Steven Spielberg Once Said That ‘I Lost My Whole Family’ When He Showed Them This Film

Steven Spielberg has occasionally shared his numerous projects with his family. But there was one film that his loved ones collectively couldn’t stand.

Steven Spielberg’s family had a hard time watching 1 of his lowest-grossing movies

Spielberg didn’t normally re-watch his own films. But he had a few exceptions, and would only watch certain movies that his children would experience for the first time.

“Every once in a while I see a movie with my kids. I want to accompany my kids when they see E.T. for the first time,” Spielberg said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Because of this, the Oscar-winning director has re-lived quite a few movies with his loved ones. But his family weren’t fans of all of them.

“I rarely look back at the movies I’ve made except when my kids see them for the first time. So I get a chance to see all my own movies again through my kids’ eyes, which is always fun, you know, because they tell me whether they like ’em or not right away. Or they walk out. I’ve had my kids walk out of my pictures,” Spielberg told Roger Ebert back in 2002.

One of the films Spielberg’s family hated the most was Amistad. The movie was a 1997 historical drama about a slave uprising. It was far from his worst-reviewed film. But despite good reviews, it was one of Spielberg’s lowest-grossing features, only pulling in $58.3 million at the box office. It was also a feature that his family didn’t care too much for.

“They walked out of Amistad. I lost my whole family. All my young kids, you know. I wouldn’t ever show them the middle passage and I didn’t let them see the very beginning and they were bored by the legal stuff. They left,” he said.

Steven Spielberg’s film career became second after having children

Spielberg didn’t picture himself becoming a family man earlier in his career. The idea first presented itself when he directed E.T.. While shooting, Spielberg already saw himself becoming a sort of father-figure to all the young kids on set. This experience changed Spielberg’s perspective on his future.

“No. I didn’t want to have kids because it was not a kind of equation that made sense for me as I went from movie to movie to movie, script to script… It never occurred to me till halfway through E.T.: I was a parent on that film,” Spielberg once told Variety. “I was literally feeling like I was very protective of Henry [Thomas] and Mike [McNaughton] and my whole cast, and especially Drew [Barrymore], who was only 6 years old. And I started thinking, ‘Well, maybe this could be my real life someday.’”

Spielberg would go on to start quite a large family, fathering seven children. He shares one child with his ex-wife Amy Irving. After their divorce, he adopted two children with his current wife Kate Capshaw. Spielberg and Capshaw went on to have four more children. The filmmaker confided that things changed for his career after giving birth to his first child. In an interview with Boston Parent, he felt that the “paradigm changed, and everything from that moment on had to do with my kids’ wellbeing, and my career suddenly became second.”

Steven Spielberg shared how his own upbringing affected him as a filmmaker

Spielberg felt like he might’ve been inspired to direct at an early age. In an interview with Playboy, the filmmaker revealed that his parents weren’t exactly the most supportive when it came to movies. His mother and father restricted Spielberg from watching movies. But the Spielberg family soon realized there was a slight misfire in their plans.

“I often think that depravity is the inspiration for an entire career,” Spielberg said. “I feel that perhaps one of the reasons I’m making movies all the time is because I was told not to. I was ordered not to watch television. My intake was limited solely to Disney films. I never saw anything with any violence in it. And yet when I came screaming home from Snow White when I was eight years old, and tried to hide under the covers, my parents did not understand it, because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare but to delight and enthrall.”