Steven Spielberg Says He Waits Years Before Watching His Own Movies

I guess that means he won't be seeing his new 'Red Player One' for a while, then.

Director Steven Spielberg attends 'Ready Player One' photocall.
Getty

ROME, ITALY - MARCH 21: Director Steven Spielberg attends 'Ready Player One' photocall at Hotel Russie on March 21, 2018 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images)

Director Steven Spielberg attends 'Ready Player One' photocall.

As you might imagine, Steven Spielberg is a pretty busy guy—so busy, in fact, that he doesn’t even get the chance to watch his own movies until years after. To be fair, Schindler’s List isn’t exactly a quick watch. Anyway, that unlikely tidbit comes courtesy of a new interview the 71-year-old director gave to the New York Times.

“I’m always moving really fast, and I don’t look back a lot,” he told the newspaper, “That’s why I don’t sit down and look at my movies on a movie screen after I’ve made them. Sometimes it’s years before I will even dare look at a movie again, and sometimes I’ll shut it off after five minutes.” Whatever Spielberg’s personal insecurities may be, his new film Ready Player Onedid very well at this year’s SXSW Film Festival. “I’m really too busy, both in my private life and in my professional life, to have a lot of time to dwell on success or failure,” the director said.

Ready Player One is set for release March 29. The screenplay for the big screen adaptation of the 2011 Ernest Cline novel was written by Zak Penn and Cline himself. Despite being set in a dystopian future, the book is rife with '80s pop-culture references, as is the film. Spielberg said that he feels “a deeper responsibility to tell stories that have some kind of social meaning,” adding, “If I have a choice between a movie that is 100 percent for the audience and a movie that says nothing about the past—that resonates for me or elevates a conversation that might have been forgotten, like with Munich—I will always choose history over popular culture. Even with all the popcorn in a film like Ready Player One, it does still have social meaning.”

Meanwhile, the director has a fifth Indiana Jones on tap, as well as a remake of West Side Story.

Latest in Pop Culture