For all the genres Steven Spielberg has bent to his will, the Western has remained one of the most conspicuous gaps in his directing résumé. That does not mean he has stayed far from it. The “Indiana Jones” movies have always carried a frontier pulse in their bones—dust, saddle energy, lone-wolf bravado, desert horizons—borrowing from Western grammar even as they move through pulp-adventure terrain. And with John Ford long looming over Spielberg as one of his clearest artistic touchstones, a connection “The Fabelmans” made explicit in its final movement, his SXSW tease of a Western plays less like a surprise than a long-delayed arrival.
That is what made the reveal so tantalizing. During a live taping of “The Big Picture” with Sean Fennessey at SXSW, Spielberg said he is developing a Western now, then leaned into the room’s reaction by calling it “kick ass.” He kept the details close, but he did make one thing clear: whatever version of the genre he wants to make, he is not interested in dragging along its stale old shorthand.
“There are gonna be no stereotypes,” Spielberg said. “There’ll be no tropes.” He added that the movie will still have “horses” and “guns,” and Entertainment Weekly reported that he also suggested it could shoot in Texas. That is a pretty intriguing lane for Spielberg to finally enter, especially given that he said in 2021 the Western was the one genre he still had not really tackled and reiterated last year that he still had “an appetite for a Western.”
The Western tease might be the fresher headline, but Spielberg also spent part of the conversation talking about extraterrestrials and his upcoming sci-fi film “Disclosure Day.” Asked about Barack Obama’s recent comments on alien life, Spielberg admitted his first reaction was pure movie-publicity opportunism: “Oh my God, this is so great for ‘Disclosure Day.’” He then widened the thought, saying he has “a very strong, sticky suspicion” that humanity is not alone. That thread, obviously, runs straight through his career, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” and now back into a new film arriving June 12.
That new movie stars Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, and Wyatt Russell, and it puts Spielberg back in the extraterrestrial mode that has always let him split the difference between pop spectacle and metaphysical wonder. But the Western is what lingers here. If “Disclosure Day” looks like a return to one of Spielberg’s oldest fascinations, this other project sounds like something even more charged—a filmmaker finally circling one of the last major American forms he has not fully claimed, and doing it with enough self-awareness to know the old myths are not worth hauling back intact.
