Steven Allan Spielberg (; born December 18, 1946) is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, Spielberg is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema and is the highest-grossing film director of all time. Among other accolades, he has received three Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, four BAFTA Awards, twelve Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and a Grammy Award, as well as the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1995, an honorary knighthood in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2006, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2009, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and the National Medal of Arts in 2023. According to Forbes, he is one of the world's wealthiest celebrities, with a net worth of at least $5.3 billion. He is one of 22 people to achieve EGOT status.
Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to California and studied film in college. After directing several episodes for television, including Night Gallery and Columbo, he directed the television film Duel (1971), which was approved by Barry Diller. He made his theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), also beginning his decades-long collaboration with composer John Williams, with whom he has worked with for all but five of his theatrical releases. He became a household name with the summer blockbuster Jaws (1975), and continuously directed more acclaimed escapist box-office blockbusters with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the original Indiana Jones trilogy (1981–1989). He also explored drama in The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987).
In 1993, Spielberg directed back-to-back hits with the science fiction film Jurassic Park, the highest-grossing film ever at the time, and the epic historical drama Schindler's List, which has often been listed as one of the greatest films ever made. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the latter as well as for the World War II epic Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg has since directed the science fiction films A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005) and Ready Player One (2018); the historical dramas Amistad (1997), Munich (2005), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015) and The Post (2017); the comedies Catch Me If You Can (2002) and The Terminal (2004); the animated film The Adventures of Tintin (2011); the musical West Side Story (2021); and the family drama The Fabelmans (2022).
Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks Pictures, and he has served as a producer for many successful films and television series, among them Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), An American Tail (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Animaniacs (1993), Pinky and the Brain (1995), Twister (1996), Band of Brothers (2001) and Transformers (2007–present). Several of Spielberg's works are considered among the greatest films in history, and some are among the highest-grossing films ever.
Seven of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". In 2013, Time listed him as one of the 100 most influential people, and in 2023, Spielberg was the recipient of the first ever Time 100 Impact Award in the US.
Early life, education, and early career
Steven Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest child and only son of four children. His mother, Leah Adler (née Posner), was a concert pianist and ran a kosher dairy restaurant, and his father, Arnold, was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers. His immediate family were Reform Jewish/Orthodox Jewish. Spielberg's paternal grandparents were Jews from Ukraine; his grandmother Rebecca (née Chechik), was from Sudylkiv, and his grandfather Shmuel Spielberg was from Kamianets-Podilskyi. Spielberg has three younger sisters: Anne, Sue, and Nancy. At their home in Cincinnati, his grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors. They, in turn, taught him numbers: One man in particular, I kept looking at his numbers–his number tattooed on his forearm ... he started – you know, when–during the dinner break, when everybody was eating and not learning, he would point to the numbers. And he would say, that is a two, and that is a four. And then he'd say, and this is a eight, and that's a one. And I'll never forget this. And he said, and that's a nine. And then he crooked his arm and inverted his arm and said, and see, it becomes a six. It's magic. And now it's a nine, and now it's a six, and now it's a nine and now it's a six. And that's really how I learned my numbers for the first time ... the irony of all that, and the gift of that lesson, never really dawned on me until I was much older.
In 1952, his family moved to Haddon Township, New Jersey, after his father was hired by RCA. Spielberg attended Hebrew school from 1953 to 1957, in classes taught by Rabbi Albert L. Lewis. In early 1957, the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Spielberg had a bar mitzvah ceremony when he was thirteen. His family was involved in the synagogue and had many Jewish friends. Of the Holocaust, he said that his parents "talked about it all the time, and so it was always on my mind". His father had lost between sixteen and twenty relatives in the Holocaust. Spielberg found it difficult accepting his heritage; he said: "It isn't something I enjoy admitting ... but when I was seven, eight, nine years old, God forgive me, I was embarrassed because we were Orthodox Jews. I was embarrassed by the outward perception of my parents' Jewish practices. I was never really ashamed to be Jewish, but I was uneasy at times." Spielberg was the target of antisemitism: "In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible." He gradually followed Judaism less during adolescence, after his family had moved to various neighborhoods and found themselves to be the only Jews.
Spielberg recalls his parents taking him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). He had never seen a movie before, and thought they were taking him to the circus. He was terrified by the movie's train crash, and at age 12, he recreated it with his Lionel trains and filmed it. He recalls: "The trains went around and around, and after a while that got boring, and I had this eight-millimeter camera, and I staged a train wreck and filmed it. That was hard on the trains, but then I could cut the film lots of different ways and look at it over and over again." This was his first home movie. In 1958, he became a Boy Scout, eventually attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. He fulfilled a requirement for the photography merit badge by making a nine-minute 8 mm Western, The Last Gunfight. Spielberg used his father's movie camera to make amateur features, and began taking the camera along on every Scout trip. At age 13, Spielberg made a 40-minute war film, Escape to Nowhere, with a cast of classmates. The film won first prize in a statewide competition. Throughout his early teens, and after entering high school, Spielberg made about fifteen to twenty 8 mm adventure films. He recalls that my dad told me stories about World War II constantly ... I knew, based on the stories my dad and his friends were telling about World War II, that there was no glory in war. And it was ugly, and it was cruel ... it was, you know, visually devastating. And so I thought, someday, if I ever do make a war movie for real, it's got to be something that tells the truth about what those experiences had been for those young 17-, 18-, 19-year-old boys storming Omaha Beach, let's say.
