It's no secret that Steven Spielberg has long admired Alfred Hitchcock. The director of E.T. had on many occasions tried to meet the Master of Suspense, but with to avail. In 1976, he tried to slip onto the set of Family Plot, the last film directed by his idol before his death, but Hitchcock refused to meet him, saying "Isn't that the boy who made the fish movie?... I could never sit down and talk to him... because I look at him and feel like such a whore." But that's in the past. As Hitchcock did with "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", Spielberg would soon have his own horror series.
What you should know about the series
The series baptized "Spielberg's After Dark" is written by the director himself, the first such project he has taken on since A.I Artificial Intelligence in 2001. The series will be divided into 10 to 12 episodes, or "chapters", of between 7 to 10 minutes in length, available only on the smartphone platform Quibi. The director and the producers have collaborated with a team of engineers to ensure that the series can only be watched after the sun sets, thanks to light detection technology in smartphones. A clock will appear on the screen to tell viewers how many minutes are left before the sun goes down, and another to warn them of the dawn. Spielberg may never have met Hitchcock, but it seems he needed no advice from the master on how to build suspense.
What you should know about Quibi
An abbreviation of "Quick Bite", this new short-form mobile video platform will launch in April 2020 in the USA. Producer Jeffrey Katzenberg (Shrek, The Prince of Egypt, Madagascar...) initiated the project, joined by ceo Meg Whitman, the former ceo of Ebay. Thought of as an incubator for short-form programmes, the platform will air mini-series split into episodes of just a few minutes each. The majority of original series have been dreamed up in this format, alongside some feature-length pictures, with 7,000 new programmes estimated per year. Steven Soderbergh, Guillermo del Toro and Anna Kendrick are among those jumping on the idea, but it is "Spielberg's after dark" that has sparked the most interest as of yet. “He’s writing it himself. He hasn’t [written anything in awhile] so getting him to write something is fantastic," said Jeffrey Katzenberg in a recent interview with Variety...We're already on tenterhooks.
Translated by Ashe de Sousa
