Fresh Air - Film Icons: Steven Spielberg / Carrie Fisher

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

In 2022, E.T. and Jaws director Steven Spielberg talked about how he fell in love with film, and how he was afraid of everything as a kid. We'll also revisit our 2016 interview with actor Carrie Fisher about what it was really like to become a sex symbol as Princess Leia.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. From now through Labor Day, we're featuring interviews from our archive with great actors and directors. On this episode, we'll hear from Steven Spielberg. He'll talk about how he fell in love with film. The very first movie he saw both enchanted and terrified him. But the man who made Jaws admits a lot of things scared him as a kid.

Everything. There was nothing that didn't scare me. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of this horrible, New Jersey, this horrible scary naked tree out the window that looked like it had tentacles. Also, Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.

We'll listen back to Terry's 2016 interview with Carrie Fisher. It was recorded when she wrote her memoir, The Princess Diarist, about making the first Star Wars movie. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Every weekday, NPR's best political reporters come to you on the NPR Politics Podcast

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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Today, we continue our series on classic films and movie icons. I don't know who you are or where you came from, but from now on, you do as I tell you, okay? Look, your worshipfulness. Let's get one thing straight. I take orders from just one person, me. So one day you're still alive. Will somebody get this big walking carpet out of my way? That's Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars. We're going to listen back to Terry's 2016 interview with Carrie Fisher. She had just written a memoir about making that movie. Included in the book is the diary she wrote while shooting it when she was having a secret

affair with Harrison Ford. The memoir is called The Princess Diarist. Carrie Fisher, welcome back to Fresh Air. So how did you find your Star Wars diary? I mean, had you forgotten that you wrote it? I forgot that I wrote it and I was making my bedroom bigger, because I've always had small bedrooms, so I felt I deserved a bigger one now. I don't know why. And so there was all these boxes of writing underneath the floorboards, and I found it among all this other stuff. And I remembered when I saw it. So what most surprised you that you'd forgotten you'd experienced that you'd had written about in your journal?

That I was so insecure. Oh, yeah, that surprised me too, reading excerpts. I'm going to have you read an excerpt a little bit later, but yeah, it seems like you really needed other people to tell you who you were because you didn't know. No, I know. At least I knew that. At least I was aware that I didn't know who I was. So that was something. But it was sad to me. As you've pointed out, in Star Wars, you were the only girl in an all-boy fantasy. When did you start realizing that you were part of boys' sex fantasies?

Not until way later, and I'm very glad of that. Like about, I don't know, maybe eight years ago, some guy said to me, I thought about you every day from when I was 12 to when I was 22. And I said, every day? And he said, well, four times a day. And, you know, what do you say to that? Thank you? What do you say to that? Then I started becoming aware of it in an uncomfortable way.

So was it a very boys kind of set when you were making the film? Yeah. It's mostly, crews are still mostly men. I mean, I like that they have a continuity girl. So they don't call a continuity woman it's a continuity girl and they're women in makeup and hair and wardrobe but not in camera

not in sound you know and not in special effects it's all men did that add to your feeling of insecurity I think I sort of felt isolated you know I didn't really have anyone. I didn't confide in men. Well, I didn't confide in anyone then.

As opposed to oversharing like you do now. Yes, that's right. I made up for it. So what's really made news from your book is your affair with Harrison Ford when you were making Star Wars. He was in his mid-30s and married. You were 19.

Did you tell him you were going to write about it before you actually published the book? Oh, yeah. I'm really relieved to hear that. You're relieved? I'm relieved, yeah. Oh, no, I wouldn't have ambushed him like that. But it's still, no matter if I told him or not, it probably feels like an ambush. It feels like an ambush to me.