In Phoenix, Spielberg went to the local theater every Saturday. Formative films included Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937), Walt Disney's Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and The Seven Samurai (1954), Ishirō Honda's Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) ("the film that set me on my journey"), Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) ("I'm still living off the adrenalin that ... I experienced watching that film for the first time.") He attended Arcadia High School in 1961 for three years. In 1963, he wrote and directed a 140-minute science fiction film, Firelight, the basis of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Firelight, funded mainly by his father, was shown in a local theater for one evening and grossed $501 against its $500 budget.
After taking a tour bus to Universal Studios, a chance conversation with an executive led to Spielberg getting a three-day pass to the premises. On the fourth day, he walked up to the studio gates without a pass, and the security guard waved him in: "I basically spent the next two months at Universal Studios ... that was how I became an unofficial apprentice that summer." His family later moved to Saratoga, California, where he attended Saratoga High School. A year later, his parents divorced. Spielberg moved to Los Angeles to stay with his father, while his three sisters and mother remained in Saratoga. He recalls: My parents split up when I was 15 or 16 years old, and I needed a special friend, and had to use my imagination to take me to places that felt good – that helped me move beyond the problems my parents were having, and that ended our family as a whole. And thinking about that time, I thought, an extraterrestrial character would be the perfect springboard to purge the pain of your parents' splitting up. He recalls his mother had "a huge adventurous personality. We always saw her as Peter Pan, the kid who never wanted to grow up, and she sort of saw herself that way. I think my mom lived a lot of childhoods in her ninety-seven years." He was not interested in academics, aspiring only to be a filmmaker. He applied to the University of Southern California's film school but was turned down because of his mediocre grades. He then applied and enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where he became a brother of Theta Chi fraternity. In 1968, Universal gave Spielberg the opportunity to write and direct a short film for theatrical release, the 26-minute 35 mm Amblin'. Studio vice president Sidney Sheinberg was impressed and offered Spielberg a seven-year directing contract. A year later, he dropped out of college to begin directing television productions for Universal, making him the youngest director to be signed to a long-term plan with a major Hollywood studio. Spielberg returned to Long Beach in 2002, where he presented Schindler's List to complete his Bachelor of Arts in Film and Electronic Media.
He recalls a formative encounter with one of his favorite filmmakers, John Ford, who said: "So they tell me you want to be a picture maker. You see those paintings around the office?" Spielberg said he did. John Ford pointed to a painting and asked, "Where's the horizon?" Spielberg said it was at the top. Ford asked him where it was in another painting. Spielberg said it was at the bottom. Ford said, "When you're able to distinguish the art of the horizon at the bottom of a frame or at the top of the frame, but not going right through the center of the frame, when you can appreciate why it's at the top and why it's at the bottom, you might make a pretty good picture maker."
Career
1969–1974: Television work and film debut
Spielberg made his professional debut with "Eyes", a segment of Night Gallery (1969) scripted by Rod Serling and starring Joan Crawford. Initially, there was skepticism from Crawford and studio executives regarding Spielberg's inexperience. Despite Spielberg's efforts to implement advanced camerawork techniques, studio executives demanded a more straightforward approach. His initial contributions received mixed responses, leading Spielberg to briefly step back from studio work. Crawford, reflecting on her collaboration with Spielberg, recognized his potential, noting his unique intuitive inspiration. She expressed her appreciation for Spielberg's talent in a note to him and communicated her approval to Serling. Crawford's endorsement highlighted Spielberg's early recognition in Hollywood despite hesitations regarding his experience.
In the early 1970s, Spielberg unsuccessfully tried to raise financing for his own low-budget films. He co-wrote and directed teleplays for Marcus Welby, M.D., The Name of the Game, Columbo, Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law and The Psychiatrist. The Columbo episode directed would be the show's inaugural, non-pilot episode "Murder by the Book". Although unsatisfied with his work, Spielberg used the opportunity to experiment with his techniques and learn about filmmaking. He earned good reviews and impressed producers; he was earning a steady income and relocated to Laurel Canyon, LA.
Impressed, Universal signed Spielberg to do four television films. The first was Duel (1971), adapted from Richard Matheson's short story, about a salesman (Dennis Weaver) being chased down a highway by a psychotic tanker truck driver. Executives decided to promote the film on television from its quality. Reviews were positive, and Universal asked Spielberg to shoot more scenes so it could be released theatrically to international markets. "Deservedly so" writes David Thomson, "for it stands up as one of the medium's most compelling spirals of suspense. The ordinariness of the Dennis Weaver character and the monstrous malignance of the truck confront one another with a narrative assurance that never needs to remind us of the element of fable." Duel, which would mark Spielberg's debut as a film director, would first air on Barry Diller's ABC Movie of the Week before having an international theatrical release. More TV films followed: Something Evil (1972), which aired on CBS, and Savage (1973), which aired on NBC; however, unlike Duel, neither of these would have a theatrical run.
