Is This Spielberg’s Greatest Era?

– I think that we too often dwell on the younger artists and we dwell on the kind of first moments of brilliance. And you could certainly do that with Spielberg. You could certainly say his greatest film is “Jaws,” best film — – We’re done, just leave it alone. – I see it, I see it. – Right, yeah. – Fair. – But it’s way more interesting when an artist gets a chance to stay in his game and evolve and change and mature. And I think “Disclosure Day” is an incredible opportunity because of the themes involved. – Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I really love about what that house is doing in “Disclosure Day” is that it is making explicit a thing that is such a huge part of the Steven Spielberg project, which is, what it means to have a home and what it means to no longer have one or be displaced from it. And “home” can be something as simple as an actual house. But it can also be conceptual, right? Like, what does it mean — What happens? What is the real chaos in “War of the Worlds,” for instance? It’s that you’ve got millions of people suddenly homeless and, you know, migrating from Point A to Point Who Knows? “West Side Story” is a movie about people fighting over a neighborhood as it is being destroyed. – Sure. – And it’s sort of saying, I mean, you know, his — Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s “West Side Story” is, you know, an explicitly political document, right? – Yes, yeah. About displacement, right? – Imagine if he had made “West Side Story” in the ’70s. – It would be a totally different film. – Oh, it’d be a totally different movie. – It would have a different perspective. It would have a different look. – Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. – The fact that those ’70s films are such ’70s American films is what’s so great about them. And now, the fact that these films are this American 21st-century development makes them in some ways, you could say aesthetically here and there, I’m not as interested in this or that. But what he’s doing in terms of the stories he’s telling and how he’s telling them and the perspective that they have is even more interesting, I think. Because there’s — something like “The Fabelmans,” which is from a child’s point of view. And yet we all know that it’s from an older man’s point of view, that he’s kind of seeing through this younger self. You can really only do that if you’re working in your 70s. – Yeah, yeah. So, in some ways, this might be his best era.