YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Spielberg

lines on the record: 30
first: 2024-04-04
most recent: 2024-04-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“visited him at the Long Beach Airport during the filming of 1941. Spielberg surveyed his army of uniformed actors in World War II airplanes, and said with a childlike smile, You know, they pay me to do this.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the mind games that he had to deal with when making the movie, the movie's finished, the movie's released. This is what happens. Jaws surpassed Francis Ford Coppola as the godfather to become the most successful film in motion picture history to that date. Jaws held that distinction until November 77, when it was dethroned by George Lucas's Star Wars. Spielberg took out an ad in the Hollywood paper showing a little robot from Star Wars R2D2 catching Bruce the Shark in his jaws with a fishing hook, congratulating Lucas for capturing the box office title. Spielberg wrote, Wear it well, your pal Stephen. And again, just remarkable that all these guys were friends.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Film 100 days over schedule, let alone a director whose first picture had failed at the box office. There were moments of solitude sitting on the boat thinking this can't be done. It was stupid to begin with, we'll never finish it. No one is ever going to see this picture, and I'm never going to work in this town again.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is more about the terror part of Euphorian terror, right? Imagine having to shoot a shark movie without the shark. He thought he was doomed, and this went being his greatest achievement. It's just wild. For weeks after shooting started, Bruce simply refused to work. That's the name of the shark. That night, Richard Dreyfus declared, if any of us had any sense, we'd all bail out now. Spielberg anxiously shot around the star of the movie out of desperation, he began shooting barrels instead of the shark. In the movie, the barrels are affixed to a shark by the harpoon, and they cruise the ocean's surface as a standard for the submerged creature. We were very scared. I didn't know whether any of us could do it. We thought we're making a picture called Jaws, and we don't have the fucking shark. Today, with computers, you could just put the shark in. In those days, it was a strictly mechanical thing. The pressure on the 27-year-old director was enormous. I thought my career as a filmmaker was over. I heard rumors from back in Hollywood that I would never work again because no one would ever take a”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was incredibly tense. And so halfway through, Spielberg wants to quit. And this is just a reminder, your mind will play tricks on you. Lucas thought Star Wars was going to flop, if you remember that. Spielberg says the same things. I'm going to be out of the movie business. This movie's not going to do well. I had two failures in a row, and I'm done. Sid had words with Spielberger withdraws. It was one of the few disagreements that Stephen and I had. I literally forced him to do it. I think he was upset for a while and he turned to me and said, why are you making me do this B movie? He was scared. He felt overwhelmed. He wasn't sure. He was right guy for it. The picture was important to him, vitally important. There was such huge professional stakes. Nothing was ready. It was at that stage completely out of control, and it was as it was during most of the shooting. Jaws ran into so many production problems that exasperated crew members began referring to the movie as flaws. Spielberg later admitted I thought it would be a turkey.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a modestly budgeted thriller called Jaws. So we're going to get into jaws. I want to take a slight tangent first. I do have to tell you, I'll just tell you up front jaws is his, people are called jaws his free pass into his future. And that's completely due to its financial success. At the time it was released. It was the most profitable movie ever made. And he's like, once I had that, I got final cut on every single project I ever did moving forward in my career. I got to choose which projects I did. I got to choose what they look like. It bought me my freedom. And again, finances buy you freedom. Before Jaws, they're shopping this idea of a science fiction film that is going to eventually become close encounters of a third kind, which is also successful. But I want to pull something out here because I think it's important, something we talked about, the autobiography of Sid Meyer. Sid Meyer is the computer programmer, the game designer that made civilization. The main idea in that book was so important is the fact that...”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So eventually he does get the opportunity to direct a movie. It's called Sugarland It Flops. And it's very dangerous as much as the film industry talks about, oh yeah, it's an art and everything else. It's like, yeah, you have a couple flops and you're out of the industry real quick, right? And so he was in a very precarious position because he was being pushed into do a shark movie. And he's like, what the hell? I don't want to do this shark movie. And the lesson here is that his biggest win Jaws is by far the most important thing to ever happen to the career of Spielberg and he says it, right? His biggest win is going to come right after what he thought at the time was his biggest failure. When he received the bad news about Sugarland in April 1974, Spielberg did not have much time to sit around engaging and second guessing or nursing his wounds. He was on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, immersed in preparations to make another film.