Spielberg made his official theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), based on a true story about a married couple on the run, desperate to regain custody of their baby from foster parents. The film starred Goldie Hawn and William Atherton and marked the first of many collaborations with composer John Williams. Although the film was awarded Best Screenplay at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, it was not a commercial success, which Spielberg blamed on Universal's inconsistent marketing. The film opened in 400 US theaters to positive reviews; Pauline Kael wrote "Spielberg uses his gifts in a very free-and-easy, American way—for humor, and for a physical response to action. He could be that rarity among directors, a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation's Howard Hawks." The Hollywood Reporter wrote that "a major new director is on the horizon".
1975–1980: Stardom with blockbuster films
Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown took a chance with Spielberg, giving him the opportunity to direct Jaws (1975), a thriller based on Peter Benchley's bestseller. In it, a great white shark attacks beachgoers at a resort town, prompting police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) to hunt it down with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a veteran shark hunter (Robert Shaw). Jaws was the first movie shot on open ocean, so shooting proved difficult, especially when the mechanical shark malfunctioned. The shooting schedule overran by a hundred days, and Universal threatened to cancel production. Against expectations, Jaws was a success, setting the domestic box-office record and making Spielberg a household name. It won Academy Awards for Best Film Editing (Verna Fields), Best Original Dramatic Score (John Williams) and Best Sound (Robert Hoyt, Roger Heman, Earl Madery and John Carter). Spielberg said the malfunctioning of the mechanical shark resulted in a better movie, as he had to find other ways to suggest the shark's presence. After seeing the unconventional camera techniques of Jaws, Alfred Hitchcock praised "young Spielberg" for thinking outside the visual dynamics of the theater: "He's the first one of us who doesn't see the proscenium arch".
After declining an offer to make Jaws 2, Spielberg and Dreyfuss reunited to work on a film about UFOs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Spielberg used 65 mm film for the best picture quality, and a new live-action recording system so recordings could be duplicated later. He cast one of his favorite directors, François Truffaut, as the scientist Claude Lacombe and worked with special effects expert Douglas Trumbull. It marked the first of many collaborations between Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn. One of the rare films both written and directed by Spielberg, Close Encounters was popular with filmgoers and won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography (Vilmos Zsigmond) and Best Sound Effects Editing (Frank Warner). Stanley Kauffmann wrote: "I saw Close Encounters at its first public showing in New York, and most of the audience stayed...to watch the credits crawl lengthily at the end. For one thing, under the credits the giant spaceship was returning to the stars. For another, they just didn't want to leave this picture. For still another, they seemed to understand the importance of those many names to what they had just seen." Kauffmann placed it first on his list of the best American films from 1968 to 1977. Kael called Spielberg "a magician in the age of movies".
His next directorial work was 1941 (1979), an action-comedy written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale about Californians preparing for a Japanese invasion after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Spielberg was self-conscious about doing comedy as he had no prior experience in it. Universal and Columbia agreed to co-finance the film. 1941 grossed more than $92 million worldwide upon release, but most critics, and the studio heads, disliked it. Charles Champlin described 1941 as "the most conspicuous waste since the last major oil spill, which it somewhat resembles".
1981–1992: Established filmmaker
Spielberg directed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. They considered it a homage to the serials of the 1930s and 40s. It starred Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood. Filmed in La Rochelle, Hawaii, Tunisia and Elstree Studios, England, the shoot was difficult but Spielberg said it helped him hone his business acumen. The film was a box-office success and won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction (Norman Reynolds, Leslie Dilley and Michael D. Ford); Best Film Editing (Michael Kahn); Best Sound (Bill Varney, Steve Maslow, Gregg Landaker and Roy Charman); Best Sound Editing (Ben Burtt and Richard L. Anderson); and Best Visual Effects (Richard Edlund, Kit West, Bruce Nicholson and Joe Johnston). Roger Ebert wrote: "Raiders of the Lost Ark is an out-of-body experience, a movie of glorious imagination and breakneck speed that grabs you in the first shot, hurtles you through a series of incredible adventures, and deposits you back in reality two hours later–breathless, dizzy, wrung-out, and with a silly grin on your face". Raiders was the first film in the Indiana Jones franchise.
Spielberg returned to science fiction with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). It tells the story of Elliot (Henry Thomas), a young boy who befriends an alien who was accidentally left behind by his companions and is attempting to return home. Spielberg eschewed storyboards so his direction would be more spontaneous, and shot roughly in sequence so the actors' performances would be authentic as they bonded with and said goodbye to E.T. Richard Corliss wrote, "This was the closing-night attraction at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, a venue not known for blubbering sentiment. At the end, as the little critter bade his farewells and the Jules Verne-like space ship left the ground, the audience similarly levitated. One heard the audience's childlike applause; one felt their spirits lift. This was rapture made audible, palpable ... Spielberg orchestrated the movements of the camera and the puppet spaceman with the feelings of—it has to be called love—expressed in young Henry Thomas' yearning face. E.T. was the first film character to be a finalist in TIME's Man of the Year sweepstakes. It would have been fine with me if the little creature, this lovely film, had won."
