Steven Spielberg has directed more than thirty feature films across six decades, and the striking thing about the run is how little the technique changed while the subject matter did. He started with a television movie about a truck, Duel, and the thing he was already good at is the thing he stayed good at: putting a camera where an ordinary person’s eye would be and letting the audience discover a fact at the same moment the character does. The famous shots are almost never about the object. They are about the face watching it.
His commercial peak, from Jaws in 1975 through Jurassic Park in 1993, effectively invented the modern summer release and then kept beating it. What is easy to miss is how much of that success rested on restraint. Jaws works because the mechanical shark kept failing and the film had to imply the animal for an hour. Jurassic Park works because the dinosaurs appear for roughly fifteen minutes of a two-hour running time. Spielberg’s instinct in both cases was to withhold, and the withholding produced the effect the effects could not.
The second half of the career is a deliberate turn toward the historical and the unresolved. Schindler’s List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, Munich and Lincoln are all films about institutions failing people, and none of them resolve as cleanly as his adventure pictures do. Critics who accuse him of sentimentality tend to be arguing with the endings and not the films, because the middle sections of those movies are frequently bleak and refuse the comfort the reputation promises.
He remains the most commercially successful director in history by a wide margin, has won the Academy Award for Best Director twice, and co-founded DreamWorks. For writers the useful lesson is the one about the shark: a threat described is more frightening than a threat displayed, and the constraint that forces the description is often the best thing that happens to a production.
