Classic Desert Island Discs - Steven Spielberg
36:18 Share

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening. MUSIC PLAYS

My castaway this week is Steven Spielberg. Over the past eight decades, Desert Island Discs has cast away Hollywood icons like James Stewart, Sophia Loren and Tom Hanks and pioneering directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Steve McQueen. Today's castaway has reached more people than any of them.

His releases don't just spark trends, they spawn phenomena. Jaws, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln, West Side Story. It's impossible to pin him down to one style. Wherever his creative travels take him, he brings along the questions which have illuminated his work since the beginning, about families, particularly fathers and sons...

Innocence, separation, the David and Goliath struggles we face every day, and most importantly of all, the impulse to, as a certain extraterrestrial put it, be good. They are present too in his own story, which after 50 years of filmmaking, he finally told this year. The Fablemans is a deeply personal tribute to the family and the family fractures that shaped him.

He says, I'm the fraidy cat who makes a picture and immediately assumes that nobody is going to show up the first day and it will be reviled around the world. When it doesn't turn out that way, I'm relieved. I don't celebrate. I don't have victory parties. I simply feel relief. Steven Spielberg, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Thank you. I love being here. I'm relieved being here. We'll see how long the relief lasts, but right now I'm relieved to be on your show. Well, me too. Relieved to have you, loud and clear. So, Stephen, The Fablemans is based on your own coming of age, both personally and cinematically. You are perhaps more invested in this film than any other that you've made throughout your long career. What does that do to your fear levels?

It shoots them through the roof, of course, because I'm a private person that's going public about and I can't hide behind somebody else's authorship or a book or a genre or American history. I can't get into any of those really convenient bomb shelters anymore. I'm just stuck with myself right here talking to you.

And what was it like for you recreating those experiences that you had as a young boy? I mean, watching Paul Dano and Michelle Williams bringing your parents back to life in a painstakingly reconstructed replica of the family home. It must have been extraordinary. When I first saw my house being rebuilt, my childhood home being rebuilt on a soundstage, my first thought was, is this going to be the most self-indulgent,

I've ever asked people to accompany me through is this $40 million of therapy. I didn't know really what I was doing except I was answering a need I had

being an orphan or recently orphaned by the loss of both parents, to recapture some of those memories in some way that wouldn't seem too indulgent to actors I really respected like Michelle Williams and like Paul Dano and Judd Hirsch. So it was a tightrope for a while. Did you get emotional? Yes, I did. I did. Oh, my God, I did. Probably the biggest struggle I had making the film was not to get emotional.

But there were times where it just, it was out of my control. It's time for your first disc. What is it and why are you taking it with you today? I think why I've taken the Gene Pitney song, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is because it was a seminal movie in my life.

And it was one of the first times that a song led me to the theater, not the other way around, where you see a movie, hear the song, and then buy the song, and then see the movie again. This was something that was getting a lot of radio play, but I didn't know John Ford that well, and I wasn't even aware he directed it. I just knew that the song outlined a story that I could not wait to see, and it was one of my favorite Westerns of all time. The kind of a man the West would need To tame a troubled land

He was the bravest of them all.

The man who shot Liberty Valance, performed by Gene Pitney. Steven Spielberg, you were born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1946. Your mother, Leah, was a concert pianist. How do you remember her?

I remember her as more of a Isadora Duncan, a freely expressive ballerina than I do even as a pianist because she used to express herself with these sort of classic ballet moves and just dance, you know, in the headlights at a campfire on a camping trip or just around the house. And in that sense, the Peter Pan of my mother, the little boy who never grew up, she was the woman who never grew up.

My sisters called her Lee. Leah was her name. My sisters called her by her first name. Even as four, five, six-year-olds, they never said, Mommy, Mommy, this, that. It was Lee, Lee, Lee. I was the only person in the family that called her Mom. She had an Army Jeep, a Korean War-era Army Jeep. She drove all around Arizona, all around Phoenix. No seatbelts. We were in the back in an open Army Jeep being taken to school, being taken to dinner, being taken on camping trips.