A special screening was organized for Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who were emotional by the end. E.T. grossed $700 million worldwide. It won four Academy Awards: Best Original Score (John Williams), Best Sound (Robert Knudson, Robert Glass, Don Digirolamo and Gene Cantamessa), Best Sound Editing (Charles L. Campbell and Ben Burtt) and Best Visual Effects (Carlo Rambaldi, Dennis Muren and Kenneth F. Smith). Kael wrote of E.T., "His voice is ancient and otherworldly but friendly, humorous. And this scaly, wrinkled little man with huge, wide-apart, soulful eyes and a jack-in-the-box neck has been so fully created that he's a friend to us, too; when he speaks of his longing to go home the audience becomes as mournful as Elliot. Spielberg has earned the tears that some people in the audience—and not just children—shed. Genuinely entrancing movies are almost as rare as extraterrestrial visitors." Spielberg co-wrote and produced Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), released the same summer as E.T. With John Landis, he co-produced the anthology film Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), contributing the "Kick the Can" segment.
His next feature film was the Raiders of the Lost Ark prequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Working again with Lucas and Ford, the film was shot in the US, Sri Lanka and China. The film was darker than its predecessor, and led to the creation of the PG-13 rating because some content was deemed unsuitable for children under 13. Spielberg later said he was unhappy with Temple of Doom because it lacked his "personal touches and love". Nonetheless, the film was a blockbuster hit, won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects and received mostly good reviews. Kael preferred it to the original, writing, "Spielberg is like a magician whose tricks are so daring they make you laugh. He creates an atmosphere of happy disbelief: the more breathtaking and exhilarating the stunts are the funnier they are. Nobody has ever fused thrills and laughter in quite the way that he does here. He starts off at full charge in the opening sequence and just keeps going". She conceded that it was less "sincere" than Raiders, adding "that's what is so good about it." On this project Spielberg met his future wife, Kate Capshaw, who played Willie Scott. Spielberg recalled, "The second film I could have done a lot better if there had been a different story. It was a good learning exercise for me to really throw myself into a black hole. I came out of the darkness of Temple Of Doom and I entered the light of the woman I was eventually going to marry and raise a family with."
Thomson writes that "At first sight, the Spielberg of the eighties may seem more an impresario—or a studio, even—then a director." Between 1984 and 1990, Spielberg served as producer or executive producer on nineteen feature films for his production company, Amblin Entertainment. Among them were Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984), The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985), Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis, 1988), Joe Versus the Volcano (John Patrick Shanley, 1990) and Arachnophobia (Frank Marshall, 1990). In the early 1980s, Spielberg befriended Warner Communications CEO Steve Ross eventually resulting in Spielberg making films for Warner Bros. It began with The Color Purple (1985), an adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, about a generation of empowered African-American women in the depression-era South. It was Spielberg's first film on a dramatic subject matter, and he expressed reservations about tackling the project: "It's the risk of being judged-and accused of not having the sensibility to do character studies." Starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, the film was a box-office hit and critics started to take note of Spielberg's foray into drama. Ebert named it the best film of the year. The film received eleven Academy Award nominations, and Spielberg won Best Director from the Directors Guild of America.
As China underwent economic reform and opened up to the American film industry, Spielberg made Empire of the Sun (1987), the first American film shot in Shanghai since the 1930s. It is an adaptation of J. G. Ballard's autobiographical novel about Jamie Graham (Christian Bale), a boy who goes from being the son of a wealthy British family in Shanghai, to a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. David Lean was originally set to direct, with Spielberg producing. It was written by Tom Stoppard and co-starred John Malkovich as an American expatriate. Critical reaction was mixed at the time of release; criticism ranged from the "overwrought" plot to Spielberg's downplaying of "disease and starvation". However, Andrew Sarris named it the best film of the year and later included it among the best of the decade. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, but a disappointment at the box office; Ian Alterman of The New York Times thought it was overlooked by audiences. Spielberg recalled that Empire of the Sun was one of his most enjoyable films to make. Thomson called it "a great work through and through" and "the first clear sign that Spielberg the showman was an artist, too."
In 1989, Spielberg intended to direct Rain Man, but instead directed Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to meet his contractual obligations. Producer Lucas and star Ford returned for the film. A longtime James Bond fan, Spielberg cast Sean Connery as Jones's father, Henry Jones, Sr. Due to complaints about violence in Temple of Doom, Spielberg returned to more family-friendly fare for the third installment. Last Crusade received positive reviews and was a box-office success, earning $474 million; it was his biggest hit since E.T. Biographer Joseph McBride wrote that it was a comeback for Spielberg, and Spielberg acknowledged the amount he has learned from making the Indiana Jones series. Ebert wrote that, "If there is just a shade of disappointment after seeing this movie, it has to be because we will never again have the shock of this material seeming new. Raiders of the Lost Ark, now more than ever, seems a turning point in the cinema of escapist entertainment, and there was really no way Spielberg could make it new all over again. What he has done is to take many of the same elements, and apply all of his craft and sense of fun to make them work yet once again. And they do."