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to be a dick. Just try to be, you're going to get farther if you can avoid that. And a lot of people would interact with Steven be like, okay, like he's not, he's got, he says he has a nice manner. This gets you a long way. When a director has the attitude, I don't know everything about this, but would you like to try something, which is how Stephen interacts with his coworkers, you're willing to knock yourself out for that director.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spielberg in the documentary also gives advice. He's like, you have this idea of what you want to do, and it's only in your head. And he says, no one can help you holding the entire idea in your head. That is your job. That's something that you have to figure out how to do. And I think that's his approach to movie making. So let's go back to the book. He thinks visually. He's in the perfect format for his skill set. And he says he seemed to be able to see more than other people saw. He didn't seem to waste any time. He didn't seem to get caught up in what directors often do. Eating up camera time, eating up miles and miles of film. This is back before there was digital film. There was literally physical film. They produced, literally, that's true, miles of film on a movie. He seemed to cut on the floor. We knew that this boy knew about the camera. And he combined this the way he thought visually, which is perfect for obviously being a filmmaker, with the fact that it...”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there's an idea that popped up in the book and in my notes multiple times for the documentary. And it's this idea that he thinks visually, and really the way I think about this is like, you got to find the perfect medium or the perfect format for your skill set. And there's another way to put it. Somebody else later on in the documentary says that Spielberg speaks cinema as his native language.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have, he goes from the euphoria, right, of being signed youngest director ever, to the terror of not liking the work and being very bad at it. He has a breakdown and he winds up having to take a, really the high from being getting signed and then the fall of being despawned. He has to take a break. Not only had he failed to interest Universal in letting him bring to life all the stories I had in my head, but no one was even offering him TV episodes to direct. I was in a despondent comatose state and I told Sid I wanted to leave of absence and I got it. And there's one more sentence about this point in his life because I think it's extremely important to remember success is not a straight line. He didn't just go from night gallery, the show he didn't like, to jaws. His career stalled at a number of occasions.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throwing up nervous, every time I start a new scene, I'm nervous, talks about vomiting over and over again. He's a 65-year-old man when he's talking about this, right? And the same thing that was happening to him when he was younger. Like, we just don't, and I'm glad he shares this because something else is like, oh, this guy obviously knows everything. He's got, I don't even know what, four of the, I don't know what the number is now, but I think when this book ends, he has four of the top 10 highest-grossing movies of all time. This guy clearly knows what he's doing, and yet you don't see before the camera turns on. He's in the corner throwing. I was so frightened that even the whole period is a bit of a blank for me. I was walking on eggs. I didn't know if I'd ever, I don't know if you've never been to bed for four days in a row. It's like taking drugs. I don't take drugs. I never would have used every drug under an over-the-counter at the time. The show put me through dire straits. It was a good discipline, but a very bad experience.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's because he's worked with the same people for decades, his editors, his visual effects people, the people when he's on a new project, he winds up hiring a lot of the same people over and over again because he says we just have a way, like all the knowledge we have working with each other, it compounds and that compounding makes it easier for us to communicate and work faster. He's like, if I had to hire brand new people every few years to do a project, he's like, I couldn't do this. This is very similar. I did a three-part series on Larry Ellison. He said the same thing. He's like, the reason he's like the core programming team at Oracle for the first, I forgot it was, like, 10 years, whatever the time period it was, like it didn't change. It was like the same 30 people, whatever the number was, right? I can't, these numbers might be wrong, but the main point I'm telling you is definitely, if I remember correctly. But the idea is like, you don't want all this turnover where you see these people jumping from project to project, working with constantly new people. Yeah, you might want to do that. You might want to get some fresh idea and new blood in there. But the idea is like, well, just like.