Word: spielbergisms
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Just after finishing his new movie about the aftermath of the massacre at the Munich Olympics, Steven Spielberg talked with TIME movie critic Richard Schickel, who collaborated with him on the TV documentary Shooting War, about his reasons for taking on Munich, his anger at the International Olympic Committee and his modest plan for improving Arab-Israeli relations...
...remote setting: a Pacific island in the 1930s for Kong, World War II London for The Chronicles of Narnia and Mrs. Henderson Presents. It may be based on fact (The New World) or fiction (Memoirs of a Geisha). It may even have similarities to warm-weather fare. Steven Spielberg's winter drama, Munich, like his summer fantasy, War of the Worlds, portrays a deadly surprise attack and the ambiguous human response...
...Kushner could make a good, entertaining guess. Spielberg had long wanted to work with the Pulitzer prizewinning author of Angels in America, and once he had solved Kushner's concerns about formatting a screenplay ("I said, 'Well, there's a program called Scriptor--put it on your laptop and you don't have to worry about that again'"), Kushner said he would try a few scenes. They became a 300-page first draft, written largely on spec, after which he and Spielberg happily collaborated for a little more than a year to complete the script. "You speak the words...
Kushner located a dry, allusive, sometimes bleakly comic language for them, and Spielberg often found himself just listening to Kushner's words, momentarily forgetting his picture-making part of their deal. In a situation rare in modern filmmaking, the screenwriter was on the set 90% of the time. "When something was more action driven, Steven would take the lead," says Kennedy, "and when something was more dialogue driven, Tony would take the lead." Says Spielberg: "It was as close as I've ever come to directing a play...
...Spielberg is at his best in visualizing a world he believes to be more menacing than it has ever been. That is more than a matter of noirish shadows. It is the hint of suspicious movement in the back of the frame, a pan that goes on a few frames longer than necessary, suggesting the possibility of a menace that may be present. Near the movie's end, a casual pan along the Manhattan skyline reveals the World Trade Center buildings. Had to show them, the director says. They existed at a historical moment in the mid-'70s. But there...