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Let him complain; the guy loves making movies--and loves making them for less than today's big spenders. With all its effects, The Lost World cost about $75 million, peanuts compared with this summer's Speed 2: Cruise Control, heading for $140 million, and The Titanic, at about $200 million. During an Amistad pre-production conference, Spielberg flummoxed Katzenberg and DreamWorks film exec Walter Parkes by demanding that the already relatively frugal $56 million budget be cut an additional $20 million. "I saw The English Patient," he said. "I know we can do this for less." Spielberg enjoys talking about his work. "I'm deciding whether to use my castle or my second bishop," he says as he prepares a shot. "How am I being threatened here? How can I advance? Directing is about seeing 20 moves ahead while you're working on the next five." He'll do all the work himself, if the person assigned to the job can't hack it. In one scene the faces of the slaves are to be lighted by a lantern carried by one of the crew. But it isn't working. "Let me do the light myself," Spielberg says, holding the lantern so that the slaves' tortured faces are perfectly illuminated. He even shoots a second-unit "insert" scene of a crumpled letter tossed onto a table. "I like to sweat the details," he says. "The second-unit stuff is what makes the audience eat the popcorn faster. Making a movie and not directing the little moments is like drinking a soda and leaving the little slurp puddle for someone else."
Popcorn. Slurp puddle. The flood of junk-culture references makes Spielberg sound like the world's smartest kid. Which he probably is and, once upon a shooting star, surely was. To see the man, look at the child--with Spielberg more than most, this is true. "What binds my films together," he says, "is the concept of loneliness and isolation and being pursued by all the forces of character and nature. That comes from who I was and how I was raised." The big mystery the mature Steven had to unravel and come to terms with is this: Whose child am I?
The answer, for decades, was Leah's. She's the mother for whom her son throws elaborate parties. One time he created a shtetl on a sound stage to remind his mother of her father's Russian roots. "They had live chickens and goats," she says, "and dancers and lots of vodka." Spielberg unabashedly adores his mother. "There's no way for me to be closer to her," he testifies, "except to live inside her. Which I've already done."
Today, as she holds court at the Milky Way, her kosher dairy restaurant that serves jalapeno potato pancakes and encourages mingling ("someone called this the Jewish Cheers"), Leah doesn't even pretend to be the shaper of her famous son's blooming genius. Looking back on his youth, she says, "He scared me! I didn't know anything about raising children--couldn't change a diaper--and it took a concerted effort just to get him past his infancy. Now he has dimensions I can't even fathom. Most people dream. Steven dreams; then he fulfills."