Inside the Mind of Steven Spielberg

Jon Mooallem, writing at Wired, with a giant profile on Steven Spielberg:

That’s just how it is: all your feelings bound up together. You are scared of so many things but simultaneously drawn to them. You are infatuated with airplanes but terrified of flying. You love Disney films but later describe the shooting of Bambi’s mother as giving you PTSD. Outside of your bedroom window in New Jersey, across a long, empty field, is a tremendous tree. “I was terrified by the tree. It was a huge tree,” you’ll later remember, and at night you watch its dark silhouette morph into horrible, demonic things. “Every single night my imagination would find something else to fear.” And still, you stare at the tree every single night. You revisit the things that scare you until they don’t scare you anymore. You love that cycle of tension and resolution; it will become another trademark of your films.