Also in 1989, he reunited with Richard Dreyfuss for the romantic drama Always, about an aerial firefighter. It is a modern remake of one of Spielberg's favorite childhood films, A Guy Named Joe (1943). The story was personal; he said "As a child I was very frustrated, and maybe I saw my own parents [in A Guy Named Joe]. I was also short of girlfriends. And it stuck with me." Spielberg had discussed the film with Dreyfuss back in 1975, with up to twelve drafts being written before filming commenced. Always was commercially unsuccessful and received mixed reviews. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Always is filled with big, sentimental moments, it lacks the intimacy to make any of this very moving."
After a brief setback in which Spielberg felt "artistically stalled", he returned in 1991 with Hook, about a middle-aged Peter Pan (Robin Williams), who returns to Neverland and encounters Tinker Bell (Julia Roberts) and the eponymous Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman). During filming, the stars clashed on set; Spielberg told 60 Minutes that he would never work with Roberts again. Nominated for five Academy Awards, the studio enjoyed the film but most critics did not; Thomson called it "maudlin". Writing for The Washington Post, Desson Howe described the film as "too industrially organized", and thought it mundane. At the box office, it earned more than $300 million worldwide from a $70 million budget.
1993–1998: Transition to dramatic works
In 1993, Spielberg returned to the adventure genre with Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton's bestseller, with a screenplay by Crichton and David Koepp. Jurassic Park is set on a fictional island near Costa Rica, where a businessman (Richard Attenborough) has hired geneticists to create a wildlife park of de-extinct dinosaurs. In a departure from his usual order of planning, Spielberg and the designers storyboarded certain sequences from the novel early on. The film also used computer-generated imagery provided by Industrial Light & Magic; Jurassic Park was completed on time and became the highest-grossing film at the time, and won three Academy Awards.
Also in 1993, Spielberg directed Schindler's List, about Oskar Schindler, a businessman who helped save 1,100 Jews from The Holocaust. Based on Schindler's Ark, Spielberg waited ten years to make the film as he did not feel "mature" enough. He wanted to embrace his heritage, and after the birth of his son, Max, he said that "it greatly affected me [...] A spirit began to ignite in me, and I became a Jewish dad". Principal photography began on March 1, 1993, in Kraków, Poland, while Spielberg supervised the post-production of Jurassic Park. To make filming "bearable", Spielberg brought his wife and children with him. Against expectations, the film was a commercial and artistic success, and Spielberg used his percentage of profits to start the Shoah Foundation, a non-profit organization that archives testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Schindler's List won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Spielberg's first as Best Director. It also won seven BAFTAs, and three Golden Globes. Schindler's List is one of the AFI's 100 best American films ever made.
In response to meeting Holocaust survivors during the filming of Schindler's List, Spielberg decided to use some of the proceeds from the film to establish the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994. The goal was to record the testimonies of survivors "before it was too late". Over 50,000 survivors were recorded. In 2006 the foundation transferred its archives to the University of Southern California and the name was changed to the Visual History Archive (VHA) at the USC Shoah Foundation.
Ebert wrote, "Flaubert once wrote that he disliked Uncle Tom's Cabin because the author was constantly preaching against slavery. 'Does one have to make observations about slavery?' he asked. 'Depict it; that's enough.' And then he added, 'An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.' That would describe Spielberg, the author of this film. He depicts the evil of the Holocaust, and he tells an incredible story of how it was robbed of some of its intended victims. He does so without the tricks of his trade, the directorial and dramatic contrivances that would inspire the usual melodramatic payoffs. Spielberg is not visible in this film. But his restraint and passion are present in every shot." Filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, criticized the film for its weak representation of the Holocaust. Imre Kertész, a Hungarian author and concentration camp survivor, disliked the film, saying, "I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life and the very possibility of the Holocaust." Thomson calls it "the most moving film I have ever seen."
In 1994, Spielberg took a break from directing to spend more time with his family, and set up his new film studio, DreamWorks, with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. After his hiatus, he returned to directing with a sequel to Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). A loose adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel The Lost World, the plot follows mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and his researchers who study dinosaurs at Jurassic Park and are confronted by another team with a different agenda. Spielberg wanted the onscreen creatures to be more realistic than in the first film; he used 3D storyboards, computer imagery and robotic puppets. Budgeted at $73 million, The Lost World: Jurassic Park opened in May 1997 and was one of the highest grossing films of the year. The J. Hoberman critic opined that The Lost World was "better crafted but less fun" than the first film, while The Guardian wrote "It looks like a director on autopilot [...] The special effects brook no argument."
Amistad (1997), his first film released under DreamWorks, was based on the true story of the events in 1839 aboard the slave ship La Amistad. Producer Debbie Allen, who had read the book Amistad I in 1978, thought Spielberg would be perfect to direct. Spielberg was hesitant taking on the project, afraid it would be compared to Schindler's List, but said, "I've never planned my career [...] In the end I do what I think I gotta do." Starring Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, Djimon Hounsou and Matthew McConaughey, Spielberg used Allen's ten years worth of research to reenact the difficult historical scenes. The film struggled to find an audience, and underperformed at the box office; Spielberg admitted that Amistad "became too much of a history lesson".