I'm the one that wrote it. Did you tell him or did you ask him for permission? No, I said I found the journals that I kept during the first movie and I'm probably going to publish them. And he just sort of raised his finger and said, lawyer. And then I said, no, I won't, you know, write anything that you don't want. I mean, I'll show it to you before, and you can take anything out that you want taken out. I don't want to, you know, make you uncomfortable, which

I, of course, have. Unduly uncomfortable. So he read it before it was published, and did he ask for any changes? I sent it to him. I called him. I said, where are you, you know? And I sent it to him. And I never heard back, so I can't imagine that he was comfortable with everything that was in it. But it's not like it's negative about him. It's just a personal story that's been a secret for a long time. Well, you do describe him as being kind of quiet and maybe kind of cold. Well, he's not the warmest person. He's not accessible, let's say that. He doesn't talk a lot,

and I'm very extroverted, and so it sort of was going nowhere. It was sort of one half of a conversation was happening. No, he's not a big talker, That's all. He just, he's very quiet and che but the fantasy did not always work out. And it was, you kind of projected a lot onto him. So if you could read an excerpt for us. Sure. We have no feeling for one another. We lie buried together during the night and haunt each other by day, acting out something that we don't feel and seeing through something that doesn't deserve any focus. I have never done anything quite like this. I sit patiently awaiting the consequences. I talk, walk, eat, sleep, patiently awaiting the consequences. How can a thing that doesn't seem to be happening come to an end?

George says that if you look at the person that someone chooses to have a relationship with, you'll see what they think of themselves. So Harrison is what I think of myself. It's hardly a relationship, but nevertheless, he is a choice. I examined all the options and chose the most likely to leave. No emotional investments. Never love for me, only obsession. Someone has to stand still for you to love them. My choices are always on the run. So thank you for reading that. That's Carrie Fisher reading

from the journal that she kept during the making of the first Star Wars film, and excerpts of that journal are included in her new memoir, The Princess Diarist. So, you know, in that excerpt, it seems like this relationship, in a way, was right for you because you had such low self-esteem and didn't

think you deserved somebody who actually was invested in you. But I didn't pick him. I mean, I didn't have a crush on him. He sort of, I didn't even have the nerve to have a crush on him there. I thought he was out of my range, if I even thought about it. He was so much older than I was, and he was married. So you describe yourself as having a pattern of being obsessed with inaccessible men. I know, but I'm 19 at that time. I have no pattern.

I had one boyfriend. When I read that, I felt so sorry for myself at that age. I mean, how could I have a pattern if I'd had one boyfriend? But that's, I guess, how it felt to me. You know, it was as intense as a pattern the kind of typical will there or won't they. They hate each other, but that's because they really like each other. And so you're having that kind of on-screen relationship. And in real life, you're having an affair.

So how did the affair affect the chemistry on screen? I think it made us more comfortable with one another. I think it made me more able to wisecrack to him, even if I was insecure. We were having an affair, so there was something to base some security on. I don't know. There was chemistry there, and you can see it. So I don't know which came first,

the chemistry in the film or the chemistry in the world. And, I mean, your characters end up having a child together. Well, a really good child, don't you think? We had Hitler. That's sort of perfect. I think that's perfect. Harrison and I have Hitler as a child. And who does he look like? Neither one of us. He's six foot five. So what was it like for you and Harrison Ford to work together again on the most recent Star Wars film, The Force Awakens? And did he already know you were writing the book? Did you already know you were writing the book? No, no, I didn't.

I wasn't writing any book. I hadn't found the diaries yet. I found the diaries when we started promoting when the movie was coming out and that's when I told him. And I'm sure he would have stopped me if he could have. But it sounds like you gave him that opportunity. Well, I gave him the opportunity to take out anything he didn't like.

Right, but not to stop it, yeah. But I don't think it's that revealing. It's certainly not offensive. It's not unkind about him. It's flattering. I mean, the way people are reacting to it is funny to me, too. I'd do him at 73. We're listening to Terry's 2016 interview with Carrie Fisher. We'll hear more of their

conversation after a break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Wondery. Kill List is a true story of how one journalist ended up in a I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. planet money. And on Fridays, we discuss indicators in the news, like job numbers, spending, the cost of food, sometimes all three. So my indicator is about why you might need to bring home more bacon to afford your eggs. I'll be here all week. Wrap up your week and listen to the Indicator podcast from NPR. This message comes from Wondery. Find out how the NYPD transformed into one of the world's most powerful police forces. From Wondery and Crooked Media with Push Black, this is Empire City. Follow Empire City on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. So it sounds like, you know, reading the book that you had a kind of love-hate relationship with your identity as Princess Leia.

