Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The War of the Worlds

We order our c- coffee and our apple pie, and I say, "Mike, so what did you think?" Go ahead.

I will tell you that watching these two movies back to back, which I did, is a master class in understanding what the Spielbergian motifs are because th- um, th- these two, like, if they were paintings, they would both have the same signature in the same spot.

So I'll give an example of what I mean.

For those of us that grew up on Spielberg movies, we know that we like them.

We know that they're overwhelmingly suspenseful.

I think that he gets a lot of credit because, um, he's like the anti-Stephen King.

I think, like, what, what a lot of people that like Stephen King, and even a lot of people that don't like Stephen King think, is that he builds up tension, but never manages to pay it off.

And I think that Spielberg cinematically is the ultimate builder of tension and then the ultimate payer off.

Nobody, nobody lea- You don't leave Minority Report thinking, "Ah, that was lame." You leave Minority Report, even if you don't like the premise or you don't like the movie, just totally out of breath.

They're deeply harrowing experiences.

Like, so how does he do that? And he is, if you will, he's the Chekhov of cinema.

Chekhov, his famous writing advice is, "Don't describe to me the moon.

Show me the reflection in a piece of glass." And that is the Spielbergian, uh, ultimate Spielbergian move.

Like, if I say Jurassic Park to you, everybody's thinking s- a glass of water, and it's trembling, and you can see the, the tiny riplets and, and movements in it as the dinosaurs are getting closer.

You know, I, I'm not gonna show you a shark.

I'm gonna show you a pair of legs.

I'm gonna do things, uh, with the, with the soundtrack.

I'm gonna do things with the way the water ripples.

I'll maybe give you a glimmer or a glimpse, but I- I'm not...

I'm filtering experiences through small, concrete, palpable ... details that make you like feel them in your chest.

So I'll just give you an example of how these two movies match, uh, perfectly.

When the two explorers in the Gobi Desert find that ship, and they're with their camels, um, Spielberg wants to show you how stunned they are, 'cause you obviously don't s- they, they start calling to each other in Mongolian, I guess.

But the one guy is just, he's just panting and breathing, and the scarf that he has over his face is, uh, pulsing and moving, and moving.

In War of the Worlds, when Dakota Fanning is hiding from the aliens with her dad, [laughs] Tom Cruise, and they're huddled, and that weird, um, like, snake eye thing is looking for them, Dakota Fanning is panting 'cause she's so nervous, and she's moving a spiderweb in and out.

And so it's, like the movies are 30 years apart, but the guy's scarf is the same thing as the spiderweb, right? How do I dramatize to you that somebody's afraid? How do I dramatize that they're nervous? I'll show you the objects that they move with their breath while they're panting, and it, there's just some psychosomatic thing that happens to you while [laughs] you watch, which is that you start to pant.