VSIt is not part of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, on screens since February 22, but the 76-year-old American director can claim to have appeared for the first time in the columns of the World fifty years ago, at the age of 26. It was in the edition of April 15-16, 1973, to evoke his first feature film, Duel, broadcast in 1971 on American television and released theatrically two years later in Europe. When a television channel across the Atlantic considered, at that time, that one of its productions was of a quality exceptional, she tried the adventure of the big screen abroad.
The world, by discovering this adaptation of a short story by Richard Matheson featuring a motorist chased by an old tank truck, immediately takes the measure of the singular and precocious talent of the filmmaker. “Steven Spielberg’s staging plays on stripping, rigor, on a certain terribly effective coldness, writes the journalist Colette Godard. Faced with this attentive gaze, the spectator becomes this man who struggles and dies, overcome by his own anguish in the face of a world he has built, which he no longer recognizes. A world that no longer belongs to him. » Afterwards, the evening paper will never miss a single step in the rise of the Spielberg phenomenon.
“Young directors in American cinema currently enjoy total freedom. They are not subject to any constraint from the studios. »Steven Spielberg at World in 1974
On April 14, 1974, Jean de Baroncelli talks about Sugarland Express, the filmmaker’s second essay, a “disconcerting, intelligent, interesting film”, and an “dazzling staging”. A year and a half later, hits the screens Jaws, preceded by phenomenal public success in the United States. On January 29, 1976, the evening daily headlined “An extra-cinematic success” and highlighted Spielberg’s unusual talent in this story of a white shark terrorizing swimmers in a seaside resort on the East Coast of the United States. “ It is naturally in the action, notes Jean de Baroncelli, that the qualities of the young filmmaker burst forth: rigor of the staging, precision of the details, sense of rhythm. »
Steven Spielberg gives his first interview to the World, in the edition of February 16, 1978, on the occasion of the release of his fourth film, Dating of the Third Kind. In the interview titled “Spielberg filmed UFOs”, the director explains that he takes the possible existence of flying saucers very seriously.
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