And she just was literally someone who loved to live life. She celebrated life. She lusted after life. And I know that sounds kind of general or generic, but if you knew her, you would know that she would throw her head back and just start singing for no reason because she was just so happy. And when she wasn't happy, she'd get into a fetal position and

and lie on the kitchen floor when we came home from school. There was such a range, a spread of feelings for my mom. It's time to go to the music, Steven Spielberg. What have you gone for and why? Well, John Sebastian Bach wrote a piece called Little Fugue in G minor.

It's the song that identified my father to all of us because every time he came home from work and he pulled the car into the driveway, he'd get out of the car, walk around to the front of the house whistling Bach's Little Fugue. He'd whistle it from the car. He'd open the front door. It would get louder and louder. We knew it was him. We knew it was home. We knew it was suppertime. And he'd walk into the house and he'd say,

And as he hung up his hat and his coat on the coat rack right in front of the front door, he would continue whistling it, and he would only stop whistling it when we started talking to him. Hey, Dad, and he'd stop whistling, how was school, yada, yada. So it's the piece of music I most identify with my father. ¦

Bach's Little Fugue in G minor, arranged by Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

So Steven Spielberg, I want to find out more about the relationship between your parents, but also your father, Arnold himself. So that was the tune that he would whistle when he came home from work. He was an electrical engineer. How did the two of you get on? How do you describe your relationship? My dad always looked at the practical side of life. He had really solid values. He served in the United States Army Air Corps. And then he was such a

genius with radios. They grounded him and he was in charge of all ground to air communication with the entire wing of the 490th Bomb Squadron in the China-Burma-India campaign. And all the veterans that my dad used to have reunions with every year, which often come to our house,

And I was a kid and it was kind of strange. They'd come to our house and suddenly you'd hear sobbing coming from the living room. And one or two of the guys would just be sobbing. And I would never understand what they were crying about. But these are grown men crying. Obviously, it's what happens in war and the PTSD you take through your life and the fact that they had their band of brothers with them comforting each other was a profound growing aspect to my whole interest in World War II and

That kind of thing. But, you know, my dad was also a genius with computers. And he was on the very first team at RCA that invented the very first data processing machine or computer that sold commercially. So he has been honored for that with his whole team over the years. And he went on to invent a computer. I think it was a 235, a General Electric. And I got a call one day, my office did, from Bill Gates inviting me and my dad up for lunch with Bill.

And we're talking, and Bill's only talking to my dad. I'm just listening. And then he said, you invented the 235 in GE. That was your machine. He said, yeah, that was my machine. That was my program. And he said, well, I just want you to know the reason you're up here is I want to thank you because that computer, which was a multi-user machine, and Paul Allen and I started getting the idea for developing Windows based on this machine you invented in GE, and I just wanted to thank you for that.

And I sat there with my mouth hanging open, and I looked at my dad, who could be very stoic, and his eyes are filling with tears, and he's struggling to reach for a handkerchief in his pocket. And that was a day that my dad and I shared that I shall never forget.

When you were 17, your parents divorced and your mother left the family home. She'd actually fallen in love with your father's best friend, Bernie. After the divorce, you became estranged from your dad and you didn't speak for 15 years. What happened? I was upset because...

Even though I knew where my mother's heart was residing, I also didn't understand why it was my father that fell on the sword and said to all of us when the separation was announced in our home in Northern California that it was my dad's idea to separate from my mom, that he was leaving her. And I had I had.

I had real problems with that. And why did your dad do it? Why did he say, this is my idea, when you knew what you knew about your mother's relationship with his best friend? I think my dad didn't know that. My mom knew that, but my dad had no idea what I knew. No idea. That was a secret I kept only with my mother. You know, my mom could be as fragile as she was adventurous. And when she hit a low point,

She really could collapse, could crumble. My dad knew that about her. And I think he loved her so desperately that he wanted to make a new life for her and his business partner possible. Actually, I know it sounds like a movie in terms of the grand sacrifice somebody might make for someone else's happiness. But that's who my dad was. And I think that's what he did it. But I did not understand that. We need to take a minute for the music. It's your third choice today. What are we going to hear and why?

