarship he mentions and expounded more on the contrasts between the movies from the first half and last half of his career. Notbohm and Friedman have retained most of the interviews that appeared in the first edition of the book. These reiterate the familiar stories of Spielberg’s suburban childhood where he encountered instances of antisemitism that fostered his sense of being an outsider; his making of films as a teen about space and war to enthrall family and friends; and his meteoric rise to fame by renovating formulaic genres with flashy aural and cinematographic techniques. Readers of Jewish Film & New Media will find the interviews conducted by John Richardson (100–110) and Stephen Schiff (111–130) about Schindler’s List the most germane to their areas of specialization. The former captures Spielberg’s directorial process during the shooting of the film, whereas the latter places the movie within the context of his personal and professional maturation. Therein Spielberg discloses how he convinced screenwriter Steve Zallian to heighten the profiles of key Jewish characters and follow what happened to them during the ghetto liquidation scene. This challenges the criticism commonly leveled at Schindler’s List by Holocaust scholars who fault the movie for diminishing the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust by focusing on the transformation of its German protagonist. That viewpoint ignores how Spielberg renders Schindler’s deeds as the rare exception to the rule since they are consistently bookended by the escalating brutality and lethality of German anti-Jewish measures. The new material in the book starts with an interview regarding Catch Me If You Can (2002) and ends with one devoted to Ready Player One. Not all the [End Page 241] films Spielberg made in this period are accorded an interview. It would have been...