It might not be mentioned in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical film The Fabelmans, in theaters since February 22, but the 76-year-old American director can claim to have appeared for the first time in Le Monde's pages 50 years ago, at the age of 26. In the paper's April 15-16, 1973 edition, he talked about his first feature film Duel, which was broadcast on American television in 1971 and released in theaters in Europe two years later. Back then, when a television network across the Atlantic felt the quality of one of its productions was exceptional, it turned it into a theatrical release abroad.
Upon discovering this adaptation of a Richard Matheson short story featuring a motorist hounded by an old tanker truck, Le Monde immediately understood the measure of the filmmaker's singular and precocious talent. "Steven Spielberg's direction plays on stripping things down, on rigor, on a certain terribly effective coldness," wrote the journalist Colette Godard. "Faced with this attentive gaze, the spectator becomes a man struggling and perishing, overcome by his own anguish against a world he has built and no longer recognizes. A world that no longer belongs to him." After that, the evening paper never missed a single step in the rise of the Spielberg phenomenon.
'Young directors in American cinema currently enjoy total freedom. They are not constrained in any way by the studios,' Steven Spielberg to 'Le Monde' in 1974
On April 14, 1974, Jean de Baroncelli wrote about Sugarland Express, the filmmaker's sophomore effort, a "disconcerting, intelligent, interesting film" with "dazzling direction." Jaws hit the screens a year and a half later, preceded by a phenomenal public success in the United States. On January 29, 1976, Le Monde wrote of "extra-cinematic success" and highlighted Spielberg's unusual talent in this story of a white shark terrorizing bathers at an East Coast resort in the United States. "It is naturally in action moments," noted de Baroncelli, "that the young filmmaker's qualities shine through: rigorous direction, attention to detail, a sense of pace."
Spielberg granted his first interview to Le Monde in its February 16, 1978, edition for the release of his fourth film, Encounters of the Third Kind. In the interview, entitled "Spielberg films UFOs," the director explained that he took the possible existence of flying saucers very seriously.
The interview also told of an era. At this moment in Hollywood's history, the famous 1970s, the all-powerful directors enjoyed great freedom. "Young directors in American cinema now have total freedom," Spielberg explained to Jacques Siclier. "They have no constraints from the studios." These words now belong to another time, as American cinema's current balance of power clearly favors producers (unless the director's name is Spielberg).
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