Simply Abu Dhabi Magazine XXIII

2 5 3 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I Q: What's your inspiration to make more and more extraordinary films at this stage of your life? I'm just looking for a good story. We're always on the hunt for a good story, and sometimes those good stories are right in front of our faces. I have seven children. I read the book a lot to my children growing up, so I became the BFG while I was the storyteller of that book, and I sure know what it feels like to be BFG with my kids below me and me above them with a book between us. I know how that feels. Q: Do you still believe inmagic in a world where outside the red carpets onHollywood, there are homeless people begging in the streets and people struggling to make a living? All of us have to believe in magic. The worse the world gets, the more magic we have to believe in, because that magic will give us hope and that hope will cause us to be proactive. And when we have the wherewithal to help, it will put us into a position to get very proactive in the world that needs our attention more than it ever has. And so, hope comes from magic – and I think that is what movies can give people. They can give people hope that there will be a reason to fight on to the next day. Q: And how do you manage to find a balance between reaching a wide audience and working for your own personal artistic vision? I don’t really think of reaching a wide audience when I'm directing or choosing a project to direct, unless it's a sequel. Of course, if you're doing a sequel, you're only doing it because the first film was very successful, so that's where the anticipation comes in, because you've got an audience that is going to raise the bar on you. That's when I'm working for the audience, when their expectations are very high – not because I'm the director, but because the film that came before was attended and became quite popular. But I can't make movies and think about balancing. I just express what I express and I'm different, I think, as a person every year and that comes out in the wash of the film. Q: Really? The only time I start to think about that is when I’m asked the question, but for the most part, it's just work. This is something I'll be doing for the rest of my life. It's great fun, hard, engaging work and I just love it. And if I didn’t love it, I would just set out to sea and just sail the oceans for the rest of my life. Q: Don't you try to reach a wide audience with stories that relate to the rest of the world outside United States? Well, that would be the ultimate dream from Hollywood, that a film that you're associated with has meaning beyond your own country or even beyond English-speaking countries. That would be my hope, that there are feelings and emotions in my film that everybody can relate to, that there doesn’t need to be a language barrier. Every movie is an orphan until it's adopted by someone and we hope our movie finds a lot of homes. Q: A few years ago, during the release of Tintin, you said that you were struggling to find a good love story. Are you still struggling with that? Well, I think this is a love story, The BFG. I think it's a different kind of love story, but it's a love story that children have for their grandparents. It's a love story that grandparents have toward their children. I think this is probably the closest I've ever come to telling a love story. Q: Were you aware of some of the negative things that Roald Dahl was said to have believed? I was not aware of them. This is a story about embracing our differences, and the values in the book and the values in the film– those were the values I wanted to impart in the telling of this story. Q: Your movie talks a lot about dreams and you were talking about the Hollywood dream, so I wonder what is your own dream life? Well, my dream life is my creative process. It really is, even when I'm in the depths of history. There still is a dream there that's operating, so everything we do, everything you do and everything I do is we play with each other's dreams and you make my dreams sound better maybe. Q: What about your real dreams, when you sleep? When I sleep? I couldn’t even tell you about that. For at least the last two years, I haven't slept much! I haven't had the chance because I've been working so much. Q: Did you try to recapture the spirit of E.T. with the movie BFG? Well, just for me, it was not really like going back to the past. It was revisiting something that I've always loved to do, which is just to tell stories that are from the imagination. When I do history movies, the imagination has to be put aside to vet the history and to do it accurately, and so there's not a lot of imagination except in interpreting a performance or finding the right camera angle to illuminate this storytelling. But with this, there were no barriers. They were gone and I felt liberated. I felt like I could do anything on this. It just brought back feelings I had as a younger filmmaker. Q: Is there anything adapted from the book, like when the Queen pops in? We certainly had licence to — a book and a film have a lot of differences. And we just added a little more plot to the movie version of the book, which we did in compliance and in complete cooperation with the entire Dahl family. We felt the Queen should certainly have equal time with everyone else during that sequence. We didn’t want to leave the Queen out. Q: What do you think the Queen will think about it? We think she has a good sense of humour and she'll be fine with that; she has equal rights of expression. We'll see what the Queen thinks when the time comes, won't we? I certainly think that there's a lot of values in this movie that are universal. This experience of telling the story of BFG was a non-cynical experience. And with a complete lack of cynicism, the story is not a comparison of how big BFG is compared to how tall Sophie is, but: how big do their hearts grow together? That was the metaphor that led me to want to tell the story. Q: You're a master storyteller. You strike this wonderful tone where fantasy meets reality. Was it difficult striking that tone and keeping the tone you've already set? When you read a book out loud, you hear yourself reading it and then of course you're watching for the reaction that your kids are having to hearing it. I remember that when we got to civilisation and we returned from the foreignness of Giant Country and we came back to the familiarity of London, I remember my kids got really, really excited. Instead of saying, "Oh, we're back to civilisation," they wanted to see, and they were excited every time there was something describing how tall BFG was and how small everybody was at the palace, and there was something really special about the Queen's breakfast from the book. I think it's one of my favourite parts of the book. And we saved the Queen's breakfast for the very, very end of production. That was a nice one. Q: You're an American director and of course you've got English actors, but how did you rely on your cast tomake sure you've got it right? This is one movie you do not want to cast American actors in and then have to release it in Great Britain and have to answer the question, "Why did you do that?" The greatest actors for me are the actors on this dance, in this picture, and the thing I pride myself in is how I love casting. It's one of the most important contributions I can make, even more than directing the actors. Just the casting of the right actor saves me a lot of verbosity. I've always wanted to work with Mark Rylance and we got a chance to do two films in a row. And being able to see Mark go from the clipped and close to the vast, yet very emotional, Rudolph Abel to suddenly the expansive and generous and sometimes cowardly and always courageous BFG, just to see that before my own eyes, that transformation was one of the most astonishing experiences I've ever had in my entire career working with anybody. And with Rebecca and with Penelope and Jemaine who speaks English but comes fromNewZealand, I just feel that we were a family and we continue to be. Q: Mark Rylance is also going to be in Ready Player One... Should we assume that you'll find a role for him in the next Indiana Jones? Well, I just feel lucky to know him. I feel very, very lucky that I got to meet Mark. I think I'm even luckier that we became friends. I have a lot of acquaintances over 44 years of directing television and film and I haven't brought a lot of people into my life from the movies. I have such respect for Mark, but we have so much fun together as friends, as buddies, and that's not why I'm casting him in Ready Player One. I'm casting him in Ready Player One because there's nobody better to play Halliday than Mark Rylance, if you know the book. But to have the friendship and to have the professional working relationship is just a dream come true. That's my goal. Steven Spielberg