Spielberg's 1998 release was World War II epic Saving Private Ryan, about a group of US soldiers led by Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) sent to bring home a paratrooper whose three brothers were killed in the same twenty-four hours of the Normandy landing. Filming took place in England, and US Marine Dale Dye was hired to train the actors and keep them in character during combat scenes. Halfway through filming, Spielberg reminded the cast they were making a tribute to thank "your grandparents and my dad, who fought in [the war]". Critics praised the direction and its realistic portrayal of war. The film grossed a successful $481 million worldwide and Spielberg won a second Academy Award for Best Director. In August 1999, Spielberg and Hanks were awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal from Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Thomson writes "Ryan changed war films: combat, shock, wounds, and fear had never been so graphically presented; and yet there was also a true sense of what duties and ideas had felt like in 1944. I disliked the framing device. I would have admired a director who trusted us to get there without that. Never mind—Ryan is a magnificent film." Ebert wrote "Spielberg knows how to make audiences weep better than any director since Chaplin in City Lights. But weeping is an incomplete response, letting the audience off the hook. This film embodies ideas. After the immediate experience begins to fade, the implications remain and grow."
1999–2012: Experimentations with technology
Spielberg returned to science fiction with A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), a loose adaptation of Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" (1969). Stanley Kubrick had bought the rights to the story in 1979 and worked on an adaptation for years. He told Spielberg about the project in 1984 and suggested that he direct, believing the story was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities. In 1999, Kubrick died. Spielberg decided to direct A.I. and wrote the screenplay. Spielberg tried to be faithful to Kubrick's vision and made allusions to his friend's work though with mixed results according to some critics. The plot revolves around an android, David (Haley Joel Osment) who, like Pinocchio, dreams of being a "real boy". The film won five Saturn Awards and grossed $236 million worldwide. Jonathan Rosenbaum highly praised the film: "If A.I. Artificial Intelligence — a film whose split personality is apparent even in its two-part title — is as much a Kubrick movie as a Spielberg one, this is in large part because it defamiliarizes Spielberg, makes him strange. Yet it also defamiliarizes Kubrick, with equally ambiguous results — making his unfamiliarity familiar. Both filmmakers should be credited for the results—Kubrick for proposing that Spielberg direct the project and Spielberg for doing his utmost to respect Kubrick's intentions while making it a profoundly personal work." A. O. Scott called it "the best fairy tale–the most disturbing, complex and intellectually challenging boy's adventure story–Mr. Spielberg has made" and chose it as the best film of the year and one of the best of the decade.
Spielberg followed A.I. with the sci-fi neo-noir Minority Report (2002), based on Philip K. Dick's short story (1956). The film stars Tom Cruise as commanding officer of precrime in futuristic Washington, D.C. Ebert named Minority Report the best film of 2002, praising its craftsmanship: "here is Spielberg using every trick in the book and matching them without seams, so that no matter how he's achieving his effects, the focus is always on the story and the characters ... Some directors place their trust in technology. Spielberg, who is a master of technology, trusts only story and character, and then uses everything else as a workman uses his tools." However, critic Todd McCarthy thought there was not enough action. The film earned more than $358 million worldwide. Also in 2002, he released Catch Me If You Can, based on the autobiography of con-artist Frank Abagnale. Leonardo DiCaprio played Abagnale; Christopher Walken and Hanks also starred. Spielberg said, "I have always loved movies about sensational rogues—they break the law, but you just have to love them for the moxie." The film was a critical and commercial success.
Spielberg followed Catch Me If You Can with The Terminal (2004), a comedy inspired by the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri and by Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967). The film follows Viktor Navorski (Hanks), an Eastern European man who, after a coup in his home country, is stranded in John F. Kennedy International Airport. It features Catherine Zeta-Jones as a flight attendant and Stanley Tucci as a customs and immigration official. Ebert wrote of Viktor's predicament: "The immigration service, and indeed the American legal system, has no way of dealing with him because Viktor does not do, or fail to do, any of the things the system is set up to prevent him from doing, or not doing. He has slipped through a perfect logical loophole. The Terminal is like a sunny Kakfa story, in which it is the citizen who persecutes the bureaucracy." The titular terminal was a real set built by Alex McDowell. In 2005, Spielberg directed War of the Worlds, a co-production of Paramount and DreamWorks, based on H. G. Wells's novel; Spielberg had been a fan of the book and of George Pal's 1953 film. Starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, the film is about an American dock worker who is forced to look after his children, from whom he lives separately, as he tries to protect and reunite them with their mother when extraterrestrials invade Earth. Spielberg used storyboards to help the actors react to computer imagery that they could not see and used natural lighting and camerawork to avoid an "over stylized" science fiction picture. The film was a box-office hit grossing more than $600 million worldwide.