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Directors and new writers and first time producers he has made an opportunity for. He puts his money and he puts his business personality on the line. Okay, so he's already signed as a director. Again, I've repeated the sermon earlier, and I'm going to repeat it one more time because it's a note left myself on this page. There's two notes for myself. Number one, have a piece of work that you can point to, right? He set up a screaming of Amblin. It was an incredible piece of work. This is how he gets signed by this guy named Sid Scheinberg. So think of this as mentor number two in Steven's life. And there's still friends to this day, which again, like, this is something I always look for. When you meet new people, it's like, it's very important that they have they've been able to develop relationships for a long time because you can fool, like you can fake being a good person for, you know, a couple months, maybe a year, maybe even a few years. But, you know, if somebody's known you for 20 years, like you can't fake being a scumbag for that long, right? And Steven, something that he talks about, actually I wasn't going to talk about this now, but I might as well because it pops to my mind. He's like something that I think is an idea that we can take from Spielberg. He talks about the reason he's able to work so quickly.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so with the fact that Spielberg obviously was extremely, he calls himself a self-starter, he had a piece of work, which I have to repeat is very important. You have to have something you can point to. It's not just like, oh, I'm just somebody you don't even know, you know, come help me. Like they see that this kid's out here hustling. He's out here working. He's actually doing this. He's really interested in this industry that I'm in, right? And he's got something to point to. So because he had like a calling card, he was able to get signed and then he's just so grateful because he feels Chuck Silvers is the one that like opened all the doors for him at Universal. He's like, be my manager. And listen, Chuck is so wise here. And he just has one request. He's like, listen, I'm just doing this because I want to help you. But you have to pay this forward. After you are successful, his one request, Chuck's one request to Steven Spielberg is the same thing. It's why Ingvar Kamprad said over and over again, founder of Ikea, why am I writing this book? People told me I didn't want to write a bottle.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he just goes up, and again, he's not like an arrogant kid, goes up with asking for help and saying why he wants help. He often would walk up to stars and directors and producers on the studio streets and invited them to lunch. Carrie, Grant, and Rock Hudson were among those who accepted. This is the same thing that a young Steve Jobs did. He called up Bill Hewlett, if I remember correctly. I think it was Bill and not David. Either one, the partners, calls him up, asks for parts, says I'm a fourteen, 12-year-old kid, wind's with getting a summer job. Later on, when he's like 18, 19, he calls up all the people. Bob Noyce, founder of Intel, the guy that did microsystems, I can't remember his name, the guy that did AMD, can't remember his name at the moment, sorry. All these people, he's just like, listen, I didn't know how to build a company. I greatly admired the people that knew. So I called them up. I asked if I could talk to them, if I could have lunch, coffee with them. Yeah, some people are going to ignore you. Some people are going to...”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is such an important part of this whole thing about this, I'm not trying to direct him what to do, I'm trying to be there for him. So Silver says, my idea of encouragement was to be there. Basically, that's the only function I really served. Somehow I always became a listening board every time he got a story idea, every time he shot some film, asked why he went so far out of his way to help Stephen, Silver's replied simply, I liked him. I admired this lump of raw material. Just think about just pause and think about what is happening in the story. How important there is an alternate future where Stephen does not have the help of Chuck Silvers, somebody that is a film historian, somebody that's been with Universal, somebody can help guide him, somebody that's a few decades older than him. And we don't know the name of Steven Spoomberg because that wasn't that opportunity.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, before he had all these people like Frank Capper, Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lee, and all these people, but he's like, now I could have a role model and a collaborator and somebody that inspires me that's my own age that's doing the same stuff I'm trying to do. So it says now instead of having those role models, rather it was someone nearer to my own age, someone I could actually get to know, compete with and draw inspiration from. And that was remarkable how, you know, they're obviously very driven big egos, but they didn't have big egos with each other, right? They're like, listen, we're competing. But I'm also being inspired from you. And they were able to maintain like a friendship, right? And they had the maturity to realize, hey, we're going to get a lot farther if we can help each other than if we just like, oh, I hate that guy because he's doing the same thing I'm doing. Well, this is not a zero-sum game. Like people can like your movies, George, and they can like my movies as well. It doesn't have to be just one filmmaker. The fact that they were able to do that at such a young age is very, very...”