Steven Spielberg

Personal context

Summary

Steven Spielberg is a director and producer known for popular adventure films and historical dramas, including Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Lincoln. His work often explores family, war, persecution, and people confronting violence or injustice. He founded the USC Shoah Foundation to preserve testimony from Holocaust survivors and other witnesses; in a 2016 Harvard commencement speech, he spoke against racism, homophobia, and discrimination, and urged empathy and peaceful protest. For West Side Story, he said the story needed correction and described casting Latino performers in the Sharks’ roles as central to making the film. He and Kate Capshaw donated $100,000 to oppose California’s Proposition 8, which would have banned same-sex marriage. In 2023, he called his decision to replace guns with walkie-talkies in E.T. a mistake and criticized revising films to fit changing sensibilities.