Spielberg's Munich (2005) is about the Israeli government's secret retaliation after 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were murdered in the 1972 Munich massacre. The film is based on Vengeance, a book by journalist George Jonas. It was previously adapted for the screen in the 1986 television film Sword of Gideon. Spielberg, who personally remembers the incident, sought advice from former president Bill Clinton, among others, before making the film, because he did not want to cause further problems in the Middle East. Although the film garnered mostly positive reviews, some critics perceived it as antisemitic; it is one of Spielberg's most controversial films. Munich received five Academy Awards nominations: Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director for Spielberg. It was his sixth Best Director nomination, and fifth Best Picture nomination.
In the mid-2000s, Spielberg scaled down his directing career and became more selective about film projects. In December 2005, he and his partners sold DreamWorks to conglomerate Viacom. In June 2006, Spielberg planned to make Interstellar, but abandoned the project, which was eventually directed by Christopher Nolan. Spielberg remained active as a producer. Spielberg returned to the Indiana Jones series in 2008 with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Released 19 years after Last Crusade, the film is set in 1957, pitting Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) against Soviet agents led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), searching for a telepathic crystal skull. Principal photography was complete in October 2007, and the film was released in May 2008. This was his first film not released by DreamWorks since 1997. The film received generally favorable reviews from critics, but some fans were disappointed by the introduction of science fiction elements uncharacteristic of the previous films. Tom Ryan praised Spielberg and Lucas for their realistic 1950s setting—"The energy on display is impressive". It was a box-office success, grossing $790 million worldwide.
Starting in 2009, Spielberg shot the first film in a planned trilogy of motion capture films based on Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin. Spielberg had long been a fan of the comics, and per Michael Farr, Hergé "thought Spielberg was the only person who could ever do Tintin justice." The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was co-produced by Peter Jackson and premiered in Brussels, Belgium. The film was released in North American theaters on December 21, 2011, in Digital 3D and IMAX. It received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed over $373 million worldwide. The Adventures of Tintin won Best Animated Feature at the 69th Golden Globe Awards. Spielberg followed Tintin with War Horse, shot in England in summer 2010. It was released four days after Tintin, on December 25, 2011. The film, based on Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel, follows the friendship between a British boy and his horse Joey before and during World War I. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios with whom DreamWorks made a distribution deal in 2009, War Horse was the first of four consecutive Spielberg films released by Disney. It received acclaim from critics and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. In a review for Salon magazine, Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "at this point in his career Spielberg is pursuing personal goals, and everything that's terrific and overly flat and tooth-rottingly sweet about War Horse reflects that."
Spielberg directed the historical drama Lincoln (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as President Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and written by Tony Kushner, the film depicts the final four months of Lincoln's life. The film was shot in Richmond, Virginia in late 2011. and was released in the US in November 2012. Lincoln was acclaimed and earned more than $250 million worldwide. It was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, winning Best Production Design and Best Actor for Day-Lewis's performance. Donald Clarke from The Irish Times praised the direction: "Against the odds, Spielberg makes something genuinely exciting of the backstage wheedling."
2013–present: Recent work
It was announced on May 2, 2013, that Spielberg would direct American Sniper, but he left the project before production began. Instead, he directed Bridge of Spies (2015), a Cold War thriller based on the 1960 U-2 incident, and focusing on James B. Donovan's negotiations with the Soviets for the release of pilot Gary Powers after his aircraft was shot down over Soviet territory. It was written by Matt Charman and the Coen brothers, and starred Tom Hanks as Donovan, as well as Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan and Alan Alda. It was filmed in the fall of 2014 in New York City, Berlin and Wrocław, and was released on October 16. Bridge of Spies was popular with critics, and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture; Rylance won Best Supporting Actor, becoming the second actor to win for a performance directed by Spielberg.
In 2016, Spielberg made The BFG, an adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book, starring newcomer Ruby Barnhill, and Mark Rylance as the titular Big Friendly Giant. DreamWorks bought the rights in 2010, and John Madden had intended to direct. The film was the last to be written by E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison before her death. It was co-produced and released by Walt Disney Pictures, marking the first Disney-branded film to be directed by Spielberg. The BFG premiered as an out-of-competition entry at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and received a wide release in the US on July 1, 2016. The BFG received fair reviews; Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune compared certain scenes to the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, while Toronto Sun's Liz Braun thought that there were "moments of wonder and delight" but it was too long.
A year later, Spielberg directed The Post, an account of The Washington Post's printing of the Pentagon Papers. Starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, production began in New York on May 30, 2017. Spielberg stated his attraction to the project: "When I read the first draft of the script, this wasn't something that could wait three years or two years—this was a story I felt we needed to tell today." The film received a wide release on January 12, 2018. The Post gained positive reception; the critic from the Associated Press thought "Spielberg infuses every scene with tension and life and the grandeur of the ordinary that he's always been so good at conveying." In 2017, Spielberg and Paul Greengrass, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro and Lawrence Kasdan were featured in the Netflix documentary series Five Came Back, about the war-related works of directors Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler. Spielberg was also an executive producer. He executive produced the series with Barry Diller and Scott Rudin.
