10 Things We Learnt About Steven Spielberg’s The Post

All The News That’s Fit To Print?

♦ Over at The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and screenwriter Liz Hannah just talked about the director’s new drama The Post and here’s 10 things we picked up from that chat…

1. Spielberg wasn’t even intending to make it originally: “I read the script without any intention of telling the story myself or of committing to a production while in the middle of [another one,] Ready Player One, which was only half sane. But I was really curious about the subject matter. Ben Bradlee was my neighbor for years in East Hampton.”

2. The director was actually frightened by the script: “My first reaction [reading it] was I got scared — which is good for me because fear is my fuel. The more frightened I become of something, the more I have to work through it. This was a topic that was scaring everybody I know on my side of the [political] street — and quite rightly.”

3. Spielberg doesn’t trust all media these days, he admits: “I’m not going to go on record saying which media I trust; I’m just saying, obviously, there is media that you would imagine I would not trust. (Laughter.) Obviously, there is media you would take for granted I trust, and you would be right…In my political reading, I read The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian. I check in on Politico, Axios and Drudge, and I go to Fox often to see the manipulation.”

4. Screenwriter Hannah tapped into subjects that have always fascinated her for The Post: “I was always interested in those issues. I grew up in a very politically interested family. My parents were both artists, and then one of them became a social worker at some point. But they were very active in the 60s. I grew up in a household that loved Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, [but] I don’t think they were partisan. It’s a patriotic sort of household that I grew up in.”

5. Streep, who plays Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, got a little surprised once she started doing the research on her character: “My image of her was as her full-blown Athena self. That’s how I thought of her. And when I went into the book [Graham’s memoir, Personal History] and read about the constant, nagging insecurity [and feeling] that ‘I don’t belong in this room, my opinion doesn’t matter,’ that was fascinating. And, to the extent that it’s encouraged by the landscape in which we grow up as women, her guile surprised me.”

6. The actress never met her but she did meet Washington post editor Bradlee, she reveals: “I never met her. I met Ben Bradlee. I had dinner with him once, and Sally Quinn, with Nora Ephron and my mother and Jack Nicholson. And Sen. [Bill] Bradley, whom I sat next to. I said to him, ‘Gosh, don’t you miss basketball? Do you ever play anymore?’ He said, ‘When you stop making movies, do you want to do community theater?'”

7. Spielberg recalls what Bradlee was like: “I’m in the business of working with very charismatic actors, and Ben was right up there in the highest echelons. The only other person that reminded me of Ben — as a performer who was not in the entertainment industry — was the former head of Time Warner, Steven J. Ross.”

8. Working with women in his long career has changed the director, he recalls:”Kathy Kennedy, when we first started working together. She started off as my secretary — you’re putting it in the context of 1978. Basically, I was a little bit of a hothead, impatient, and I would be hard on my crew — loving to my cast but tough on my crew. And about 15 days into shooting E.T., she pulled me into her office and sat me down in a chair and gave me the bollocking of my life. Because she did not like the way I was talking to the crew. She didn’t care for my impatience, she didn’t care for my sharpness. She said, ‘This is unacceptable behavior,’ and I hadn’t heard that since a teacher in school or my own mom — and that was a big shift in my life. I became mindful because somebody I trusted and respected had called me out.”

9. Spielberg’s longtime producer Kristie Macosko Krieger echoes what he said about Kennedy:”Kathy taught me how to work hard. She was always the first person on set, the last person to leave. There was no job beneath her, no job above her.”

10. Spielberg feels optimistic about the future: “The truth is ready to make a comeback.”

The Post Spielberg Hollywood Reporter feature www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk

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