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too. It's extremely important. It took Coppola to start breaking down the doors of Hollywood for other film school graduates in the late 60s. He became, as Spielberg put it, all of our godfathers. And so now we fast forward to when Spielberg and Lucas start becoming friends. They wind up being pals, inspirers, collaborators, but they're pushing each other because of how talented they were. So Spielberg, you know, is like, I'm a young hotshot. I'm good too. Oh wait, there's another meet. There's always another you. Like, you got to know that. And so what Spielberg realized is like he watches Lucas's film. He's like, oh my God, I'm sick to my stomach at how good this guy is. So he says when he saw the short film, Spielberg was jealous to the very marrow of my bones. I was 20 years old and had directed 15 short films by that time. And this little movie was better than all of my little movies combined. So he says, now I...”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spielberg vividly remembers how he and such other self starters, that's how he's describing himself, Lucas and Scorsese had to chisel and dynamite their way into a profession that never really looked to young people except as actors. There were no willing producers at that time I was trying to break into the business. My first thrust were met with a great deal of animosity. But all these people, the movie brats, USC Mafia, this is a description of them, were unwilling to settle for such limited dreams. They ate, breathed, and slept movies with a passion earlier generations had brought to writing or painting. And so what they needed is they needed somebody like Francis Ford Coppola, who was the first young director to break through. And then once they saw, wait a minute, that guy can do it. And he's great, talented. They weren't saying he wasn't talented, but it's like, okay, he's like a couple years older than me. I can do it.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is another example of how important studying the filmmakers that came before him were for his career. So the movies that impressed even the most when he was a boy were two epics directed by David Lean, The Bridge on the River Qui and the Lawrence of Arabia. Spielberg later called Lean the greatest influence I ever had. He emulated Lean's sense of visual storytelling throughout his career. He says the scope and audacity of those films filled my dreams with unlimited possibilities. You know what's crazy? In the documentary he says that he watches great films over and over and over again, right? Just like we should be reading books or any kind of experiences that we have. Like books is the most obvious example here is you might read a book once and then you read it five years later and it's just like, oh, the book changed. It was like, no, the book's the same. You changed, right? He still sees Lawrence of Arabia every year. He talks about that in the documentary. The movie came out in 1962.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so something he took away from that story, he says he was mightily impressed by Peter's defiant declaration. I don't want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady. I always wanted to be a little boy and have fun, Spielberg admitted. I've always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“father's workaholic personality he was like this even in in high school and he definitely liked that for i mean it's funny because later in the book he's like yeah i had his first son's born i think he's around 40 years old so he's like you know i'm gonna just not work weekends i'm gonna be home he does that for a very short amount of time but he's definitely an obsessive steven inquired what he called his father's workaholic personality along with such hate as his love of storytelling and his fascination with high technology that his father introduced him to Stephen's tendency to withdraw into his own world is also a legacy from his father. Like Stephen, his father was an introverted person, then talks about more about his mom's influence on Stephen just realizing, hey, I don't really want to be an adult. I want to create these, I want to live like this fantasy world. The rule of home was just don't be an adult. Who needs to be anything but 10? We never grew up at home because she never grew up, Stephen commented. And so one of his favorite stories when he was younger was Peter Pan.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm going to go back to what his parents say about him as a young person, too, because this is important because one of the main takeaways I took from his life story is the fact that if you don't like your life, you don't like the world that you're living in, you can create your own. And he definitely had a very unhappy time growing up. Not only the dissolution of his parents' marriage, their fighting all the time, but also they kept moving around. They went from a Jewish community to being the only Jewish people around. So there's a lot of anti-Semitism you had to deal with. But it says, when he was growing up, I didn't know he was a genius. His own mother later admitted. Frankly, I didn't know what the hell he was. You see, Stephen wasn't exactly cuddly. He was scary. When Stephen woke up from a nap, I shook. My mother used to say the world is going to hear of this boy. She continues. No one ever said no to him. He always gets what he wants. Asked how she influenced her son's development, she replied, I gave him freedom. Stephen inquired what he called his”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they created the iPod. And