Well, you're going to hear Paul McCartney's Michelle. The reason I picked that song is it's just a silly little story. I was a freshman in college and there was a girl I liked a lot and she would agree to let me take her out to dinner or to a jazz club or out to a movie, but she would never, ever, ever let me kiss her.

And we were driving back from someplace and we pulled into the big parking lot by the dorms on the college campus at Long Beach. And Michelle came on. I think we heard it for the first time together on the radio. And the melody is just heart achingly beautiful. And I look over at her. She's got tears in her eyes. And just before the song is over, she jumps over on my side of the car and starts kissing me.

And when I got to know Paul a number of years ago, when Paul and I met and became friends, that was one of the first stories I ever told him. I had a chance to tell Paul McCartney that story. Play a piano song. Play a piano song. I need to, I need to, I need to make you see what you mean until I'm hoping you.

It might be a little bit of French that did it. Tribune en sang might have been the inflection point for the kiss. I'm just saying. I mean, it never hurts, does it? When in doubt, drop some French. Michelle by The Beatles. Steven Spielberg, many years after their divorce, your parents actually became close again. I wonder how that was for you and your sisters. It was something we can't believe happened. It's the stuff that only usually happens in Frank Capra movies.

But and we truly loved Uncle Benny in our movie, Bernie in real life. We loved him despite what happened. My mom married him, was married longer to him than she was to my father.

But sadly, after he passed away, my mom was alone. But my father had remarried a really good person named Bernice. And my dad and my mom and Bernice started hanging out together. Every bar mitzvah, every birthday party, every premiere of one of my movies. And in a way, my sisters and I, not in a way, we used to look at each other and say, how often do kids get their parents back after a divorce?

And we really felt spiritually and in the flesh, we got mom and dad back for the remaining years of their lives. You started making films when you were just 10. One of your first was a three-minute Western. Tell me how you shot it. Well, it was for a Boy's Got Merit badge. The manual said, tell a story with pictures.

And so I made this little Western. I had no editing equipment at home, so I did the whole thing. We call it cutting in the camera where I would shoot a cowboy in one direction and shoot a stagecoach robbery in another direction and then go back and shoot the people getting robbed in the stagecoach. And then I'd cut and walk over to a little room and we'd have a kid playing the sheriff and then they'd come in and tell the sheriff, we just got robbed. What are you going to do about it? It was all done inside the camera.

And I only had one roll of film, so I had to make the whole thing three minutes long. That was all I had. And when I brought it into the Boy Scout troop, the scoutmaster suggested I bring the projector in to show it to everybody. So I showed that movie, which I entitled Gunsmog, because Gunsmog was a big popular television show at the time.

And they went crazy. They were laughing. And not at the movie, but they were laughing with the film because it was pretty silly stuff. I even recognized it being pretty silly. I was laughing. They were laughing. At the end, they applauded like crazy. And I got bitten by this bug. And that was it. You once said that the words action and cut allowed you to get control of your life. Tell me more about that. What did you mean by it? I wasn't popular. And I couldn't throw a football.

And the only thing that really was my ticket to some sort of limited popularity was the fact that I made these little movies when I was 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, right up through college. And I was able to get the most handsome captain of the football team who probably wouldn't give me the time of day at school to give me

all his entire Saturday to star in a movie. And in a way, it was being able to say action to somebody that wouldn't talk to me at school but would obey the word action was kind of empowering. It's time for some more music, Steven Spielberg. Disc number four, what have you got for us? Jackie Dushan and What the World Needs Now is Love.