Spielberg directed the science fiction Ready Player One (2018), adapted from the novel of the same name by Ernest Cline. It stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, and Mark Rylance. The plot takes place in 2045 when much of humanity uses virtual reality to escape the real world. Ready Player One began production in July 2016, and was intended to be released on December 15, 2017, but was moved to March 2018 to avoid competition with Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It premiered at the 2018 South by Southwest film festival. Spielberg's direction was praised along with the action scenes and visual effects, but many critics thought the film was too long and overused 1980s nostalgia.
In 2019, Spielberg filmed West Side Story, an adaptation of the musical of the same name. It stars Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler in her film debut with Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Mike Faist, and Rita Moreno in supporting roles. Written by Tony Kushner, the film stays true to the 1950s setting. West Side Story was released in December 2021 to positive reviews and received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and Best Director. Spielberg also received nominations from the Golden Globe Awards, Directors Guild of America, and Critics' Choice Movie Awards. The Economist praised the choreography, stating that it "stunningly melds beauty and violence". In March 2022, Spielberg said that West Side Story would be the last musical he will direct.
Spielberg's 2022 film The Fabelmans is a fictionalized account of his own adolescence, which he wrote with Tony Kushner. Gabriel LaBelle plays Sammy Fabelman, a character inspired by Spielberg, while Michelle Williams plays Sammy's mother Mitzi Fabelman, Paul Dano plays Burt Fabelman, his father, Seth Rogen plays Bennie Loewy, Burt's best friend and co-worker who becomes Sammy's surrogate uncle, and Judd Hirsch as Mitzi's Uncle Boris. Filming began in Los Angeles in July 2021, and the film premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, Spielberg's first appearance at that festival. It received widespread critical acclaim and won the festival's People's Choice Award. It received a limited theatrical release on November 11, 2022, by Universal Pictures, before expanding wide on November 23.
Despite the favorable critical reception, West Side Story and The Fabelmans were box-office failures, which Variety suggested could be attributed to a decline in the popularity of Spielberg in a film-going environment altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the public's loss of interest in prestige films. The Fabelmans received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. It was, however, a major box office success in France and became the highest-rated film of the 21st century in the country, with a 4.9 average from critics on AlloCiné from 43 reviews, with all but six giving the film 5 stars. Cahiers du Cinéma wrote that Spielberg, at age 76, had "come to represent like no other, the idea of cinema as wonder, at a time when the relationship to the spectacular and the cinema seems more tormented than ever" and declared that the film will "undoubtedly remain the most important and singular film of his career".
Spielberg had planned to direct Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but he stepped down and was replaced by James Mangold. Spielberg said that he would remain "hands on" as a producer, along with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. In 2016, it was announced that it would be written by David Koepp, with a release by Disney on July 19, 2019. After a change of filming and release dates, it was postponed again when Jonathan Kasdan was announced as the film's new writer. Soon after, a new release date of July 9, 2021, was announced. In May 2019, Dan Fogelman was hired to write a new script, and Kasdan's story, focused on the Nazi gold train, would not be used; the script was ultimately credited to Mangold, Koepp, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth. In April 2020, it was announced that the release of the film was delayed to July 29, 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in October 2021, the release date was again delayed to June 30, 2023. The film began production in the UK in June 2021 and finished in February 2022.
In February 2025, Spielberg began shooting his next film, Disclosure Day, reportedly about UFOs. The screenplay was written by David Koepp, based on an original idea from Spielberg. The film will star Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, Wyatt Russell, and Eve Hewson, and is set to be released in theatres on June 12, 2026, by Universal Pictures.
Other ventures
Production
Spielberg's first film as an executive producer was the directorial debut of Robert Zemeckis, I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978). He produced Zemeckis's dark comedy Used Cars (1980), which was a critical but not a commercial success. In 1980, Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall founded Amblin Productions; the first film it produced was the romantic comedy Continental Divide (Michael Apted, 1981). It went on to produce Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984), Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis, 1988), Joe Versus the Volcano (John Patrick Shanley, 1990), Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997) and The Mask of Zorro (Martin Campbell, 1998). For some, including Young Sherlock Holmes (Barry Levinson, 1985) and Harry and the Hendersons (William Dear, 1987), the title "Steven Spielberg Presents" was in the opening credits. It produced Don Bluth's animated films An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988), leading to the spin-off Amblimation. In 1985, NBC offered Spielberg a two-year contract on a television series, Amazing Stories; the show was marketed as a blend of The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. NBC gave Spielberg creative control and a budget of $1 million for each episode. After two seasons and disappointing ratings, the show was not renewed. Although Spielberg's involvement as a producer would vary widely from project to project, Zemeckis said that Spielberg would always "respect the filmmaker's vision". Over the next decade, Spielberg's record as a producer brought mixed critical and commercial results. In 1992, Spielberg began to scale back producing, saying "Producing has been the least fulfilling aspect of what I've done in the last decade." He produced cartoons such as Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Family Dog, Freakazoid!, and Pinky and the Brain. He produced A Brief History of Time by Errol Morris.