153 Facts About Steven Spielberg

Several of Steven Spielberg's works are considered among the greatest films in history, and some are among the highest-grossing films ever.

Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona.

Steven Spielberg moved to California and studied film in college.

Steven Spielberg made his theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express and became a household name with the summer blockbuster Jaws.

Steven Spielberg explored drama in The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg directed back-to-back hits with the science fiction thriller Jurassic Park, the highest-grossing film ever at the time, and the epic historical drama Schindler's List, which has often been listed as one of the greatest films ever made.

Steven Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for the latter as well as for the World War II epic Saving Private Ryan.

Steven Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks, and he has served as a producer for many successful films and television series, among them Poltergeist, Gremlins, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Band of Brothers.

Steven Spielberg has had a long collaboration with the composer John Williams, with whom he has worked for all but five of his feature films.

In 2013, Time listed him as one of the 100 most influential people, and in 2023, Steven Spielberg was the recipient of the first ever Time 100 Impact Award in the US.

Steven Spielberg was born on December 18,1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Steven Spielberg's mother, Leah, was a concert pianist and ran a kosher dairy restaurant, and his father, Arnold, was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers.

Steven Spielberg had a bar mitzvah ceremony when he was thirteen.

Steven Spielberg's family was involved in the synagogue and had many Jewish friends.

Steven Spielberg's father had lost between sixteen and twenty relatives in the Holocaust.

Steven Spielberg recalls his parents taking him to see Cecil B DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth.

Steven Spielberg had never seen a movie before, and thought they were taking him to the circus.

Steven Spielberg was terrified by the movie's train crash, and at age 12, he recreated it with his Lionel trains and filmed it.

Steven Spielberg used his father's movie camera to make amateur features, and began taking the camera along on every Scout trip.

At age 13, Steven Spielberg made a 40-minute war film, Escape to Nowhere, with a cast of classmates.

In Phoenix, Steven Spielberg went to the local theater every Saturday.

Steven Spielberg moved to Los Angeles to stay with his father, while his three sisters and mother remained in Saratoga.

Steven Spielberg applied to the University of Southern California's film school but was turned down because of his mediocre grades.

Steven Spielberg then applied and enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where he became a brother of Theta Chi fraternity.

Steven Spielberg returned to Long Beach in 2002, where he presented Schindler's List to complete his Bachelor of Arts in Film and Electronic Media.

Steven Spielberg made his professional debut with "Eyes", a segment of Night Gallery scripted by Rod Serling and starring Joan Crawford.

Crawford, reflecting on her collaboration with Steven Spielberg, recognized his potential, noting his unique intuitive inspiration.

Steven Spielberg expressed her appreciation for Spielberg's talent in a note to him and communicated her approval to Serling.

Steven Spielberg earned good reviews and impressed producers; he was earning a steady income and relocated to Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles.

Steven Spielberg made his theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express, based on a true story about a married couple on the run, desperate to regain custody of their baby from foster parents.

Steven Spielberg said the malfunctioning of the mechanical shark resulted in a better movie, as he had to find other ways to suggest the shark's presence.

You have only to submit to the travesty of Jaws 2 to realize how much more engagingly Steven Spielberg saw the ocean, the perils, the sinister beauty of the shark, and the vitality of its human opponents.

Steven Spielberg used 65 mm film for the best picture quality, and a new live-action recording system so that the recordings could be duplicated later.

Steven Spielberg cast one of his favorite directors, Francois Truffaut, as the scientist Claude Lacombe and worked with special effects expert Douglas Trumbull.

Steven Spielberg was self-conscious about doing comedy as he had no prior experience in the genre.

Steven Spielberg directed Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman.

Steven Spielberg later said that he was unhappy with Temple of Doom because it lacked his "personal touches and love".

Steven Spielberg creates an atmosphere of happy disbelief: the more breathtaking and exhilarating the stunts are the funnier they are.

The film received eleven Academy Award nominations, and Steven Spielberg won Best Director from the Directors Guild of America.

Critical reaction was mixed at the time of release; criticism ranged from the "overwrought" plot to Steven Spielberg's downplaying of "disease and starvation".

Steven Spielberg recalled that Empire of the Sun was one of his most enjoyable films to make.