And I remember hearing the song when I went out to see a movie by Paul Mazursky called Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. And it had that song in it. And I just never forgot the impact it had on me. And also because it's exactly what the world needs today. It's what the world needed yesterday. It's what the world needed 78 years ago. I mean, it is sort of a wishful song. What the world.

needs now is love sweet love it's the only thing that there's just too little now is love sweet love no not just for some but for everyone

That song makes me want to hug a Republican. That's the kind of thing that I'd love to see. I'd love to see a progressive and a more of an extreme Republican hear that song and like hug each other. That would make me very happy right now. And that's what the world needs right now, too. Jackie Deshanon and What the World Needs Now is Love.

So, Steven Spielberg, while you were still at high school, you got, well, let's just call it an unofficial internship at Universal Studios. How did you manage that? I heard that there was a tour at Universal. You could get on a bus. So I took the tour and

On the bus, and we had a bathroom break, and everybody was allowed to get out, stretch their legs, and go to the restroom. And I hid in the stall of one of the restrooms. I didn't come out until I was sure everybody had gotten back on the bus, and the bus drove away. And I spent the rest of my day literally walking around the lot, going into sound stages and watching some television being shot. And there happened to be a very nice man there named Chuck Silvers who ran the library at Universal where all the films were kept.

And when I said I jumped off the bus because I wanted to be a movie director, he thought that was really original and kind of novel and thought that was terrific. And he said, what kind of movies do you make? And I told him about my little Westerns and war movies back in Phoenix, New York.

He said, look, if you can come back tomorrow, bring some of those films with you. And I'd like to see them and I'll write you out a pass. And Chuck loved these little movies and he gave me a three-day pass. He said after three days I was on my own. But I had had four days where I passed by the guard at the gate. His name was Scotty. He was Scottish, by the way. And I took a chance. I had a little sport jacket on, a little string tie. And I walked past Scotty with no pass on that next day. And I said, look, I'm going to write you out a pass.

And I waved to him and he didn't ask me to show him my papers. He waved back at me. And I basically spent the next two months at Universal Studios. And that was how I kind of became an unofficial apprentice for that summer.

And he showed the same kind of ingenuity when you were making your first blockbuster, Jaws. You were just 27. It was a very difficult shoot, working on small boats in a cold sea with a mechanical shark that kept malfunctioning. It's a much better movie that the shark kept breaking down because I had to be resourceful in figuring out how to create suspense and terror without seeing the shark itself. And Hitchcock did that. And I think Hitchcock was a tremendous guide for me

in the way he was able to scare you without really seeing anything. It was just good fortune that the shark kept breaking. It was my good luck, and I think it's the audience's good luck too, because I think it's a scarier movie without seeing so much of the shark. Now, the sea around your desert island could be inhabited by real sharks. How would you feel about that? That's one of the things I still fear. Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me

For the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975, which I truly and to this day regret. The decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that. It's time for your fifth disc today, Steven Spielberg. What are we going to hear and why have you chosen it? I'm a big Frank Sinatra fan. And one of my favorite signature Frank Sinatra songs has always been Come Fly With Me.

And I love the song so much that I was able to acquire the rights from Tina Sinatra, who I know. And she licensed that song for me to use in the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio called Catch Me If You Can. Come fly with me, let's float down to Perlama. There's a one-man band and he'll toot his flute for you. Come fly with me, let's take off.

Once I get you up there, there is rare

Frank Sinatra and Come Fly With Me, as featured in your film, Steven Spielberg, Catch Me If You Can. I mean, you've made so many. We can't touch on them all today. But I do want to touch on one of the recurring themes, which comes up in many of your films, the way that a child's perspective so often steers the story. I mean, Close Encounters, E.T., Jurassic Park, BFG, The Fablemans.

How does their take on the world influence you as a director? Well, I think when you see things through a child's eyes, there's no room for cynicism.

E.T. would not be the same movie if a bunch of adults caught E.T. and brought him into a laboratory and maybe one adult scientist formed a rapport with the little squashy alien. It only worked through the innocence of young kids who are starting to assume responsibility for another living creature.

