As you once explained it: “Just before I left, I dared myself to look up into his face and suddenly felt like we were in some way related. You’ll remember how “it terrified me to see a giant in a chair like that,” but also what happened next. It’s not about Lincoln, but it’s steeped in the way that encounter at the Lincoln Memorial felt-the confused way that childhood itself felt. You only stumble into the connection between them momentarily, when this new film is nearly finished and you’re doing your first press interviews for it.
Eventually, you make a movie about him: Lincoln.īut there’s a second movie worth mentioning, a few years after that one. Back home you find yourself making paper cutouts of his profile, again and again. Mad Max: What It Takes to Make the Most Intense Movie Ever JJ Abrams, Star Wars Superfan, on Directing The Force Awakens The Mysterious Vision of Jeff Nichols, Hollywood’s Next Blockbuster Auteur You just stand there, freezing and afraid, pulling at your uncle’s coat to go. You can’t even look at it-just glimpsing the statue’s titanic white hands is too destabilizing. He takes you to see an enormous marble man.
This is never more clear than when your uncle brings you to Washington, DC, one winter. You do the same thing with the clouds, lying in your backyard, letting your mind change them into “gigantic fists, gigantic faces.” Eventually, it hits you: “There was just something about bigness that scared me when I was a kid.” “I’ve always opted for waking up after a bad dream and being so happy I was awake, and then wanting to go back to sleep to have that damn dream again,” you’ll say. You love that cycle of tension and resolution it will become another trademark of your films. You revisit the things that scare you until they don’t scare you anymore. “Every single night my imagination would find something else to fear.” And still, you stare at the tree every single night.
It was a huge tree,” you’ll later remember, and at night you watch its dark silhouette morph into horrible, demonic things. Outside of your bedroom window in New Jersey, across a long, empty field, is a tremendous tree. You love Disney films but later describe the shooting of Bambi’s mother as giving you PTSD. You are infatuated with airplanes but terrified of flying. You are scared of so many things but simultaneously drawn to them. That’s just how it is: all your feelings bound up together. All you know is “I’d never felt better and I’d never felt worse in my entire life.” As an adult, in the ’80s, you’ll remember: “Everybody grabbed this guy and threw him up on their shoulders and carried him into the locker room.” But you just stay there, bawling by yourself, not even trying to sort out the conflicting spasms of pride and shame inside you. Then, once he’s overtaken you and your classmates explode with glee, you make a show of running hard again, so it still looks close. But now he’s gaining on you, and the entire class is cheering, yelling, “C’mon, beat Spielberg!” You know, intuitively, that you should take a dive letting him win is the generous thing to do. This other kid actually is intellectually disabled. One day your class has to run a mile, and eventually only you and one other boy are left slogging around the track.
You are pimpled, wimpy, and Jewish, and you are bullied for all of it. You are exquisitely uncomfortable with yourself. Later, when people recognize your gift for re-creating the sensations of childhood-when a critic describes your work as going “so deep into the special alertness, loyalty, and ardor of children that it makes you see things you had forgotten or blotted out and feel things you were embarrassed to feel”-it’s this sensitivity they’re often talking about. Awe, dread, wonder, joy, vulnerability, sadness-often these come crashing over you together as a single phenomenon.
You feel things strongly, as all children do, and seemingly all at once. I magine you are Little Steven Spielberg.