Steve Jobs and his team at Apple said they knew that the iPod was going to be a success because they loved using it. And Spielberg has a similar approach. He's like, I make movies that I want to see. A trait that we see in his early life that he keeps up for his entire the rest of his career. The book ends with Jurassic Park with them discovering, oh my God, he winds up trying to hire. He didn't know that CGI had advanced so much, right? That they could actually have the Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus Rex and look like they did in that movie. And so originally they were trying to physically make these costumes. They were going to have whether they were machines or they had people dressed up as them trying to run and trying to emulate what wind up being reproduced by the computer in the movie. But from the very beginning, he was obsessed with finding the latest cutting edge technology that he could apply to his craft. This is something that's very important.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a few pages later, there's two sentences, each on separate pages that I think are very interesting, very quick lessons here. And one is that it's obvious Spielberg was one capable of independent thought, and part of that came out of the fact that he just felt like a misfit. He felt different than everybody else. He felt he wasn't understood. He was not interested in the other things that were expected of a kid, a young person his age. And he says, I never felt comfortable with myself because I was never part of the majority. I felt like an alien. Then he talks about his approach to filmmaking, which is very common for, I think, how you make a good product. The fact that you put your place in, you put yourself in the place of the customer. Like you make what you want to see. And so he says, Spielberg wants to find his approach to filmmaking by declaring, I am the audience. Recently is a 10-year anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, and I was rereading some notes from this book about...”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And here's another quote from a young Stephen Spielberg making movies grows on you. You can't shake it. I like directing movies above all. All I know for sure is I've gone too far to back out now, and so this idea there's no turning back, this obviously conflicts with a lot of conventional life advice, but it appears over and over again in these biographies. These people are just like, I have no plan B. I'm all in on this idea. This is something he talks about in the book, a quote from the documentary. says it there too. And now, you know, the book ends. This book ends. He's just over 50 years old. The documentary takes place he's in his early 70s. And he says, I realized there was no going back. This was going to be what I was going to do or I was going to die trying. This was going to be the rest of my life.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy with a passion for a hobby that grew out of control and that grew out of control and somewhat consumed me. I discovered something I could do and people would be interested in it and me. I knew that after my third or fourth little film that this was going to be a career, not just a hobby. And that's another thing that just makes Spielberg extremely interesting. Like how many people realize from such a young age two people come to mind that were similar to Spielberg. It was like, okay, I knew by the time I was a teenager what I was going to do for my life, Ingvar Kamprad, which is the founder of IKEA. I've covered him back on. I think I'm founders number 102. He started IKEA, like 14 years old, worked on it till he died when he was in his 80s. And then Kobe Bryan knew from the time he was a teenager. He's like, okay, I want to be my goal is to be the greatest basketball player of all time. So I think it's rare for anybody to find what they really want to do in life, but even more rare that you know from such a young age, it's just remarkable. So that's a little bit about the family life and the fact that his...”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up remaking this movie when he becomes a professional filmmaker. That's the movie. The remake of this movie is Close Encounters at the Third Kind. But we see his personality 16 years old and a lot of this sticks with him for his whole life. And he went by Steve Spielberg at this point in his career. Steve Spielberg had been shooting film obsessively for more than seven years with a mono-maniacal dedication that made him virtually oblivious to schoolwork, dating, sports, and other normal adolescent pursuits. So this idea of monomaniacal dedication is something that's going to appear over and over again in the book. It appears over and over again in the documentary as well. He repeats it over and over again. He's like, I had one focus. I was obsessed with movies. I knew right away that this is what I was going to do for the rest of my life. And as he says, I know they're quoting him when he was reflecting back in this time as being a young man, a young filmmaker. I was more or less a”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of his boyhood friends recalls Spielberg saying, he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy. He was twelve. I've been really serious about filmmaking as a career since I was twelve years old, Spielberg said. I don't excuse those early years as a hobby. Do you know what I'm saying? I really did start then.”
2024-04-04 · Founders · Steven Spielberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source