In 1989, Steven Spielberg intended to direct Rain Man, but instead directed Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to meet his contractual obligations.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, now more than ever, seems a turning point in the cinema of escapist entertainment, and there was really no way Steven Spielberg could make it new all over again.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg returned to the adventure genre with Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton's bestseller, with a screenplay by Crichton and David Koepp.

Also in 1993, Steven Spielberg directed Schindler's List, about Oskar Schindler, a businessman who helped save 1,100 Jews from the Holocaust.

Against expectations, the film was a commercial success, and Steven Spielberg used his percentage of profits to start the Shoah Foundation, a non-profit organization that archives testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Steven Spielberg depicts the evil of the Holocaust, and he tells an incredible story of how it was robbed of some of its intended victims.

In 1994, Steven Spielberg took a break from directing to spend more time with his family, and set up his new film studio, DreamWorks, with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Steven Spielberg wanted the onscreen creatures to be more realistic than in the first film; he used 3D storyboards, computer imagery and robotic puppets.

Producer Debbie Allen, who had read the book Amistad I in 1978, thought Steven Spielberg would be perfect to direct.

The film struggled to find an audience, and underperformed at the box office; Steven Spielberg admitted that Amistad "became too much of a history lesson".

Halfway through filming, Steven Spielberg reminded the cast that they were making a tribute to thank "your grandparents and my dad, who fought in [the war]".

Steven Spielberg told Spielberg about the project in 1984 and suggested that he direct, believing the story was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities.

Steven Spielberg tried to be faithful to Kubrick's vision and made several allusions to his friend's work though with mixed results according to some critics.

Steven Spielberg, who is a master of technology, trusts only story and character, and then uses everything else as a workman uses his tools.

Steven Spielberg followed Catch Me If You Can with The Terminal, a comedy loosely inspired by the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri and by Jacques Tati's Playtime.

In 2005, Spielberg directed War of the Worlds, a co-production of Paramount and DreamWorks, based on H G Wells's novel of the same name; Spielberg had been a fan of the book and of George Pal's 1953 film.

Steven Spielberg used storyboards to help the actors react to computer imagery that they could not see and used natural lighting and camerawork to avoid an "over stylized" science fiction picture.

Steven Spielberg's Munich is about the Israeli government's secret retaliation after eleven Israeli Olympic athletes were kidnapped and murdered in the 1972 Munich massacre.

In June 2006, Steven Spielberg planned to make Interstellar, but abandoned the project, which was eventually directed by Christopher Nolan.

Steven Spielberg returned to the Indiana Jones series in 2008 with the fourth installment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Steven Spielberg followed Tintin with War Horse, shot in England in the summer of 2010.

The film is based on Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel of the same name and follows the long friendship between a British boy and his horse Joey before and during World War I Distributed by Walt Disney Studios with whom DreamWorks made a distribution deal in 2009, War Horse was the first of four consecutive Spielberg films released by Disney.

Steven Spielberg directed the historical drama Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as President Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln.

In 2016, Steven Spielberg made The BFG, an adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book, starring newcomer Ruby Barnhill, and Mark Rylance as the titular Big Friendly Giant.

Steven Spielberg executive produced the series with Barry Diller and Scott Rudin.

Steven Spielberg directed the science fiction Ready Player One, adapted from the novel of the same name by Ernest Cline.

Steven Spielberg's direction was praised along with the action scenes and visual effects, but many critics thought the film was too long and overused 1980s nostalgia.

In 2019, Steven Spielberg filmed West Side Story, an adaptation of the musical of the same name.

Steven Spielberg received nominations from the Golden Globe Awards, Directors Guild of America, and Critics' Choice Movie Awards.

In March 2022, Steven Spielberg said that West Side Story would be the last musical he will direct.

Steven Spielberg's 2022 film The Fabelmans is a fictionalized account of his own adolescence, which he wrote with Tony Kushner.

Steven Spielberg had planned to direct Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but he stepped down and was replaced by James Mangold.

Steven Spielberg said that he would remain "hands on" as a producer, along with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.

In February 2025, Steven Spielberg began shooting his next as-yet untitled film, reportedly about UFOs.

Steven Spielberg produced Zemeckis's dark comedy Used Cars, which was a critical but not a commercial success.

