“The epidemic made me think about death many times. Now a series on Napoleon Kubrick »- Corriere.it

At the age of 76, Steven Spielberg certainly doesn’t want to rest after 59 directions, 34 of which are for feature films that have been released to the cinema. He arrived in Berlin to pick up the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, which brings him closer to the Academy Awards for which he was nominated. Valbalman, the Cincinnati director admitted to working on a series about Napoleon, starting with a screenplay that Stanley Kubrick never got around to producing (it was said because he failed to get Jack Nicholson to sign a contract to keep it available for twenty years, given that the film had to follow the loopholes but also the aging emperor). ). Spielberg didn’t say much about the project, except that there will be seven Hbo-produced episodes, a collaboration with the director’s ninety-year-old widow Christine, and his son-in-law Jan Harlan, but that was enough to pique everyone’s curiosity.

Modest to extreme (“I don’t think I have been inspired by any other director by my cinema while I have often been inspired by the greats of the past””), replacing John Ford, who in his last film “instructed” the young Fableman: What would you advise the aspiring filmmaker? He did not hesitate in his answer: «Always start from a good script, because it is the stories, not the shots, that push the audience to go to the cinema. The first step is to know how to write well, and if you are not able to, do not be shy to ask for help from those who can do it better than you.”

The latest movie, The Fabelmans, which traces his life from ages 8 to 18, who is also facing the painful separation between his parents, seemed to many to be a kind of self-medication, but Spielberg preferred other explanations: «It is true that my parents’ divorce was a traumatic event and that in my films I often put the idea of ​​​​the family as the lifeline. Without that drama I never would have done it Sun Empire Where a child is separated from his parents, but his real spring Fablemans It was fear that gripped me during the epidemic, after I thought about death so many times. This is what prompted me to tell such a special story. If I had not spent so much time cooped up at home with my family, I might not have found the courage to do so.”

Always the same is the enthusiasm for cinemaable to overcome any obstacle, “the most important thing in my life except the birth of a child” (and he has six, three boys and three girls), he has remained the same since he was a child, when he was able one Saturday, at the age of nine, to walk three kilometers to see West that his parents deemed too violent for him, wild trails By John Ford: “I saw it and understood nothing. It made up for it when I saw it again and again years later, but then I couldn’t help but go and see it. I even took the money for the ticket from a family piggy bank.”

If these were the beginnings, it would only come to what we know: Â «I always did what I knew how to do but also what I didn’t know, challenging myself every time. and always with a good dose of irony and a desire to play: it is no coincidence that my surname, of German origin, means rather the mountain that plays.”