The director, who was driving, caught Paltrow’s terrified expression in the rear-view mirror as she quizzed him about the film – and he knew he’d found the star of his 1991 Peter Pan film.
He recalls, “Bruce (Paltrow – Gwyneth’s late father) and Kate (Capshaw – Spielberg’s wife) and I had taken Gwynnie to see The Silence of the Lambs… We were driving back from the movie theatre, and I was going back to work (on Hook) the next day. I was looking in the rear-view mirror and she was talking about the film and she had this really frightened look on her face, and it suddenly clicked, and I said, ‘Hey, you could be the young Wendy! You could be the young Maggie Smith.'”
He tells Entertainment Weekly magazine, “I turned around and said, ‘Do you want to make a movie?’ She got a SAG (Screen Actors Guild) card because of it.”
