Vision of a genius

The BFG, the latest from Steven Spielberg, is based on the 1982 book of the same title by Roald Dahl. It’s the story of young Sophie (the newcomer Ruby Barnhill), who one night is plucked from her bed by a giant hand. She soon discovers that the hand belongs to the BFG — voiced with an ache by Mark Rylance — or the Big Friendly Giant. The girl and the giant bond, naturally, and soon enough this funny, creepy, quirky child-snatching story turns into an odd-couple tale about 2 lonely souls who set out to vanquish a gang of giant hooligans who snack on “human beans” — people.

Using a combination of physical sets, performance capture and digital wizardry, Spielberg creates a visually seamless world that looks startlingly real. The BFG is most touchingly an expression of Spielberg’s movie love, evident in its emphasis on dreams, a lovely interlude involving a kind of shadow play and even in an allusion to a Zoetrope, a protocinematic device that creates the illusion of motion.

The film was adapted for the screen by Melissa Mathison, who died in 2015, and remains best known for her screenplay for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. It was Spielberg’s second appearance as a director in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition, following The Sugarland Express in 1974. Spielberg speaks about his new movie, accusations that Dahl was anti-Semitic and what he would change in the film industry. Here are excerpts:

How did the project come to you?
Kathy Kennedy. She got the rights from the Dahl estate about 9 or 10 years ago. And she hired Melissa to write the screenplay. I read Melissa’s script and loved it. There was a lot of work to be done, but it was a wonderful first draft. I got involved in directing it because Melissa and I have been so close all these years; we raised our families together practically.

Was the melding of technology and human beings part of your interest?
Not really, because at first I thought we would do it with actors — Darby O’Gill and the Little People with forced perspective, staging, actors with false eye-lines. But then I realised if I shot the movie that way it would be no different from Tom Thumb, Thumbelina, Jack and the Beanstalk — it wouldn’t be magical. And I thought that the most important thing I could contribute was to try to create real cinematic magic. Not magic as a result of an audience’s experience but physical, literal alchemy on the screen that was somehow similar to things we’ve seen before but somehow also different.

To do that, I thought, I need all the giants to be creatures. Now, I could certainly make them creatures through prosthetic makeup. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had complete freedom that the creatures were done digitally? I felt like we were just on the cusp of inventing soul. That we could really infuse actual, human, God-given soul into an animated character. They had gotten close to it on several movies like Avatar and even Planet of the Apes.

I didn’t want the technology to subvert Mark’s honest performance. And that was the big risk we took. Would they be able to get Mark’s soul into BFG’s face and body? And 80% of that was done by Mark himself, but the extra 20% was done by the animators.

At this point, do you feel like there are any new hurdles for you?
The BFG was a huge hurdle for me — I’d never done a fairy tale before. Every movie I make, there’s a hurdle to it. I look for things that will scare me. Fear is my fuel. I get to the brink of not really knowing what to do and that’s when I get my best ideas. Confidence is my enemy and it always has been.

My sequels aren’t as good as my originals because I go onto every sequel I’ve made and I’m too confident. This movie made a ka-zillion dollars, which justifies the sequel, so I come in like it’s going to be a slam dunk and I wind up making an inferior movie to the one before. I’m talking about The Lost World and Jurassic Park.

Is it fear of failing, fear of disappointing yourself, your critics, your admirers? What is the fear?It’s a fear of getting lost. And then staying lost in a quagmire of having made a bad choice and now I’m stuck with it for the next 60 days of shooting. I felt that way on Jaws only because it was so hard to make, not because I didn’t know how to make it. I was lost. For a movie that became awesomely successful and gave me complete personal creative freedom, I still look back at it and even now say it was my most unhappy time in my life as a filmmaker because whole days would go by and we wouldn’t get a shot.

Someone asked regarding Roald Dahl whom some, including a biographer, has said was an anti-Semite. Can you enjoy the work and not think about the artiste?
I think that all of us who stand on the shoulders of the giants who began the industry — have run into that conundrum when talking about The Birth of a Nation and D W Griffith and the exaltation of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, I don’t know what I would have done if I’d known this before The BFG. I didn’t research Dahl. That’s no excuse. I was completely enthralled by his writing, by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and especially The BFG, which is my favourite of his books. I read it to my kids. So, my only involvement was interpreting the book.

If it were up to you to restructure the film business, the studios, what would you do? How would you fix the studios?
I don’t think that the studios need fixing, as long as they keep their speciality divisions active and alert to what’s on the market and to what young filmmakers are ready to be given that big break. My only advice — and I don’t have a studio, I have a small company — is that there needs to be a good balance of crowd-pleasers and movies that are good for the soul, that get us to dwell in the aftertaste of an experience that is so far-fetched or out of the box.The other thing that I’m a huge advocate of is diversification behind the camera. We don’t have women directors. That needs to change. And I don’t believe in the quota system, either. That’s tokenism.

True talent is what we need to judge from, and there is tremendous talent in all those fields of diversity, from gender to race to religion. And a lot of this good work is being done in television. So how do we build a bridge from TV to the movies? And how do we build a bridge from those who haven’t been given a break yet? Casting directors go out into the hinterlands and find actors who had no desire to act but are plucked out of school, like Ruby Barnhill, and put in The BFG. Why can’t there be the same effort to find filmmakers?