With The BFG, Spielberg checks an entry off his bucket list: It's his first movie for the original Walt Disney label. "I have directed films for every studio in Hollywood except for Walt Disney — until now," he says. "Disney was truly, when I was a kid, my singular inspiration and also the source of most of my nightmares." Yes, he means Bambi and Dumbo, too. "The separation of mother and child …" he says. "I mean, the killing of Bambi's — it was just one of the most …" (Who can't relate?)
Alas, Disney was an imperfect partner for the more adult stories that interested him by the time he and DreamWorks settled there. "We brought an alternative kind of entertainment that had trouble squeezing in between the branded summer and Christmas four-quadrant crowd-pleasers," says Spielberg. Still, he thinks Disney was "very proud" to distribute films like The Help and Lincoln (both were profitable).
Associates said Spielberg was baffled and hurt when Lincoln lost the best picture Oscar to Ben Affleck's Argo, but he brushes that off. The one that got to him was Schindler's List. It gave him two Oscars in 1994, but he found he lacked a desire to go back to work. "I just didn't," he says. "I could not."
Spielberg (right) and Liam Neeson, star of Schindler’s List, discussed a scene during production in 1993 in Poland. The film earned seven Academy Awards, including best picture and best director.
Asked whether he was depressed, he says yes — and then corrects himself. "I've never been depressed," he says. "I was sad and isolated, and as well-received and successful as that movie was, I think it was the trauma of telling the story and forming the Shoah Foundation." For a time, he was more engaged in sending videographers to interview Holocaust survivors than pondering movie projects. "I started to wonder, was Schindler's List going to be the last film I would direct?" he recalls.But the urge to get back to work "seized me one day like a thunderbolt," he says."I just needed time." He went for popcorn fare: In 1997, he returned with a sequel to Jurassic Park.
By then, DreamWorks had been launched with fanfare, and at first, the company was on a roll: DreamWorks' name was on consecutive best picture winners: American Beauty, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind (the latter two co-produced with Universal). Its animation arm launched the Shrek franchise.
But there were costly losers, and DreamWorks soon faced money trouble. In 2004, it met pressure to pay off Paul Allen by spinning off its animation division as a public company run by Katzenberg. The next year, live-action DreamWorks sold itself to Paramount in a $1.6 billion deal. But by 2008, high-level power struggles (largely due to Geffen's machinations) had soured the relationship to the breaking point. Spielberg and then co-chairman, Stacey Snider, launched what he calls "DreamWorks 2.0" as the recession hit. DreamWorks fell well short of its financing goal and released such misses as Cowboys & Aliens and I Am Number Four.
"We had these movies that simply did not perform," says Spielberg. "What really hurt our company was Cowboys & Aliens [which cost more than $150 million to make]. Even though we shared it with Universal as a financier, just half of what we lost crippled us. And you know you're underfinanced if one movie can cripple you." He continues: "Stacey and I should have deferred forming the company for a few more years because we went into it half-baked." But had they waited, DreamWorks would have lost the opportunity to lock up rights to 17 projects that it had developed while at Paramount. (Snider left in 2014 to become co-chair of the Fox film studio.)
From left: Katzenberg, Spielberg and Geffen announced the formation of the DreamWorks SKG studio at a Los Angeles press conference on Oct. 12, 1994. Each of the three men invested $33 million in the much-touted venture.
Having made its distribution deal with Disney, DreamWorks soon became an awkward fit as the guard and goals changed to focus on Marvel and other tentpole live-action movies. Often short of money, DreamWorks teetered until the operation was rebooted in late 2015 under the name of Spielberg's original production company. Amblin Partners has more than $800 million in equity and debt, including $50 million from Spielberg himself. The company will make family movies under the Amblin Entertainment label, adult fare under the DreamWorks banner and socially conscious films under the Participant Media name.
Underlying the DreamWorks saga is what could be called a Rashomon question: Did Spielberg do everything for the company — as he thinks he did — or not enough? From the start, Spielberg exercised his prerogative, spelled out in the original DreamWorks deal, to make whatever movie he wanted. He brought DreamWorks in on several major movies developed at other studios, such as Minority Report at Fox. But some former colleagues think the Spielberg-directed movies that belonged entirely to his company were his more adult, less commercial efforts. "He tried to make it OK. It was not OK," says a company veteran. Citing a 2004 Spielberg-directed dramedy, this person continues, "The Terminal is not Jurassic Park. He created no franchises for DreamWorks."
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