It was a most welcome invasion: Steven Spielberg was stunned Saturday as Tom Cruise made a surprise landing in Chicago to present his War of the Worlds and Minority Report director with a prestigious film festival award.
Cruise shocked a ballroom of 700 guests at the 42nd Chicago International Film Festival Summer Gala. Only Michael Kutza, the Festival’s founder and artistic director, knew that Cruise would join an eclectic mix of Spielberg’s colleagues and friends who were involved in the presentation of the Gold Hugo Lifetime Achievement Award.
(And before you ask, Cruise‘s new daughter Suri, was nowhere in sight)
Spielberg was joined on the red carpet by Jaws idol Roy Scheider, actor Cuba Gooding Jr., and Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, who discovered the 100-million-year-old remains of a sail-backed spinosaur the size of a T-rex—one of the reptilian stars of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park III.
Other celebrities, including Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones), Catherine Zeta-Jones (The Terminal) and Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List), made video presentations describing their experiences working with Spielberg and lauding his lifelong body of work.
Spielberg has indeed defined a lifetime of favorite movies. From Jaws in 1975 to Munich in 2005, Spielberg’s hits are reliably, year after year, among our choices at the movie theater—and this longevity is certainly not lost on the filmmaker himself.
“It feels like a few lifetimes, actually,” Spielberg said. “Movies take a long time to make, and each one means so much to me. Every one might not be important to you, but every one of them is important to me. So in that sense, I feel like I’ve had a very full and very long life—or several lives—already.”
Past recipients of the Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award include Clint Eastwood, Jodie Foster and Charlie Chaplin. Spielberg said he feels honored not only to be among such a list of established film icons, but also to be recognized by an organization that seeks out less-established filmmaking talent.
“The Chicago Film Festival has prided itself for 42 years on finding first- and second-time directors,” Spielberg said. “And I know I’m very proud of new directors that I’ve brought into the business over my 33 or 34 years of shooting film and television. So this particular award and the theme behind it really mean a lot to me for that reason.”
In this spirit, the proceeds from the Summer Gala will go to the festival’s year-round cinema education programs.
Scheider reminisced about working with Spielberg in his early days, when the now-legendary director was just a skinny, late-20s kid fascinated by Peter Benchley’s shark tale.
“He was terrific,” Scheider said. “He was inventive, imaginative, and he listened to his actors and allowed them to contribute as much as they could to his film. And that’s always a wonderful thing for actors.”
Scheider added that while Spielberg was already a highly effective director, no one could have predicted the eventual magnitude of his success.
“I don’t think anyone expected that,” Scheider said. “Certainly we knew that we were working with someone very talented, someone with a future in the motion picture industry.”
While Scheider was one of the first actors to work with Spielberg, Gooding is still looking forward to his second chance; he was offered the lead part in Amistad, but turned it down. Djimon Hounsou eventually landed the role.
“I regret not working with Steven,” Gooding said. “I still think I made a strong choice as an actor…but the more work I see from him, I think that just to have the opportunity to share the screen when this guy is behind the camera…is an opportunity not to be missed.”
Gooding added that Spielberg commands tremendous respect from his colleagues because his bold stylistic range is unparalleled in its breadth.
“He’s really touched on so many genres,” Gooding said. “When you think of a Spike Lee or a Woody Allen, you know you’re going to get a specific statement or a specific type of comedy. But with Spielberg, you think of E.T., and then you think of Schindler’s List, and there might be certain camera movements that look familiar to you, but the whole storytelling technique is so diverse, and it’s always such a refreshing take.”
Amistad and Schindler’s List are certainly different animals than the Jurassic Park series, which captured the attention of Sereno, a world-renowned dinosaur expert. Sereno lauded not only Spielberg’s versatility, but also his ability to inspire popular trends—in particular, to make paleontology cool.
“I think [Jurassic Park] was like an adrenaline shot in the arm,” Sereno said. “I’ve always felt that kids like dinosaurs not because they’re big and ugly, but because they encourage the imagination. And what Steven Spielberg did was he came in and said, well, I’m not going to just encourage your imagination—I’m going to blow your imagination wide open.”
Sereno noted, however, that some of the dinosaur representations in Jurassic Park did not pass his scientific muster.
“Of course I have my ‘bone to pick,’ so to speak,” Sereno said. “I think they blew certain aspects of the dinosaurs out of proportion. I would have done it differently…but does that mean the film is less of a film? No. I think it was a lot of fun.”
Cinephiles are anxiously awaiting Spielberg’s next “fun” release—which may feature a familiar rugged face.
“I’m attempting to do Indiana Jones IV right now,” Spielberg said. “But we’re still developing a screenplay and there’s no start date for production.” He added that he hopes to start another much-anticipated project, an Abraham Lincoln biopic, in late 2007.
It seems that Spielberg’s creative wheels will turn for years to come—but even after his inevitable departure from filmmaking, there may still be a Spielberg film to look forward to each year.
“My daughter Sasha seems very interested in acting and writing, and my son Sawyer is quite interested in directing,” Spielberg said. “But my oldest son, Max, who’s 21, wants to go into designing computer games.”
It’s the modern triple threat: one brilliant mind to write and act (maybe opposite Tom Cruise?), one to direct and one to produce the video game.
