Published: October 28, 20
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“War Horse” and “Tintin” each also have a connection with one of the best contemporary films about childhood hopes and fear, “Billy Elliot,” about a working-class boy who, improbably, becomes a ballet star. Beneath a digital gloss Jamie Bell, who played Billy, now portrays Tintin. “War Horse,” meanwhile, counts Lee Hall, who wrote both the movie and stage versions of “Billy Elliot” as one of its writers, along with Richard Curtis.
Fox and Pixomondo
Mr. Spielberg has also produced several TV series this season, including “Terra Nova.”
Holiday Movies
Steven Spielberg, Charlize Theron, breakthrough performances and more about this season's new films.
Universal Pictures
Mr. Spielberg won an Academy Award for his direction of “Schindler's List” (1993).
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Mr. Spielberg also won an Academy Award for his direction of “Saving Private Ryan” (1998).
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Again, Ms. Kennedy said, the convergence is accidental. Mr. Hall, she said, was working on a “War Horse” script before Mr. Spielberg became involved. As adapted for the screen, she added, “War Horse,” without the puppetry of the stage play, is “about the nobility of real horses.”
But a child’s panic, Mr. Spielberg has explained, is at the core of his art. “I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way of transferring my own private horrors to everyone else’s lives,” he told an interviewer for Rolling Stone magazine in 2007.
To observe him now, gray haired and accomplished — in January he will receive yet another lifetime achievement award, this one from the Producers Guild of America, to match the Thalberg, Cecil B. DeMille, Britannia and other industry prizes — is to see a filmmaker who has worked to flush that anxiety from his professional life while fighting to preserve and heighten it in pictures like “War Horse” and “Tintin.”
(Asked what he wished for the film industry at large, Mr. Spielberg in his e-mail said he would like to see as much passion devoted to storytelling and “the discovery of new voices” as has gone toward the quest for new technologies.)
To an unusual extent the mature Steven Spielberg is insulated from jolts by multiple layers of business protection. As of last year he has been represented by not one but two of Hollywood’s most powerful agencies. The Creative Artists Agency handles his film career, while the rival William Morris Endeavor Entertainment represents both Mr. Spielberg and DreamWorks in television.
His corporate life is split between DreamWorks and a personal production company, Amblin Entertainment. In a further complication he keeps a tight alliance with the Kennedy/Marshall Company, owned by Ms. Kennedy and her husband, Frank Marshall — more insulation.
The Indian financiers who support DreamWorks through their Reliance Entertainment group are certainly not out to cause anxiety. “It’s been a privilege to partner with Steven, and get to know him through our regular meetings over the past three years,” wrote Amitabh Jhunjhunwala, who represents Reliance on the DreamWorks board, in a reverential e-mail this month.
Mr. Spielberg’s exalted status this year let him do what no one else in Hollywood likely could have achieved: He cornered both Paramount Pictures, which is releasing “Tintin” in the United States on Dec. 21 (and earlier abroad, where it has split territories with Sony Pictures), and Walt Disney, which has “War Horse” on Dec. 25, into placing his pictures on prime holiday season dates within days of each other. The studios are hungry for his promotional support — or even a screening-ready print of “War Horse” — but Mr. Spielberg, for the moment, is absorbed with “Lincoln.”
Inside his creative cocoon he relies on a small corps of fellows including the editor Michael Kahn, the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the composer John Williams. All three have contributed to “The Adventures of Tintin,” “War Horse” and now “Lincoln.” Mr. Kaminski is the baby, at 52. Mr. Kahn, who is 75, has been Mr. Spielberg’s editor since “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” released in 1977. Mr. Williams, 79, dates at least to “The Sugarland Express” (1974), Mr. Spielberg’s first feature film.
“We’ve never had an argument or disagreement about anything in all those years,” Mr. Williams said. “He’s never once said to me, ‘I don’t like that.’ ”
Asked what keeps the partnership fresh, Mr. Williams pointed to the diversity of Mr. Spielberg’s work, and to new technical challenges, like that of scoring animation, which he has not previously done.
There is that. And the eternal panic of a boy who wants everyone to love his pictures — audience and Academy alike — and is still diving in.
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