Since the release of “Ready Player One” is upon us, nostalgia seems to be the topic of choice when discussing director Steven Spielberg. And with a filmography as diverse and incredible as Spielberg, there’s a lot of films that people hold dear to them. For director Edgar Wright, when talking about what Spielberg is a huge personal influence, he goes to the beginning of the filmography – “Duel.”
Wright got a chance to talk to Spielberg about “Duel” in a recent interview for Empire. First, Wright wanted to give readers a bit of background about why “Duel” means so much to him. “I saw ‘Duel’ on TV as a kid and marveled, even then, at it,” he says. “It is a pure engine for suspense, a brilliant exercise in near-silent cinema. I still think, even in the wake of his later classics, it’s still one of the greatest displays of Spielberg’s talent and a masterclass for young film makers.”
The “Baby Driver” filmmaker goes a little deeper into one of the characteristics of the film that stands out to him – the lack of dialogue. The film follows a man who is driving his Plymouth Valiant and is stalked by a huge tanker truck, with an almost completely unseen driver, while traversing the California canyon roads. With the unknown antagonist, and a driver alone in his car, there’s not much room for dialogue. And that was on purpose.
“I cut about fifty per cent of the dialogue out of the script,” Spielberg said to Wright. “[The script] told me that this was going to be my first silent movie. I was a huge fan of the silent era…I even tried to get the network to agree to let me cut out even more dialogue, but the network was adamant that we needed what remained as some kind of a road map for people who just watched TV and who didn’t want to put too much effort into the viewing experience. If I’d had final cut in those days, I would have cut the dialogue even further back.”
Wright explains why this stuck out so much to him, even today, “’Duel’ is a film that demands your attention. If you look at it by today’s standards in terms of TV direction, let’s say in terms of network TV, it’s almost an art film. Which I think is incredible. When you watch it, you feel that this is a silent suspense movie.”
The interview then goes on to talk about the intense production schedule of the film, with a feature length film being shot in 11 days, and a little more into how the incredible confidence of a young Spielberg helped shape his first film.
Ultimately, Spielberg says the same attitude he had back then still is there today when it comes to picking projects. In those early days, he didn’t have the time, or most importantly, the money, to direct his passion project about UFO’s (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), so each project he picked basically fell into his lap.
“The more I think about something, the greater the chance I’ll never make it. It’s the things I just impulsively commit to that somehow feel right to me. I let that pretty much guide me for the last 49 years of making TV and film,” concludes Spielberg.