“It is true that some are born geniuses, but for all of us heredity is a powerful shaper of personality. The same holds true for the visionary filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Imagine a world without television, where motion pictures breathed life into stories, showed the people what they wanted to see, what they ought to see.” [Steven Spielberg]
“In such a world, after the great wars, a young Jewish boy, Steven Allan Spielberg, was taken by his parents to watch the magic of cinema unfold in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest show on Earth. This was a pivotal movie in young Steven’s life. He was fascinated with the film and started making his own home movies using his father’s home camera. But soon his world shifted from the known spaces of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was born on 18th December 1946 to Arnold and Anne Spielberg, to the arid plains of Phoenix, Arizona, where his father was transferred for a job.” [Steven Spielberg]
Steven’s father was a war veteran who had seen the ugliness and ruthlessness of war firsthand as a young soldier in the second world war. It left a deep impact on him, and he and his friends would often narrate to Steven their own sordid experiences of the war. Steven would later make one of the most famous war films of all time.
When he was making Saving Private Ryan (1998), Steven showed the brutality of the battle of Normandy, one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the world wars, where his father had lost his relatives and friends. The experience of naked unglorified violence and the scars on the psyche of young soldiers can be felt viscerally even today. [Steven Spielberg]
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Steven’s family were originally Jews from Ukraine who had come to America. But while his family practiced Judaism openly, Steven was often a target of anti-Semitic slights in school. This led to an ambivalence and uneasiness towards his religion. However, his familial surroundings also led him to honour the culture and especially mourn meaningfully the loss of lives in the Holocaust. He made the Schindler’s List (1993) to honour this heritage of loss and to focus on the good amidst the evil. [Steven Spielberg]
Another aspect of his early teenage years was the separation of his parents. While his father was grounded, his mother was very adventurous and remained so till the end of her days. Gradually his parents separated and while his sisters remained with his mother, he travelled to San Francisco with his father, where he slowly but surely forayed into the world of films. [Steven Spielberg]
But the loneliness he suffered as a result of this separation led him to the wishful imagination of a friend, even if the friend was an alien. That idea later found fruition in his film ET (1982), which along with John Williams’ memorable score remains etched in the minds of the audience due to its humanity and the insightful exploration of the human need for companionship. [Steven Spielberg]
Steven’s liberal home environment, his father’s love for scientific inquiry and his mother’s adventurous and creative spirit, profoundly contributed to Steven’s experimentation with the artform. All his films, be it drama, science fiction, war films, thrillers, attest to this liberal spirit. In 2022, Spielberg paid a heartful and earnest tribute to his parents and his growing up years in the poignant fictional biography The Fabelmans. The film, with its superlative acting, explores the mind behind the man and pays a fitting tribute to his childhood. After all, as William Wordsworth rightfully puts it, Child is the Father of Man.
