Steven Spielberg – White House 2024 – Getty
The director reveals that he has started working on a western.
Steven Spielberg has announced his next film – a Western without stereotypes.
The US director revealed that although the project will contain “horses and weapons”, he wants to avoid other typical elements and genre clichés. However, he did not reveal any details about the plot. Speaking to podcaster Sean Fennessey at the South by Southwest film and television festival on Friday (March 13), when asked about his next film, he said: “Well, I’m developing a Western right now. And it’s going to have horses. There’s going to be guns.”
The filmmaker added: “But there will be no tropes, I can tell you that. There will be no stereotypes, no typical genre clichés.” Elsewhere in the conversation, Spielberg recalled that he had wanted to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) long before his breakthrough with Jaws (1975). However, studios showed no interest because they considered the project to be a “completely crazy fantasy film”.
“Nobody let me do Close Encounters because it was on the edge of science and mythology. Nobody really understood it,” Spielberg said. The 79-year-old was initially unable to inspire anyone with his idea. “When I said, ‘I want to make a UFO movie,’ everyone thought I wanted to make a movie about the National Enquirer – crazy reports about things that don’t happen. A completely crazy fantasy movie about something that doesn’t exist,” he said.
However, after the success of ‘Jaws’ the situation changed drastically. “Afterwards everyone came to me and said, ‘Do you have an old diary? We’ll shoot whatever you have.’ It was great,” the star revealed.