Edgar Wright interviews Steven Spielberg

The filmmakers talk about the movie which launched Spielberg’s career as a movie director: Duel.

A fascinating Empire interview in which writer-director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver) converses with Steven Spielberg about Duel (1971). To call it a ‘TV movie’ is a disservice. Yes, it first aired on ABC at a time when the major broadcast networks actually produced and aired original films as part of the MOW (Movie Of The Week) phenomenon. And yes, the production shoot was only 11 days, typical of TV movies.

But it plays like a big theatrical experience which is one reason it was distributed all around the world.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Wright: What’s interesting to me watching Duel is, you have straight away as your first feature, such confidence in your visual storytelling. I think one of the reasons it stands out from the pack within TV movies, is you’re bold in the way you’re covering the action. So many TV directors or TV movies at the time would be shot with basic coverage or sometimes very flatly directed, and people are just covering the action and figuring it out in the edit. Very early on, with your first effort, the staging is very ambitious and straight away, as you’ve continued to do in all your films, you have masters that can’t be edited any other way. Some scenes are done in one shot, and you’re really editing in your head. I guess you were in your mid-20s when you directed it. Where did that confidence come from?

Spielberg: Well, I think that confidence is contingent upon the screenplay. In this sense I had a hell of a bedrock foundation. It was a streamlined story by Richard Matheson that gave me a lot of direction to direct it with. It’s really interesting. The other thing that really helped was there was such a paucity of dialogue in the script and even less so in the finished movie. I cut about fifty per cent of the dialogue out of the script. It told me that this was going to be my first silent movie. I was a huge fan of the silent era and had at that point in my life gone out many times to the Nuart and other revival houses to watch silent movies on the big screen. I even tried to get the network to agree to let me cut out even more dialogue, but the network was adamant that we needed what remained as some kind of a road map for people who just watched TV and who didn’t want to put too much effort into the viewing experience. If I’d had final cut in those days, I would have cut the dialogue even further back.

Wright: That’s one of the things that’s really striking about it. Duel is a film that demands your attention. If you look at it by today’s standards in terms of TV direction, let’s say in terms of network TV, it’s almost an art film. Which I think is incredible. When you watch it, you feel that this is a silent suspense movie.

Spielberg: It’s a primal road rage story. You’re watching a lightweight go up against a heavyweight champion. Like David and Goliath, at first you put your money on the giant and it turns out that David starts to turn the tables. I had also thought of it as a Biblical parable. I first read the short story by Richard Matheson in Playboy magazine given to me, thank god, by my brilliant secretary at the time, Nona Tyson, who had read the short story and said, ‘I think this is right up your alley’. She gave me Playboy. It was one of the few times I ever picked up Playboy without looking at the pictures.

Wright: With Duel, there are elements of it that continue into your next two movies. Sugarland Express is almost entirely set in cars. Jaws has a similar David and Goliath theme to it and there’s a link in the everyman actor between Roy Scheider and Dennis Weaver. They have a similar quality. In both cases you’re taking from everyday occurrences, driving or swimming and making them into mythic battles, but having very relatable actors at the centre of it.

Spielberg: I was conscious of that when I put myself up for the job to direct Jaws. I told David Brown and Dick Zanuck, please watch Duel, because Duel is basically Jaws on land. I really think it qualified me to direct Jaws.

Wright: That makes total sense. It’s interesting. In your documentary, you said about Duel that it was you taking on the school bully. Richard Matheson based it on a friend’s tailgating incident, but you related it to taking on the indomitable school bully.

Spielberg: It was all about the school bully. When something speaks to me, I don’t question where it first began talking. I just accept it’s something that fits and that I feel familiar with and I need to make it and I need to get it out of my system. But I can often trace it back to schoolyard origins, often in interviews years later. The interview process is gestalt therapy for filmmakers who don’t have therapists, which I never did. But years later, I look back at Duel and to some extent Jaws and say that some of my earlier films were either about my fear of going to school because there were big kids who would go after me and would make my life a ruin.

Wright: There’s an element of this in Jaws too, but more so in Duel. It’s taking place in a grounded reality, but there are hints of something supernatural in the way you portray the truck driver. You never quite see him or know anything about him. You never go fully into Stephen King territory but there are hints of it being a supernatural horror without it ever being explicitly that.

Spielberg: The supernatural horror really does not take place on the screen. It takes place in the minds of the audience. By not showing the driver, the audience gets to make any substitution they choose. And that’s where it takes on a supernatural vibe.

Read the entire interview as it offers a fascinating insight into Spielberg’s creative mindset. Here is a trailer for the 1971 movie:

Action, action, action!

For hundreds more interviews archived at Go Into The Story, go here.