It made you a star. It's an iconic role. There's things you haven't liked about being Princess Leia in the eyes of the world. What's the downside? No, I actually don't think there is that much of a downside. The downside is the hair. The downside is the hair

and some of the outfits. But I like Princess Leia. I like how she handles things. I like how she treats people. She tells the truth. She gets what she wants done. I don't have a real problem with Princess Leia. I've sort of melded with her over time. You write in the book that you had endless issues with your appearance, how you looked in Star Wars. Yes. And you say, what I saw in the mirror is not apparently what many teenage boys saw. So what did you see when you looked in the mirror? A giant fat face like a sand dab with features. And the hair?

The horrible hair. I just looked like, I don't know, like this really fat-faced, cute, in a not a good way girl. Whose idea was it to have the buns on either side of your head? Well, they kept putting hair on. They kept saying, I mean, you like this one. There were some worse ones, if you can imagine. But it was George and the producers. I mean, you know, Pat McDermott, the hairdresser, kept putting hairstyles on me. We kept parading them in front of them. And I don't know, somehow they chose that one. And to put more hair on either side of a round face is going to make it even

wider. So that was my problem with that. While we're speaking about appearance, in Return of the Jedi, when you are held captive by Jabba the Hutt, who is this like giant slimy slug-like creature and crime boss. And you're wearing this like incredibly revealing metal bikini. You are rail thin. I know. Did you have to stop eating for several weeks in order to become a cook? No, no.

I was thin then. I don't know why. There was a period of time it was brief. But I did exercise know why. There was a period of time it was brief, but I did exercise my legs. But in those days, you know, you didn't have exercise like you do now. You didn't have diets and, you know, I think there was Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons. So I got some leg weights and, you know, I didn't need to, though. I was 24 years old. Okay.

So the thing that, you know, so you're wearing this very, like, skimpy metal bikini. You're sitting in the lap of this giant criminal slug who is toying with you. He's kind of, like, petting you and licking his lips. I don't think he had lips. Whatever it is. He had a big tongue. That surrounds his lips. I don't think he had lips. Whatever it is that surrounds his mouth. Yeah. And you're wearing this, like, wearing. I mean, he has you chained,

so there's this big metal chain around your neck. So it's a very PG-13 kind of campy S&M B&D image. Yeah. And Jabba the Hutt is like licking his lips. He's stroking you. So there's something like so like sexual about it. But this is a movie for kids. So was there lots of joking on the set

about like the deeper S&M imagery of this scene? No. What my joke was when we first rehearsed it, they're brought in front of Jabba. They talk to Jabba. Jabba talks to Harrison and Mark. And then they're led off. They never say, hey, how are you?

So as they were being led off, I said in the rehearsal, don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Seriously. Which I thought they should have kept in there. Because it was like, where am I in all this? Sure, they're going to be digested for 2,000 years, but I have to stay with the slug with the big tongue. And nearly naked. Nearly naked, which is not a, you know, style choice for me. But why was it so softcore S&M B&D? I couldn't tell you that. It wasn't my choice.

When he showed me the outfit, I thought he was kidding. And it made me very nervous. And, you know, they wouldn't let me. They had to sit very straight because I couldn't have lines on my sides, you know, they wouldn't let me. I had to sit very straight because I couldn't have lines on my sides, you know, like a little crease. No creases were allowed. So I just sit very, very rigid straight.

So do you think there's something Fay Wray King Kong about that scene? Yeah, but I, you know, what's redeemed, what redeems it is that I get to kill him. Do you think there's something Fay Wray King Kong about that scene? Yeah, but I, you know, what's redeemed, what redeems it is that I get to kill him. Yeah. Which was so enjoyable. Did you see that as like female empowerment? Oh, absolutely. I sawed his neck off with that chain that I killed him with. I really relished that because I hated wearing that outfit

and sitting there rigid straight, and I couldn't wait to kill him. So Star Wars was shot in England where you had been going to school. You were in drama school there. And some of the actors in the film are British. Some of them are American. Your accent is kind of semi-English accent, isn't it? I know. It's so awful. But I've been going to school there. Well, look, it's not the school, though. It was the dialogue. I thought I recognized your foul stench when I arrived on board. Say that

like I just said it. It sounds weird. So it was very arch dialogue. So that's my excuse. And I'm living with it right now. So were you trying for an English accent? No, no, it was just accidental pretension. Well, you're probably also picking up a lot of it just living there. I mean, you have an ear. Well, I did about a year and a half of Shakespeare and Ibsen and all that. And that dialogue, my dialogue was the most arch of anybody's. Governor Tarkin, I thought I recognized your foul stench when I arrived on board. Who talks like that? But it was an iambic pentameter. No, but I did do it like I just said it, like a human without a British accent.

