magine you are Little Steven Spielberg. It's the early 1950s. You are 7, maybe 8. You are very small in an enormous world. You feel things strongly, as all children do, and seemingly all at once. Awe, dread, wonder, joy, vulnerability, sadness—often these come crashing over you together as a single phenomenon. Later, when people recognize your gift for re-creating the sensations of childhood—when a critic describes your work as going "so deep into the special alertness, loyalty, and ardor of children that it makes you see things you had forgotten or blotted out and feel things you were embarrassed to feel"—it's this sensitivity they're often talking about.

You are exquisitely uncomfortable with yourself. You are pimpled, wimpy, and Jewish, and you are bullied for all of it. Nickname: the Retard. One day your class has to run a mile, and eventually only you and one other boy are left slogging around the track. This other kid actually is intellectually disabled. But now he's gaining on you, and the entire class is cheering, yelling, "C'mon, beat Spielberg!" You know, intuitively, that you should take a dive; letting him win is the generous thing to do. So you slow down, start fading. Then, once he's overtaken you and your classmates explode with glee, you make a show of running hard again, so it still looks close. As an adult, in the '80s, you'll remember: "Everybody grabbed this guy and threw him up on their shoulders and carried him into the locker room." But you just stay there, bawling by yourself, not even trying to sort out the conflicting spasms of pride and shame inside you. All you know is "I'd never felt better and I'd never felt worse in my entire life."

That's just how it is: all your feelings bound up together. You are scared of so many things but simultaneously drawn to them. You are infatuated with airplanes but terrified of flying. You love Disney films but later describe the shooting of Bambi's mother as giving you PTSD. Outside of your bedroom window in New Jersey, across a long, empty field, is a tremendous tree. "I was terrified by the tree. It was a huge tree," you'll later remember, and at night you watch its dark silhouette morph into horrible, demonic things. "Every single night my imagination would find something else to fear." And still, you stare at the tree every single night. You revisit the things that scare you until they don't scare you anymore. You love that cycle of tension and resolution; it will become another trademark of your films. "I've always opted for waking up after a bad dream and being so happy I was awake, and then wanting to go back to sleep to have that damn dream again," you'll say. You do the same thing with the clouds, lying in your backyard, letting your mind change them into "gigantic fists, gigantic faces." Eventually, it hits you: "There was just something about bigness that scared me when I was a kid."

This is never more clear than when your uncle brings you to Washington, DC, one winter. He takes you to see an enormous marble man. You can't even look at it—just glimpsing the statue's titanic white hands is too destabilizing. You just stand there, freezing and afraid, pulling at your uncle's coat to go.

Still, you're drawn to the man. You become obsessed. Back home you find yourself making paper cutouts of his profile, again and again. Eventually, you make a movie about him: Lincoln.

Read Full Story