As if I weren’t scared enough already.
Spielberg’s production company is called Amblin Entertainment. (The name comes from the student film that helped him break into the business.) When people asked me about the kinds of movies I wanted to make after school, I would say, “Amblin-y.”
The question that inspired my film, When the Kids Are Away, was what do stay-at-home moms do when their children are at school? My short answer was: They sing and dance! I wanted to do big ensemble numbers, with dozens of moms dancing up and down the street.
Somehow, in early 2003, Spielberg had gotten a copy of my movie. (How, I’ll never be sure. Four different people have claimed credit, which is about average for a Hollywood success story.) Apparently, unbelievably, he’d liked it enough to want to meet me.
And now here I was, crossing his lobby, heading for his door. My brain was racing through the many things that might go wrong. Spielberg might realize that I knew nothing about film. Or, in spite of how much I’d built up the meeting in my mind, it could be a quick handshake and goodbye. The scariest possibility of all was that it might go great. That my life would peak right then and there. What if my first great Hollywood adventure would also be my last?
Please, I prayed, let this not be the end of the story.
I reached the reception desk. I felt silly, but there was no other way to say it: “I’m here to see Steven Spielberg.”
“We’ve actually met,” I said when we sat down in a small conference room near his office.
“Was I nice?” he asked.
“You were.”
“Phew!” he replied.
(A couple of years earlier, I’d designed a fake security credential to sneak into the Oscars. I laminated a photoshopped image of a pass, then talked my way into the backstage press area, where I worked up the nerve to shake his hand, though not to give him a letter I’d written. It was very fulsome.)
Spielberg took all the pressure off and launched into how much he’d loved When the Kids Are Away. He said it was different from any student film he’d seen in a long time. How had I made something that did so many things so well, with such high production value? That had a big orchestra and dancers and period costumes? That was so joyful?
I’d wanted the movie to be a warm picture of family life, a celebration of mothers. (Again, I was never going to be the cynical guy.) That’s why we’d shot it in Pasadena, in all that suburban sunshine. The movie also showcased little kids, another Spielberg signature. On set, I’d tried all the tricks that I’d seen him use in behind-the-scenes videos of The Goonies and E.T. to draw beautiful performances out of child actors. He had made it look so easy. It was not easy.
He said that after he watched those family scenes, he knew immediately that he needed to share my film with his wife, Kate Capshaw. Her reaction, according to him, was: “He gets us mothers.”
“That’s when I knew I had to meet you,” he told me.
The more we talked about the movie, the more surreal the conversation became. Because the final explanation for how we’d made the film was by using tools that were just as new and unfamiliar to Spielberg as they were to me.