Right. And George said, this is very serious. You know, you're not being funny about this. You know, everything is on the line here, so you're very serious. So that's where the British, when I'm serious, I'm British. I guess. So when women dress like you at Comic-Con conventions, what do you most frequently see reflected back at you?

Like which costumes, which hairdos? Oh, my favorite one to see is the metal bikini on men. And that is what has been happening a lot. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. A lot. And not thin men, by the way. That's hilarious. Yeah, so that makes me feel good about myself. Kind of a before and after thing. This is way after. Not only is Princess Leia fatter, she's a guy.

All right. Carrie Fisher, thank you so much for talking with us. Well, thanks for talking to me. Terry Gross speaking with Carrie Fisher in 2016. She died later that year at the age of 60. Now we're going to listen to our archived interview with Steven Spielberg. It was recorded when he made his semi-autobiographical film, The Fablements, based on his childhood and teenage years. Spielberg says all his movies are personal in the sense that they come from his experiences, observations, and imagination, but this one is personal in a more direct way. It tells the story in a fictionalized way of how he fell in love with

movies and became a filmmaker. Spielberg has directed over 30 films, including Jaws, E.T., the Indiana Jones films, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan. He spoke with Terry Gross in 2022. Steven Spielberg, welcome to Fresh Air. I'm so glad we have this opportunity to talk. I wasn't sure I'd ever have that opportunity to talk with you. And congratulations on this film, which I really enjoyed. Let's start with The Greatest Show on Earth. It's a circus movie with some very disturbing things in it. And I'll preface this by saying the first movie I ever saw

was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and I was probably around six, the same age you were, when you saw The Greatest Show on Earth. And we walked in late, which people used to do at that time. And the first thing I saw was Kirk Douglas wrestling with an octopus underwater. And I was terrified and I begged my mother to just take me home. So tell us about what terrified you about the greatest show on earth, a circus movie directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Well, first of all, you know, I sympathize with you.

I, too, saw 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with James Mason and Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre. And that sequence with the giant squid attacking the Nautilus was terrifying, especially because they were cutting the tentacles off with axes. And that was pretty gruesome in those days. And I remember that. But I was older when I saw that movie, but I was only six years old when I saw it. But my parents took me to the greatest show on earth, and they thought it was going to be a great picture having to do with circus clowns and three rings of entertainment.

And, you know, I actually thought they were saying to me, we're taking you to a circus. Because I had never been to a movie before. We had television at home, but I had never been to a motion picture. And I thought what they meant to say was, you're going to actually see giraffes and elephants and lions and tigers. And what happened was we waited in line for hours in the freezing winter. And then we walked into this big theater with all these seats facing forward. And it was not a big top.

It wasn't a tent. It was just a structure. And I just remember as a kid looking around, and it was all these seats. Remember the color of the seats? They were red. And the curtain was red. And then suddenly this curtain opens, and this big, grainy image in color comes up on the screen and I felt very betrayed.

My first reaction was, you said you were taking me to a circus. And this movie started playing and I don't know how long it took me to fall under the spell of the film and I was enchanted. I remember just being enchanted by, didn't understand the story, didn't understand what they were saying.

But the imagery was amazing. But then along came this horrible train crash. And the train wreck was terrifying. And I wanted to leave the theater like you did with, you know, with 20,000 Leagues. And I was knocking on my parents' shoulders. I wanted to get, I was sinking as low as I could get in the, in my seat so as not to see the screen, but it was a really terrifying, traumatic thing. And, and it never left me. My first movie was a movie that scared my pants off and I'll never forget that. So in your semi-autobiographical

film, after seeing that movie, Sammy, who's your alter ego in the film, starts to recreate what terrified him with Lionel toy trains and crashing into things. And then he starts filming scenes like that. Why did you want to recreate something that was most terrifying? Like, I wanted to just forget 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which obviously I haven't done. But why did you want to keep creating it? Well, you know, I don't know, because remember, I'm a kid, and I think that when I saw that movie for the first time and I had a Lionel electric train set,

