Steven Spielberg has many alien movies like Closer Encounters and E.T. as a part of his filmography. In 2005, he released a different kind of alien film with War of the Worlds. But the filmmaker admitted that it was a project that he directed partially out of pride.
Steven Spielberg once felt goaded into directing ‘War of the Worlds’
War of the Worlds was a project Spielberg was interested in filming since before he became one of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers.
Spielberg came across H.G. Wells’ classic novel during his younger years, and hoped to one day adapt it to the big screen. The film would star Dakota Fanning and Tom Cruise, who Spielberg already met for the feature.
‘We’ve talked about this for a couple of years when we were looking for another project to do together. I told Tom that I wanted to do this book since I read it in college before I was even a filmmaker. I wanted to do some version of it at some point,” Spielberg once said according to Female.
But there was another reason why Spielberg wanted to direct War. Although he’d been known for his classic stories about aliens, they were usually very wholesome films. Spielberg wanted to prove that he could do an extraterrestrial feature that had an edge to it.
‘Maybe it was just the idea that everybody over the years said here was the guy who can’t make a scary alien movie that goaded me into thinking why can’t I try my hand at the kind of film that Ridley Scott made when he made the first Alien, which is one of my favorite scary science fiction movies. It’s just something that I always wanted to do,” he said.
Steven Spielberg revealed the ‘War of the Worlds’ scene he couldn’t wait to stop shooting
Directing War of the Worlds wasn’t always fun for Spielberg. There was one scene while filming that gave the director immense anxiety because of the danger involved. The scene in question featured the aliens attacking a ferry, which included many extras that Spielberg worried he was putting in harm’s way.
“That was the most difficult for me because we had to have thousands of people running and I was terrified of someone falling, tripping, being stepped on or run over and thank God we had such a great stunt coordinator,” Spielberg said.
The Oscar-winner went on to say that no one was hurt in the end. But up until finishing the shot, Spielberg was tense and prepared for the worst to happen.
“We had so many extra stunt people inside the crowd and safety meetings with the crowd, so nothing bad happened. But I was on edge for four days because of the vast amounts of crowds at night running on very narrow streets. So for me that was the most anxious time during filming and I couldn’t wait for those scenes to be over,” he said.
Steven Spielberg didn’t like his ending for ‘War of the Worlds’
Spielberg once confided to fellow director James Cameron that he wasn’t too proud of the way he concluded his sci-fi feature.
“That film doesn’t have a good ending. I never could figure out how to end that darn thing,” he once said on James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction (via Yahoo).
The ending of the film has also received mixed responses from reviews and critics alike. Cameron himself agreed that the War of the Worlds ending perhaps left a lot to be desired. But The Terminator filmmaker blamed the source material more than Spielberg.
“I don’t think H.G. Wells could figure it out,” Cameron said.
Spielberg joked that Morgan Freeman, however, was able to make the ending somewhat better with just the power of his voice.
“I had Morgan Freeman help me with it with his narration,” Spielberg said.