By Jessica Mansfield & James Mottram
Steven Spielberg may be the busiest man in Hollywood – having produced ten very different, very successful movies and TV shows in the last year alone – yet the prolific director/producer continues to draw on his childhood experiences to fuel his filmmaking, with loneliness a common theme throughout many of his films. This is the key that makes some of his most loved films – E.T: The Extra Terrestrial, Schindler’s List, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence – the emotional touchstones that they are.
“Loneliness is a place that is familiar to me, and a place that I always try to escape from. I sometimes just have to fill my own life with enough dreams so that I can pretend that I’m not lonely,” Spielberg muses, sitting down to chat with FilmInk at The Cannes Film Festival about his latest film, The BFG. Adapted from Roald Dahl’s beloved book about an orphan girl’s unlikely friendship with an outcast giant, Spielberg’s whimsical take on the classic story echoes the magic of E.T: The Extra Terrestrial, whilst being very much its own work. And, like his other films, The BFG’s tale of two lonely souls coming together speaks to a part of the director’s own personal story.
“It was very easy to tell The BFG’s story, because I came from the same place that he came from,” Spielberg reveals. “I didn’t have the feistiness or the tenacity of the character of Sophie, who is able to tell off a 25-foot-tall giant, but it’s a great theme in Dahl’s story too because, in a sense, there are two orphans in this story. The BFG is orphaned from his brothers, just by the fact that they’re all bullies. They abuse him and take advantage of him, and Sophie is the unfortunate orphan of bad circumstances. So when these two orphans meet, they form a life together. That’s the core essence of the film. I remember what it was like to really feel isolated and alone; I was that way when I was younger before having children, and before getting married…before all of that.”
But now, of course, Steven Spielberg isn’t so lonely. From working with the likes of Peter Jackson and George Lucas, to mentoring Robert Zemeckis and JJ Abrams, Spielberg can work with literally anyone that he wants. And he has. “It’s crazy how old I am, because I know everybody now!” And, with an already busy schedule for the next few years, he’s still looking for more people to work with. “Son Of Saul came very close to breaking my heart… I saw the movie and then I met [the film’s director] Laszlo Nemes at the Academy luncheon. We had a two-hour chat about a week later, and I’m actively looking for something to do with him. Right now. He’s fantastic.”
But with all the collaboration that he’s done, Spielberg has never lost his touch when it comes to casting, something that he especially believes in his choice of Ruby Barnhill as The BFG’s Sophie. “Casting is 100% intuition, it really is,” he says. “I’ll see somebody, and I’ll just know that this is the right person for the part. I just knew that Ruby was the one. I saw in her reading that she was so honest – I felt like it wasn’t Dahl writing, it was just Ruby making up the words. That’s how realistic she sounded.”
The BFG is released in cinemas on June 30.