and by actually crashing the train into things and watching the train derail and watching the passenger cars and a couple of box cars and a caboose pile up, I was able to, I think, intuitively wrest back control of my fear. And I really think it helped assuage the fear. It helped me get in total control over it. So I was the one causing something that was going to maybe have a chance to scare other people, but no longer myself. And the idea of taking my dad's little Kodak Brownie 8mm movie camera and filming it was only because I kept wrecking the trains, crashing them into things. And my dad and mom threatened to take the train set away. So the idea of using a camera to film it, that I could watch the film over and over again,

and it would essentially, you know, it would calm me down. What else were you afraid of as a child? Everything. There was nothing that didn't scare me. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of this horrible, New Jersey, this horrible, scary, naked tree out the window that looked like it had tentacles. You know, and it looked like these horrible branches. And it looked like arms and long fingers and long fingernails, and the tree terrified me.

Later, as an adult, when I wrote Poltergeist, I created a tree out the window that actually comes to life and grabs a kid and starts to suck him into one of its knot holes, its sappy knot holes. And that was a direct steal from that tree out my window that scared me. I was afraid of the dark. I was, you know, I was afraid of small places. And I still am today. I'm very claustrophobic. But I was a fearful kid. And my parents didn't quite know what to do with that because my mom was fearless.

And my dad was extremely stoic about things like this. And no amount of bedside chats could calm me down once the sun set. And I went to bed, and my parents turned the lights off. And the only solace, I guess, I had was they allowed the door to my bedroom to be cracked an inch or two. So I had that little comfort of a hall light bedroom to be cracked an inch or two. So I had that little comfort of a hall light coming in, and that was about it. Among the things you're famous for is, you know, movies and TV about World War II, including, of course, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List. I mean, World War II

was terrifying, and you depicted one of the most terrifying aspects of it, which was D-Day in Saving Private Ryan. Do you see that as a continuation of what you did when you were a young boy making little films about things that terrified you, like recreating the train crash scene from The Greatest Show on Earth? Well, you know, there was a lot. I was very much in those days when I was, you know, 12, 13, 14, being influenced by television. And, you know, and there were a lot of movies on the late show. You get the late show, you get the late, late show. You get things called Million Dollar Movie back in Phoenix. And I was very influenced by all the war movies they were showing.

The John Wayne films like The Fighting Seabees and other films like Bataan or Back to Bataan or Guadalcanal Diary or The Sands of Iwo Jima. And coupled with the fact that my dad was from the greatest generation, he was a veteran of World War II. He fought in the China-Burma-India, the CBI campaign. And he was stationed in Karachi, sometimes in Burma. And he was in charge of all the planes that went off to bomb Japanese bridges.

And he had a couple of missions in the air, but he was so good with electronics, they sort of grounded him and put him in charge of sort of ground-to-air communication. And my dad told me stories about World War II constantly. So I made 8mm war movies. Escape to Nowhere, which I depict in The Fablemans, is an actual movie I made when I was about 16 years old called Escape to Nowhere. And because I was really obsessed with war, I made a World War II Air Force movie called Fighter Squadron in black and white when I was about 14 years old. And so that just came out of my sort of fascination with what I was watching on television or the stories my dad was telling me.

So when your father told you stories and when his friends who were also veterans told you stories, were they stories about heroism, about bonding with fellow soldiers, or were they stories about the horrors of war? Well, you know, sometimes it was the things I was just sort of eavesdropping about. Sometimes my dad would have reunions with other members of his fighter squadron and the 490th squadron. And they'd come over to the house sometimes once every couple of years and there'd be seven or eight guys together. And I'd be wandering in and out of my room or going into the kitchen, but I'd hear some of their stories and talking. And the thing that was most disturbing for me was all of a sudden a grown man would fold over sobbing, and my dad and everybody else would surround and tap the person on the back,

try to get a glass of water, and there would be tears from, you know, it's unusual when you're a kid and you hear in your own home adults sobbing. And whatever they were sobbing about, it was only years later that I found out that the PTSD that came out of that war was causing, and that's why it was so healthy for these veterans to get together once every couple of years. We're listening to Terry's 2022 interview with Steven Spielberg. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Listening to the news can feel like a journey. But the 1A podcast guides you beyond the headlines and cuts through the noise. Listen to 1A, where we celebrate your freedom to listen by getting to the heart of the story together,

