Spielberg on Originality

I once met Director Steven Spielberg at a Q&A. His words on creativity changed me forever.

Last fall at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Dr. Drew Casper taught an upper division class on the Spielberg’s style, promising that the legend himself would show up to give advice and answer questions on the last week before finals. While I didn’t get to ask Spielberg my question personally, one of my classmates raised my exact concerns for the future of my creative work . “As a director now working in an era of established film history and digital technology, do you have any advice for new filmmakers on how to approach originality, especially when everything feels recycled or done before?”

As if expecting this question ahead of time, Steven nodded and said something along the lines of:
“You have to realize you are originality. It’s true a lot of things today are imitations or throwbacks to older movies (including my work), but there is only one of you. As long as you manage to put yourself in the film — your individual personality, experiences, feelings, goals, perspectives — there will be originality in that. Include what makes you you , and your work will sooner or later mold its unique expression, no matter how familiar it may be on a conscious level. I think that’s what matters the most when it comes to filmmaking, or honestly anything creative in life”.

It wasn’t until he said this that I realized where all my creative anxieties derived from. Since the beginning — from 6th grade to now, in my final undergraduate semester at USC — I’ve directed many student films, video projects, sprite image animations, and online video skits, but I always struggled when it came to developing live-action short films. In fact, I never actually directed an entirely independent, institution/curriculum-free, festival-worthy film because I was always stuck in what filmmakers call ‘development hell’. I would write something down and toss it multiple times because I was always afraid of coming off as a cheap knockoff of someone else’s ideas or being another one of those stereotypical, pretentious film students who poorly imitates his favorite directors’ aesthetics and dares to call himself a filmmaker. A relative once even saw one of my action-intense animation trailers in high school and encouraged me to be the next Michael Bay. How frightening.

Looking back now though, most of what people consider my best work have had some kind of emotion or story indirectly based off my own life experiences. Perhaps I always knew this was an important root of creativity and inspiration, but at least now, a famous, well-established director has put it into words.

Despite some critics bashing him for crystallizing the generic blockbuster and borrowing from older films pretty much all the time, Spielberg has certainly proven his success over the years- decades in making successful pictures that shout the word ‘spectacle’, but still hint a sense of originality, whether viewers consciously notice or not. Even with his use of pastiche, genre mashing, and borrowing of Hitchcock and David Lean techniques, he always managed to revolve character development and visual subjectivity around his own fears, dreams, and cultural background.

At the Q&A, Spielberg also nobly shared with us how E.T. was drawn from much of his own desires (and loneliness) during certain periods of his childhood. The alien itself is the captured illustration of a friend he always wanted to connect with whenever he felt socially isolated or faced family struggles. Even without directly preaching this, the film emotionally captured the hearts of audiences all over the U.S. and is now a renown classic.

To summarize what I learned from the legend, it’s okay to respectfully borrow ideas and formalities in your work, but the real artistry and chances of successfully connecting with viewers comes from the individual. It may not come into fruition right away, but striving to vividly express your own personality, feelings, and life events, according to Spielberg, is what makes the best of films.

Next week, I will consider exploring further into the themes and aesthetics of E.T. and continue my Writing 340 study on successful originality.

Thank you for reading!

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