Now, you are sometimes accused of being sentimental. I wonder whether that's a criticism that bothers you or whether it's a badge of pride. I think everybody who says I can tend toward the sentimental is absolutely right. I'm very nostalgic. I think nostalgic even more than sentimental. But I never bristle when I hear that at all unless somebody says it ruined the movie for them. And then that's sad. I don't like that.

Is the role of a filmmaker to manipulate the audience, do you think, to make them feel? A filmmaker must never manipulate the audience unless every single scene has a jack-in-the-box kind of scare. That's manipulation. I did that a couple of times in Poltergeist and I certainly did it once in Chariots.

when the head comes out of the hole in the bottom of the boat. Oh, don't. That's manipulation. Start your life. Okay, I confess that. But no, our job is not to manipulate. Our job is to guide an audience to really forming a better understanding of themselves through the stories that we're telling.

There is a moral core that runs through all of your films, whether they're addressing war, dinosaurs, extraterrestrials, family. Why does that idea of a positive message and an outcome drive so much of your work, do you think? I think that hope is better than despair. And there could be despair in the body of the story. But if there is a solution or a promise of a choice we could all make collectively to lead better lives and live in a happier world, then I'm as a filmmaker, I'm going to make that choice.

It's time to go to the music, Steven Spielberg. Disc number six, what is it and why are you taking it with you to the desert island today? If I could take anybody to the desert island with me, of course, I'd take my wife and then I'd take Bruce Springsteen and Patti Schiaffia. I would take them to the island with me. Bruce's music has been a tremendous influence on my career, my life, my relationships. And The Ghost of Tom Joad is one of my favorite songs.

that Springsteen has ever, ever written. We share a love of Steinbeck, and he certainly was able to encapsulate and translate Steinbeck so well in this single song. There's a prayer book out of his sleep Preacher lights up a butter and takes to the drink Waiting for when the last shall be first And the first shall be last A one-way ticket to the promise One home, barely home

The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen. Steven Spielberg, 1993, saw the release of Schindler's List. It was based on the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party who saved 1,100 Jews from deportation to Auschwitz. Now, you'd read the book by Thomas Keneally 10 years earlier, before making the film. Was it a difficult decision to take on the subject?

Well, I didn't think I was emotionally or even in terms of my skill sets as a filmmaker ready in 1982 when Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal, first sent me the review of the book from the New York Times and later the book. And I read the book, but I wasn't ready yet. I had made a lot of popcorn movies and I made a lot of films based on cartoons.

relatively high concepts in terms of genre. And I hadn't made any adult movies. And I only really understood how to make that movie once I had directed Color Purple and once I had directed Empire of the Sun.

You've been very open about the issues that you went through to come to terms with your own Jewish heritage as a young man. I wonder how long it took for you to feel proud of your identity. Well, it took a while. I wasn't raised Orthodox. We were kind of reformed conservative Jews.

We were only Orthodox when my grandparents moved in or came to visit us for a week and then suddenly out went the lobsters and clams and in came the, you know, we never mixed the milk and the meat and everything became kosher. And the second they left, the lobsters came back. So that was just the official story. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But, you know, I...

There were not many Jewish people growing up alongside me in Phoenix, Arizona. So I always felt a bit on the outside and a lot on the outside, actually.

And it wasn't that I was so much in denial that I was Jewish. It was just I didn't make an issue of it. I didn't bring it up in conversation. I didn't talk about the fact, I'll be out of school next week and the week after because of Russia shot at Yom Kippur. I never announced that ahead of time. Making that film, did it change you and your attitude to your Jewish heritage? It was a phenomenon. What came out of Schindler's List, which is more important than the film itself, was the formation of the Shoah Foundation.

or I was able to empower interviewers and videographers to go all around the world to gather personal first-person testimonies from Holocaust survivors who voluntarily would come and talk to our cameras to create an archive of remembrance. That's what I'm proudest of. Now it's the USC Visual History Shoah Foundation. It's time for your seventh choice today, Stephen, if you wouldn't mind.