only from NPR. The Bullseye podcast is, according to one journalist, the, quote, kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world. So make your world more perfect. Every week, Bullseye puts the pop in culture, interviewing brilliant authors, musicians, actors, and novelists to keep you on your pop culture target. Listen to the Bullseye podcast, only from NPR and Maximum Fun. Big news stories don't always break on your schedule. But with the NPR app, news, culture, and podcasts are ready when you want them in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. So when you were growing up, there was still a draft.

And when you were of draft age, there was still a draft. What did you think? I mean, you're of the Vietnam War generation. So when you were eligible for the draft and stood the chance of being sent to Vietnam, whether you wanted to go or not, what did you think about the possibility of actually fighting in a war? I would never have gone to Canada, but I tried everything I could not to be drafted, even though I was subjected to two or three physicals. I kept taking physicals because I had a draft counselor, and the draft counselor had advised me how to delay. I was 1A. I was not doing good in college.

1A meant that you were next up on the list. I had a student deferment, a 2S deferment, as a lot of us had, most of us had. But when my grades dropped below a certain level, I lost my 2S deferment, became 1A, and was ordered up on my first physical, my second physical, actually. My first physical, I was in high school, a senior in high school, turned 18, up in Northern California. And I was standing in line in a rainstorm outside to watch Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. And I was standing in the Dr. Strangelove line, and I hear a horn honking, and I recognize my dad's car,

and he's parked on the curb right opposite the theater. This was in San Jose. And he's waving me over, and I run over to the car, and I jump in the car, and he hands me a letter from the Selective Service. And it was a letter that was ordering me to report to have my first physical. And I'll tell you the power of movies, Terry,

which is really interesting. I was terrified. That letter was like a death warrant. And my dad was going to drive me home, and I said, no, no, no, I got to see this movie. And I had the letter. And I put the letter in my back pocket and ran back in line. And I saw the movie. And 10 minutes into the movie, I forgot that my father had handed me what could have been my death warrant, that's what that Kubrick film did for me. It took my mind off of anything except that story of Armageddon. And that was another example of just the power of somebody telling me a story. Yeah, well, the story that took your mind off

having to fight in war was a story about possible nuclear war and all the things that could go wrong and lead to it. So it's funny that that was distracting you from the possibility of going to war yourself. So how did you finally get out of being drafted? Well, because something called the lottery was enacted. I was in college at the time and they were announcing the lottery and we all ran to a friend's apartment, about 15, maybe 20 of us. And we turned on the TV and we watched the numbers come out of the drum. And my birthday, my number was 275. So right away, I was off the hook. But suddenly a number would come up for somebody else. It was number 19. And that person would start screaming and burst into tears. And then another number would come over that was on the bubble, like 110,

and you didn't know whether that was going to be the number that sent you to Vietnam. But that was quite a day. I'll never forget that. So with all the fear that you had about war and fighting in war and your father's friends occasionally leaning over and sobbing, thinking about the war, why did you want to make war movies? You know, I just think I was attracted to the sacrifice and to the gallantry. War kind of glorifies heroism, and Hollywood glorified war.

You know, 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, 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. So when I had the opportunity to make Robert Rodak's script into a movie, Saving Private Ryan, it can't be a glorification of war. It's just going to have to be the low-down dirty truth of what it was like for these young boys. Oh, and it's so, especially for its time, it's so graphic in a way that, like, the World War II movies that you grew up with were not.

You'd see people kind of step on grenades in those movies and their bodies would be thrown into the air, but you didn't see, like, a severed limb. You didn't see another soldier carrying off a limb. You didn't see people throwing up on the boat, you know, on those little boats heading to the actual beach on D-Day. You didn't see, you know, bloody bodies in the water. You didn't see the true chaos of war. So I guess part of what you wanted to do was really show the complete horror of being in a scene like that and the disorientation. Yes, I was willing to sacrifice the funding that my own company was provided with by financial backers who believed in myself and David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg when we first formed DreamWorks. It was DreamWorks money. And I was kind of convinced that it was going to lose its shirt, that every single dollar we poured into Ryan, the movie cost, which now is a bargain, but the movie then

cost $59 million to make in 19, shot in 97, came out in 98. I just wanted to tell the truth and I didn't think anyone would see that film. And I was absolutely surprised that so many people around the world did go to see it. Are you afraid they wouldn't see it because it was too disturbing? I was afraid that the first people who saw it would just say, it's too bloody, don't put yourself through it. I know that you didn't storyboard the D-Day scene, at least that's what I've read. And so a lot of it was kind of figured out on the spot.

