Steven Spielberg has directed some of the most emotionally overwhelming scenes in cinema history. It took Daniel Day-Lewis to bring him to tears on his own set.
Speaking at South by Southwest in a conversation with Sean Fennessey ofThe Big Picture podcast, Spielberg described watching Day-Lewis perform a pivotal speech in Lincoln, a four-minute take in which the president implores his cabinet on the urgency of passing the 13th Amendment, and simply losing it.
‘I have to this day, talking to you about it, never gotten over that scene, or how he played Lincoln, and how he became Lincoln, for all of us, for all that time,’ Spielberg said.
At the end of the first take, he walked off the set entirely. Day-Lewis, still in character, noticed the director was gone and asked where he was. Producer Kristie Macosko Krieger pointed him to the next room, where Spielberg had gone to cry alone. ‘Mr. Lincoln walked into the room, saw me, sat down next to me and put his arms around me,’ Spielberg said. ‘That was a moment I will never forget.’
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It was one of several performances Spielberg cited as having humbled him as a director, a list that also includes Anthony Hopkins‘s summation scene in Amistadand Tom Hanks crying in a crater in Saving Private Ryan.
The SXSW conversation ranged widely, touching on Spielberg’s conviction that extraterrestrial life may already be present on Earth. ‘I have a very strong suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now, maybe even today,’ he said, citing the 2017 New York Times report on Navy pilot encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena and a 2023 congressional subcommittee hearing conducted under oath as the events that rekindled his interest in the subject. His new film, Disclosure Day, arrives June 12.
On the subject of social media, Spielberg was characteristically blunt. He put Instagram on his phone for two weeks and deleted it. ‘I had missing time as if I had been abducted by aliens,’ he said. ‘Where did that time go?’
Asked which of his films he considers most overlooked, Spielberg didn’t hesitate: Always, his 1989 romantic fantasy with Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter, andAudrey Hepburn‘s final screen appearance. ‘I really do love that movie,’ he said. He once used it as a litmus test for the women he dated. ‘If they did not cry at the end, I wouldn’t go out with them again.’
On his future plans, he was characteristically guarded but offered one tease about a Western project in development: ‘It’s going to have horses, and there will be guns, but there’ll be no tropes.’
He has been making movies for more than five decades and has no intention of stopping. ‘I can’t envision what it would be like not to do what I do,’ he said. ‘That would be the worst nightmare of my life.’
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