Steven Spielberg eyes Western as next project
Steven Spielberg plans to fulfil his long-held dream of making a Western with his next project.
Steven Spielberg's next movie will be a Western with "no stereotypes".
The 79-year-old filmmaker has teased the project will have "horses and guns" but he is trying to steer away from other conventions and "tropes" typically associated with the genre, though he didn't give any plot details.
Speaking to The Big Picture's Sean Fennessey at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on Friday (13.03.26), he said when asked about his next film: "Well, I'm developing a Western.
"And it's gonna have horses. There will be guns.
"But there'll be no tropes, I can just tell you that. There are gonna be no stereotypes, no tropes."
Elsewhere during the discussion, Spielberg recalled how he had wanted to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind long before his breakthrough movie Jaws, but studios had no interest because they thought it was a "completely crazy fantasy film".
He recalled: “Nobody would let me make Close Encounters because it was on the fringes of science and mythology. So no one really got it.
“When I said, ‘I want to make a UFO movie,’ everybody thought, well, you want to make a movie about the National Enquirer. You want to make a movie about crackpot reporting of things that aren’t really occurring, a completely crazy fantasy film about something that isn’t happening.
"[After Jaws,] everybody came to me and said, ‘You have an old diary? We’ll shoot anything you have.’ I mean, it was great.”
The Indiana Jones director has long discussed his desire to work on a Western.
Speaking in 2021, he told Yahoo!: "I was asked that question over the last 40 years of my career, if not longer, and I always say, ‘A musical is the one thing I haven’t done.’
"The thing I neglected to say is the one genre I haven’t really tackled yet is the Western.
"So who knows? Maybe I’ll be putting on spurs someday. Who knows?”
And last year, Spielberg stressed he has an "appetite for a Western, which I will someday hopefully do."
He added to The Hollywood Reporter: "It’s something that’s eluded me for all of these decades."
The Fabelmans director has also told how he often watches John Ford's Westerns, particularly The Searchers and Stagecoach, before beginning production on a new movie because of how much they inspire him.
He said: "He inspires me, and I'm very sensitive to the way he uses his camera to paint his pictures, and the way he frames things.
"I really admire Stagecoach because, for one thing, it was John Ford's first foray into Monument Valley, so he was starting to use landscape art to help tell his story."