And I don't know how you do that, how you could do that, because there's so much chaos, but it needs to be like controlled chaos in a way. You need to know what you're shooting. So how do you improvise a massive scene like that with explosions and dead bodies and bodies floating in the water and things blowing up? I mean, there's safety precautions you have to take. You need to know where the camera is and the crew

and the actors need to know what they're doing. Well, the first thing was I didn't shoot it all in a couple of days. I mean, obviously, it took 25 days. It's a 25-minute sequence, and it took 25 days to shoot 25 minutes. So I was only shooting a minute a day, and because I hadn't storyboarded anything,

but I knew what the mission was. They had to get up the Vierville Draw to get to the top of Omaha Beach. So I decided what the mission was. They had to get up the Vierville draw to get to the top of Omaha Beach. So I decided to shoot the entire sequence in continuity. So I began in the Higgins boats, and then we got them out of the Higgins boats when they came under an intense fire. And we got them behind the Belgian gates, those tank traps, those big crosses in the sand. And we just, in real time, taking one little segment at a time, we progressed up to beach until on day 25 we got to the top. And I love improvising scenes.

I mean, I love improvising shots. It's what I've done my whole life. It's what I did. I didn't do storyboards when I was a kid making 8mm movies or in college making 16mm movies. I just improvised everythingboards when I was a kid making 8mm movies or in college making 16mm movies. I just improvised everything, and I loved that. And in this sense, it allowed the chaos to be chaotic because there was no room for slick Hollywood setups.

There was only room with a handheld camera. I kept imagining, you know, there's these great shots that Bob Capa, the wartime correspondent and brilliant photojournalist, had made. He was on Omaha Beach when that first wave landed. But unfortunately, maybe 200 or more still photographs he took got ruined in a lab when the negative was sent to England to get developed, and somebody was so anxious to develop it, they ruined every single shot except nine. And those nine shots really gave me a visual style. I said, if I can get those nine Kappa shots with the blurry, shaky, messed up imagery, if I can make the whole Omaha Beach sequence look like the Bob Capa salvage photos, it might give us a little glimpse into what it was like to actually fight a war like that. Part of your new movie is about, you know,

growing up Jewish and when you moved to a largely Gentile suburb of California facing anti-Semitism at school. I know you lost over 15 relatives in the Holocaust who were, you know, relatives who were still in Europe. And your grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors in America. And you knew Holocaust survivors who had numbers tattooed on their arms from their days in concentration camps and death camps. And you've said that's how you learned to count. That's how you learned math. How did that work?

Well, it's not how I learned math. It's how I learned my numbers. It's a very kind of perverse version of Sesame Street where I'd be sitting at these tables. I was just a kid. I was like three years old. It was back in Cincinnati. We didn't move to New Jersey until I was probably three, four years old. And I just remember

sitting around the table and a lot of very, very old people. And these people probably weren't very old. They were probably in their 30s or early 40s. But when you're a little kid, anybody who looks 30 or 40 looks like they're on death's doorstep, you know? Yeah, yeah. And they were old, and they were mainly speaking either Yiddish, or they were speaking German, or they were speaking Hungarian, mainly Hungarian. And I didn't know then what the languages were. Later, my mom and dad told me what the languages were.