When I was 10 years old, we had only classical music in our house. There was nothing popular in our house. My parents went to record stores to buy. And then one day they came home with a record. It was an original Broadway cast album in 1957 or 58 of West Side Story.

And I started playing it, and I'd never heard of West Side Story before, but I wore out the record. I mean, my parents actually physically had to buy a new record a month later because I had just scratched the hell about listening to it over and over again. And it's the reason, years and years later, I wanted to reimagine West Side Story for a whole new generation. And I just remember this one song that made me cry as a kid whenever I listened to it, and that was Somewhere. Somewhere

We'll find our new... Somewhere... Somewhere from West Side Story, performed by the original Broadway cast, composed by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Stephen Spielberg, are you optimistic about the future of cinema going in the age of TV streaming? Is the same magic possible on a laptop?

Yes, a great story can get you on your iPhone, but please don't watch your films on iPhones, folks. Don't do that. But a great story can still get you on a small screen and on a supersized screen. But I prefer...

a supersized screen because what you get with that experience leaving home to go out to the movies is you get basically to be with civilization, to sit with strangers who probably in real life don't agree with anything that you agree with, but it doesn't matter because you may agree on one thing and that's what's coming off the screen, what's coming out of that soundtrack, the themes. There may be common ground found in movie theaters between

people and ideologies, they're so far apart in everyday life, but all come together to share one single experience. You can't get that at home on a television screen. You can in a movie theater. There was a BBC interview in 1994, and you said then that your biggest fear was loneliness. Now, obviously, on this program, I'm about to send you off to the island where you're going to be very much alone. How will you cope with the isolation of life as a castaway?

Well, I won't be able to. I'm going to be one of the people that will confess to you that I will not be able to survive this island alone for very long. Well, we're going to allow you one more track before we send you away to the desert island. What's it going to be, your final choice today? The final choice today is a song called Cool Hand by an artist named Buzzy Lee, who happens to be my daughter, Sasha Spielberg.

And whenever I hear this song, it just reminds me of just the privilege of parenthood. Cool Hand by Buzzy Lee. So, Steven Spielberg, the time has come. I'm going to send you away to your island. I'm giving you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to take with you. You can also choose another book. What will that be? It would be The Grapes of Wrath would be the book that I would take with me. It's my favorite book.

And Maude Jode is my favorite maternal figure in terms of a literary character, a literary figure. My mom is my most favorite maternal figure, but Maude Jode comes in pretty close. And this book has just spoken to me ever since I first read it when I was very young. You can also, on your desert island, Steven Spielberg, have a luxury item. What will that be? What are you going to take with you?

Oh, my goodness. I was going to say I was going to bring my H8 Bolex camera. I made my... Oh, that counts. That counts. Does it? Because I would bring the camera made by Bolex. And if I had to stay on the island for a long time, I would wind the camera and put it up to my ear just to listen to the gears turning. That would be enough for me. That and the waves flopping in.

And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves if you had to choose just one? Cool Hand by Buzzy Lee, because it's of our DNA. Steven Spielberg, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you so much. ♪♪♪

Hello, this is Danny. It's been too long, but I am back and I wanted to let you know about something very special that is going to be happening on the Uncanny Podcast feed this October. As we all know, this is the month of Halloween, that most ghostly time of year. And to celebrate, I am going to be doing a Halloween advent calendar.

Every single day during October, I will be dropping a brand new mini case into the Uncanny Feed. Each one under two minutes long, a tiny bite-sized nugget of terror, an email from a listener recounting an experience they believe may have been paranormal. But is it? There will also be video versions of the stories on all of my social media channels. The episodes will land every single morning, 31 stories in all, leading all the way up to Halloween. And then

And there might just be some special Halloween surprises to come too. So that is the uncanny Halloween advent calendar on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. Join me if you dare.