Shortly after The Sixth Sense became a global sensation, its director, M Night Shyamalan – hailed on the cover of Newsweek in 2002 as “the next Spielberg” – told an interviewer that, years earlier, he had realised the one ingenious trick that made Steven Spielberg movies so spectacularly successful. Like a soft-drink manufacturer who had stumbled on the secret recipe for Coca-Cola, Shyamalan could not believe his luck. What was Spielberg’s killer formula, Shyamalan was asked. He would not say. Merely by understanding it, he had struck commercial gold and he did not plan to share it.
It didn’t quite work out that way for Shyamalan, who has never matched the heights of that first hit. But I thought of his imagined revelation as I watched Spielberg’s latest film. The Post stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, the duo who took on the Nixon White House in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, the US Department of Defense’s own secret history of the Vietnam war that laid bare decades of government dishonesty.
It is a timely, absorbing story, beautifully acted and masterfully told. But what is the essential ingredient that makes it a Spielberg movie? Where is the neat narrative trick that Shyamalan thought he had spotted, the trademark device that means The Post sits in a canon that includes Jaws, Indiana Jones and Schindler’s List?
Two days later, I am sitting opposite Spielberg – now 71 and looking like a kindly college professor, a sweater over his shirt and tie and under his jacket – about to ask the man himself. He is the most commercially successful director in cinema history, the man behind ET, Jurassic Park and dozens more. So what makes a Spielberg film?
He answers by noting that he recently saw Spielberg, a two-hour documentary by Susan Daly, detailing each stage of his storied career. “Even having looked at that documentary about myself, I still cannot honestly tell you what attracts me to a project and what presses my buttons and what gets me to say yes. I can’t tell you.”
Really? No clue as to what the common thread that connects his work might be?
“There’s a couple of movies that, yes, I see my dog tags around the neck of the film, like anything that has to do with dinosaurs or intrepid archaeologists.” But more widely? He shakes his head and smiles. “And I saw the documentary. And it didn’t help.”
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