It was mainly Hungarian. And my grandmother would teach them English. She was teaching them how to, they resettled in this country and they were learning English. My grandmother was their English teacher. And there was, it was, she was teaching a class in the Cincinnati house, maybe, you know, a large dining room table filled with survivors. And one man in particular, I kept looking at his numbers, his number tattooed on his forearm. And 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 then 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. And the irony of all that and the gift of that lesson never really dawned on me until I was much older. Did you understand at the time that those numbers were basically the ID numbers tattooed on arms because, you know, the Jews were not humans to the Nazis, and they were just going to be worked to death or just, you know, put in ovens. And so this is just like the math to keep count of them and identify them. Did you understand the horror of that when you were learning math on their arms? No, I didn't know

anything about that. I didn't know who they were. And I'm sure you don't sit a three-year-old kid down and explain the Holocaust to them. There was no way I'd be able to comprehend anything. It was only years later that I had these recollections, and my mom and my grandparents would fill me in with what those days were like. You said that when you were growing up, with so many Holocaust survivors. Did the whole idea of the Holocaust terrify you and haunt you, and did you worry about something like that ever happening again? You know, the first time I really became— my parents talked a lot about the Holocaust, but it was never called the Holocaust.

They never referred to it as the Shoah. They always called it the Great Murders. They referred to to it as the Shoah. They always called it the great murders. They referred to the Holocaust as the great murders. And as a kid, that's a very dramatic thing to hear, great murders, plural. And the stories, there's only so much a story can do to scare a child. But imagery is a powerful, powerful kind of bracing way of shocking you into realization of some kind. And they actually wheeled a 16-millimeter projector, I believe, into our 6th or or seventh grade classrooms in Phoenix, Arizona. And they showed us a 45-minute or so, maybe an hour-long, black-and-white documentary called The Twisted Cross. And it was the first time I ever saw imagery of death.

I had never seen a dead body until that documentary was shown to my class and stacked up like cordwood. And I'll just never forget, I was repulsed and I was terrified. And I really, when I came home that day, told my parents what they had shown us. And that was the first time, after all the dinner table discussions about the great murders and who we lost, that was the first time after all the dinner table discussions about the great murders and who we lost, that was the first time it was a film that got me really to realize that something had happened that would change, you know, that would change me forever. How did it change you? I became obsessed with learning more about it. And Schindler's List was the culmination of all of the interest

that from the seventh grade I had just been obsessed with. Nothing was being taught. Nothing was being shown. There were no movies made of it. I remember my parents went to see The Pawnbroker, and they didn't take me, and I really wanted to see it. They said it was too intense for me and didn't want me to see it. And there were a couple of things done about the Holocaust, not many, but the pawnbroker that I later saw, I wish I had seen it when my parents saw it. That

would have been a profound experience for me. And not a lot was being written about the Holocaust either. And we didn't have access to the books that had been written, you know. And so it was not until I was really in my, I would say, 30s that there was more and more written about the Holocaust, and I started reading everything I could. Part of what your film is about is, you know, growing up Jewish. You grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. What did that mean? Did your family keep kosher, go to synagogue on days that were not the high holy days, observe the Sabbath? What did it mean in practical terms?

Yeah, Tara, I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family only when my grandparents were visiting our home. The second they went back to Cincinnati, Ohio, the lobster and the clams came back in, the milchik and the fleshik, the meat and the milk was being mixed. Everything changed. So I kind of grew up in a kind of hypocrisy of really being conservative to reform Jews, but orthodox when it was convenient and when it was not going to get my mom and dad in trouble.

You used the word hypocrisy. I mean, you are still very Jewish, and I don't know if that means mostly culturally Jewish, observant Jewish, because, you know, a lot of Jewish people are more cultural than observant in their identification with Judaism. Well, you know, for a long time I was in denial that I was Jewish when I was especially in elementary school and part of high school, because it was alienating to identify and to declare yourself as being Jewish. I never really denied I was Jewish, but I tried to make myself as tiny as possible when that conversation came up in the schoolyard. Certainly, I identified inside being in a family, in a large family growing up in Arizona. I identified culturally because we observed all the high holy days and we observed all the smaller Jewish holidays. And when my grandparents were there, there was a lot of

Russian and Yiddish spoken in our home because my grandparents were from Ukraine and I'm second generation Ukrainian. And so there was a devout kind of educational aspect of my life when they would be in town, and they were in town a lot. And so we were Orthodox a lot and kosher a lot. And then, as I said, when they went away, we weren't kosher anymore. Stephen Spielberg, thank you so much. Thanks, Terry. This was a pleasure for me. Stephen Spielberg speaking to Terry Gross in 2022. He had just made his semi-autobiographical film, The Fablemans.

Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

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