"I always liked to think of the audience while I'm directing. Because I am the audience." From movie brat to movie mogul, Steve Spielberg has never lost the common touch. The first thing he ever saw at the flicks was The Greatest Show On Earth (1952); a couple of decades of home-moviemaking, film school and TV apprenticeship later (Duel was grand enough to go big-screen outside the US), he was the new Cecil B DeMille. And exactly 30 summers after the epochal Jaws, he was still packing in the popcorn-eaters with War Of The Worlds.
But being the most successful director on earth comes with a price: ever since ET ("maybe the best Disney film Disney never made" - Variety), Spielberg has been stereotyped as a sentimentalist, more at home with reassurance than risk. Truth is, he's rarely rested on those billion-dollar laurels, always looking to evolve his craft despite the constants that recur across his work (absent dads, kids in jeopardy, scores by John Williams).
In fact, finally bagging Oscars for Schindler's List spurred Spielberg into beginning a drive for complexity rather than complacency, making films like Saving Private Ryan, AI and Minority Report. A trailblazer who works at a phenomenally fast rate - who else could make WOTW and Munich in the same year? - he's too much of a craftsman to cut corners. "Spielberg has always maintained obsessive quality control," says critic Roger Ebert, "and when his films work, they work on every level."
Picture perfect: The Color Purple. Deeply felt.