He chose Vilmos Zsigmond, whom he’d met through McElwaine and Altman. A Hungarian with a massive ego, Zsigmond had bribed his way to the West with watches in 1956, bringing with him footage of the Soviet invasion. Within a decade he’d become one of Hollywood’s best cinematographers, with a reputation, earned on films like John Boorman’s Deliverance and Altman’s chilly Western McCabe and Mrs Miller, which Spielberg admired, for shooting in bad light and worse weather.
A few weeks before he began shooting, Spielberg found himself judging a student film competition with Douglas Trumbull, largely responsible for the special effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and composers Marvin Hamlisch and Jerry Goldsmith. The young director’s name didn’t register with Goldsmith, but Spielberg was so familiar with Goldsmith’s themes for series like Thriller and The Twilight Zone, and for Planet of the Apes and Patton, that he could hum long stretches of the music. He flirted with asking him to write the score for Sugarland, but opted instead for John Williams, who, though less inventive than Goldsmith, could be relied on to turn in a score squarely in the Hollywood vernacular.
Williams’s Sugarland music would indeed be consensus composing by a master pasticheur. ‘I wanted John to do a real symphony for this film,’ says Spielberg, ‘but he said, “If you want me to do The Red Pony or Appalachian Spring, you’re going to ruin your movie. It’s a very simple story, and the music should be picking and soft, with just a few violins and a small orchestra; cradle-like.”’ He used Dutch harmonica virtuoso ‘Toots’ Thielmans to enliven fragmentary music of a folksy simplicity. Working with Goldsmith, however, became an ambition for Spielberg. ‘I heard,’ says Goldsmith, ‘that Steve and Zanuck tossed a coin to decide between me and Williams to score Jaws.’ Coincidentally, Goldsmith also did the music for Ace Eli and Rodger of the Shies, but still didn’t associate its author with his fellow panellist.
From the start, the logistics of Sugarland promised the most problems. Universal’s technical departments helped Spielberg visualise the action by building models of locations like the used-car lot so he could plan his shooting with military precision. An artist sketched every scene in storyboards which he took to Texas and taped around his motel room – ‘so I could see exactly what the film would look like from a bird’s eye view… I always had a visual overview in terms of day-to-day shooting.’
A hundred cars participated in the original chase. Universal’s publicity claimed the film used 250, failing to mention that this included the crew’s private cars and support vehicles. In fact only forty appeared on camera, and even that number threatened to be unwieldy. Richard Zanuck arrived on location the first day with trepidation.
I was thinking, well, let’s take it easy. Let’s get the kid acclimated to this big-time stuff. But when I got out there the first day he was about ready to get this first shot, and it was the most elaborate fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean tricky; all-in-one shots, the camera going and stopping, people going in and out. But he had such confidence in the way he was handling it. Here he was, a young little punk kid, with a lot of seasoned crew around, a major actress on hand, and instead of starting with something easy, he picked a very complicated thing that required all sorts of intricate timing.
And it worked incredibly well – and not only from a technical standpoint, but the performances were very good. I knew right then and there, without any doubt, that this guy knew more at that age about the mechanics of working out a shot than anybody alive at that time, no matter how many pictures they’d made. He took to it like – you know, like he was born with a knowledge of cinema. And he never ceased to amaze me from that day on.
Zanuck was right about the shooting, but charitable about the performances. Then, as later, nobody got much direction from Spielberg, who simply outlined the action and let them provide the characterisation. ‘The most I ever heard him say before a take,’ recalls one actor in his later films, ‘was, “Lots of energy” – which is what directors always say when they don’t know what they want. And afterwards he said, “A nice sense of reality.”’
Paul Freeman remarks diplomatically, ‘Steven is one of those people who do their direction of actors in the casting. They trust the performer to know his or her business, and to get on with it. On Raiders, he knew Karen Allen and I were from the stage and were used to rehearsing, so he sent us off to improvise. When we came back and showed him, he said, “Fine.” All that stuff in the tent between Karen and me was made up like that.’
Casting was, and is, agony for Spielberg. He often chooses actors from tests shot on his behalf, and almost never talks to the performers until they arrive on the set. ‘Steven goes with his nose,’ says Julian Glover, the villain of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He looks for performers who physically resemble his conception of the character and who have enough experience not to need direction. Wayne Knight arrived in Hawaii to play the fat computer hacker and embryo thief Nedry in Jurassic Park without having met him.
I got out of the van, walked up to him, and said, ‘I hope I’m the guy you wanted.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you are.’… So I get in the Jeep, and Steven gets in the Jeep, and here we are, me and Steven Spielberg sitting in this Jeep. I had never had so much as a conversation with him, and it was like, ‘So how about those Mets?’ I had no idea what to say.
If Spielberg auditions someone in person, it is seldom with a scene from the film. Usually he asks for some trivial physical action. On Raiders he held casting sessions in the Lucasfilm kitchen, asking nonplussed actors to mix and bake cookies, in an attempt to throw them back on their natural reactions. Emily Richard, the hero’s mother in Empire of the Sun, was requested simply to put her hair up for a moment. ‘He actually blushed when he asked me,’ says Richard, ‘and I blushed when I did it.’
William Atherton’s physical appearance rather than his acting recommended him for Clovis in Sugarland. ‘He’s a very soft-spoken individual with wild eyes,’ Spielberg said. ‘He could be so easily misunderstood by somebody with a pair of binoculars. One look at Bill [in Looking for Mr Goodbar] and you think, “My God, he’s going to kill Diane Keaton.”’ Michael Sacks was chosen for ‘Slide’ because Spielberg wanted the cop and Clovis to look as much alike as possible. ‘It’s two men who really began in the same small town, and went in two different directions.’
Casting as he prefers, exactly to type, paid off best in his choice of John Ford veteran Ben Johnson as Chief Tanner. With an actor whose screen persona was so firmly established, direction was superfluous. As Sacks remarked admiringly, ‘he has an extraordinary quality – he can say any cliché to you and make it seem profound.’ So effective was Johnson, however, that Spielberg came to regret his subsidiary role, feeling he should have spent more time on Tanner, explaining the compassion both for his quarry and his men that leads him to chase the fugitives rather than force a shoot-out.
The Poplins’ flight, trailed by scores of police cars, was again structured like a carnival ride, with incidents of random violence – an ambush by vigilante deputies, a chance pile-up at an intersection, the ‘potty stop’ scene, with Clovis flushing a gunman hiding in a Portaloo – breaking the exhilaration of sheer movement. Film historian Diane Jacobs rightly called Spielberg and his coevals ‘excruciatingly conscious of their medium and its history’. Hollywood had nursed them through adolescence and handed them a means of expressing themselves. As a result, they revered its past to a degree that baffled the Suits. The studios’ response to the credit squeeze of the sixties had been to sell backlots for office buildings and auction off their props. In June 1982, however, Spielberg would pay $60,500 at Sotheby-Parke Bernet for one of the surviving ‘Rosebud’ sleds from the last scene of Citizen Kane – a sequence which inspired the last shot of Raiders, where the Ark is sequestered in a giant warehouse choked with anonymous crates.
All Spielberg’s films are ‘about’ cinema before they are about anything else. ‘It’s very clear his references are to film rather than literature,’ says Tom Stoppard,