For some, including Young Sherlock Holmes and Harry and the Hendersons, the title "Steven Spielberg Presents" was in the opening credits.

Steven Spielberg produced A Brief History of Time by Errol Morris.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg served as an executive producer for the NBC science fiction series seaQuest DSV; the show was not a hit.

That year, Steven Spielberg founded DreamWorks with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Steven Spielberg cited greater creative control and distribution improvements as the main reasons for founding his own studio; he and his partners compared themselves to the founders of United Artists in 1919.

Steven Spielberg helped design Jurassic Park: The Ride at Universal Studios Florida.

Steven Spielberg produced Memoirs of a Geisha, an adaptation of Arthur Golden's novel of the same name.

Steven Spielberg worked with Clint Eastwood for the first time, co-producing Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima with Robert Lorenz.

Steven Spielberg served as executive producer for Disturbia, and the Transformers film series.

Steven Spielberg returned to the World War II theme, co-producing the 2010 miniseries The Pacific with Hanks and Gary Goetzman.

The next year, Steven Spielberg co-created Falling Skies, a science fiction series on TNT, with Robert Rodat and produced the 2011 Fox series Terra Nova and JJ Abrams's Super 8.

On January 18,2023, Steven Spielberg told press at a red carpet event for The Fabelmans that he was executive producing a documentary about John Williams, directed by Laurent Bouzereau with production companies Amblin Television, Imagine Documentaries, and Nedland Media.

In May 2009, Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the life story of Martin Luther King Jr.

In March 2013, Steven Spielberg announced that he was developing a miniseries based on the life of Napoleon.

Mark Rylance, in his fourth collaboration with Steven Spielberg, was announced to star in the role of Pope Pius IX.

Steven Spielberg saw more than 2,000 children to play the role of the young Edgardo Mortara.

In 2015, it was announced that Steven Spielberg was attached to direct an adaptation of American photojournalist Lynsey Addario's memoir It's What I Do, with Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role.

In February 2022, Deadline Hollywood reported that Steven Spielberg was developing an original film centered around the character Frank Bullitt, a fictional San Francisco police officer originally portrayed by Steve McQueen in the 1968 film Bullitt.

Steven Spielberg played many of LucasArts adventure games, including the first Monkey Island games.

In 1995, Steven Spielberg helped create and design LucasArts' adventure game The Dig.

Steven Spielberg collaborated with software publishers Knowledge Adventure on the game Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair, which was released in 1996; Spielberg appears in the game to direct the player.

In 2015, Steven Spielberg lent his likeness in Yakuza 0 in a sidestory where he directed Miracle Johnson's video of Thriller.

In 2005, Steven Spielberg collaborated with Electronic Arts on several games including one for the Wii called Boom Blox, and its sequel Boom Blox Bash Party.

Steven Spielberg is the creator of EA's Medal of Honor series.

Steven Spielberg dislikes the use of cutscenes in games, and thinks that natural storytelling is a challenge for game developers.

Steven Spielberg first ventured into theatre producing in 1997, with his involvement on a production of The Diary of Anne Frank, as well as the original 1998 production of The Farnsworth Invention.

Steven Spielberg went on to produce the stage musical adaptations of Water for Elephants and Death Becomes Her alongside his wife Kate Capshaw, both in 2024.

Steven Spielberg enjoyed the work of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick and John Frankenheimer.

Steven Spielberg says Lawrence of Arabia is the film he's seen more times than any other.

In 1982, Steven Spielberg bought one of the prop sleds from Citizen Kane.

Steven Spielberg prefers to shoot quickly, with large amounts of coverage, so that he will have many options in the editing room.

Steven Spielberg has explored the importance of childhood, loss of innocence, and the need for parental figures.

Steven Spielberg described himself as like an "alien" during childhood, and this interest came from his father, a science fiction fan.

Steven Spielberg has worked consistently with production designer Rick Carter and writer David Koepp.

The producer Kathleen Kennedy is one of Steven Spielberg's longest serving collaborators.

Steven Spielberg first worked with Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan for which he received a nomination for Academy Award for Best Actor.

Kaminski's first collaboration with Steven Spielberg started with the holocaust drama film Schindler's List for which Kaminski received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Steven Spielberg met actress Amy Irving in 1976 when she auditioned for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Steven Spielberg met actress Kate Capshaw when he cast her in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984.

Steven Spielberg said he rediscovered "the honor of being a Jew" when they married.

Steven Spielberg spent a year studying, did the "mikveh", the whole thing.

Steven Spielberg chose to do a full conversion before we were married in 1991, and she married me after becoming a Jew.

Steven Spielberg is the godfather of Drew Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow.

In 1997, a man named Jonathan Norman stalked Steven Spielberg and attempted to enter his home; Norman was jailed for 25 years.

In 2001, Steven Spielberg was stalked by conspiracy theorist and former social worker Diana Napolis.

Steven Spielberg accused him and actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, of installing a mind-control device in her brain, and being part of a satanic cult.

Steven Spielberg was released on probation with a condition that she have no contact with either Spielberg or Hewitt.

In 2013, Steven Spielberg purchased the 282-foot mega-yacht The Seven Seas for US$182 million.

Steven Spielberg has put it up for sale and has made it available for charter.

In 2022, at age 75, Steven Spielberg was diagnosed with COVID-19 but recovered.

In December 2022, Steven Spielberg was a guest on Desert Island Discs for BBC Radio 4, choosing for his luxury item an H-8 Bolex Camera.

Steven Spielberg has donated over $800,000 to the Democratic party and its nominees.

Steven Spielberg has been a close friend of former president Bill Clinton and worked with the president for the USA Millennium celebrations.

Steven Spielberg directed an 18-minute film for the project, scored by John Williams and entitled The American Journey.

Steven Spielberg resigned as a member of the national advisory board of the Boy Scouts of America in 2001 because he disagreed with the organization's anti-homosexuality stance.

In February 2008, Steven Spielberg resigned as advisor to the 2008 Summer Olympics in response to the Chinese government's inaction over the War in Darfur.

Prolific in film since the 1960s, Steven Spielberg has directed 36 feature films, and co-produced many works.

Steven Spielberg received nine nominations for Best Director, and won twice.

Steven Spielberg's third was in Best Picture, for Schindler's List.

Steven Spielberg is the only director to receive a Best Director nomination from the academy in 6 different decades.

In 1989, Steven Spielberg was presented with the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.

Steven Spielberg was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 1999, in recognition for Saving Private Ryan.

Steven Spielberg was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, located on 6801 Hollywood Boulevard.

On July 15,2006, Steven Spielberg was awarded the Gold Hugo Lifetime Achievement Award at the Summer Gala of the Chicago International Film Festival, and was awarded a Kennedy Center honor on December 3.

The tribute to Steven Spielberg featured a biographical short film narrated by Liam Neeson, and a performance of the finale to Leonard Bernstein's Candide, conducted by John Williams.

Steven Spielberg was a recipient of the Visual Effects Society Lifetime Achievement Award in February 2008; it is awarded for "significant and lasting contributions to the art and science of the visual effects industry".

In 2009, Spielberg was awarded the Cecil B DeMille Award by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for "outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment".

In June 2008, Steven Spielberg received Arizona State University's Hugh Downs Award for Communication Excellence.

In October 2009, Steven Spielberg received the Philadelphia Liberty Medal; the prize was presented by former US President Bill Clinton.

On November 19,2013, Steven Spielberg was honored by the National Archives and Records Administration with a Records of Achievement Award.

Steven Spielberg was given two facsimiles of the 13th Amendment; the first which passed in 1861 but was not ratified, and the second signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to abolish slavery.

On November 24,2015, Steven Spielberg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama at the White House.

In July 2016, Steven Spielberg was awarded a gold Blue Peter badge by the BBC children's television program Blue Peter.

Steven Spielberg has honorary degrees from the University of Southern California, 1994; Brown University, 1999; Yale University, 2002; Boston University, 2009; and Harvard University, 2016.

Critics of Steven Spielberg have argued that his films are commonly sentimental and moralistic.

In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind wrote that Steven Spielberg is "infantilizing the audience, reconstituting the spectator as child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection".

Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard opined that Steven Spielberg was partly responsible for the lack of artistic merit in mainstream cinema, and accused Steven Spielberg of using Schindler's List to profit from a tragedy.