Film Quote of the Day: Steven Spielberg's Philosophy That Inspired Generations of Dreamers

Steven Spielberg said four words in a 1985 Time Magazine interview that have stuck around for 40 years.

"I dream for a living."

We're pretty romantic about the director and his work around here, as his films have played as a backdrop to our lives, particularly the early stuff— Jaws , E.T. , Close Encounters. Now, with Disclosure Day nearing release, we're thinking about his career and how he's managed to flourish for so long.

If you sit with those words as a working filmmaker, there's a philosophy buried in there.

In 1985, Spielberg had just finished Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , Gremlins (as producer), and was about to release The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun in quick succession. He was 38. He had already changed cinema twice over. And his description of his own job was "dreaming."

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The Dreaming Started Before He Could Walk

The Time story opens with Spielberg's earliest memory, which was being taken as an infant to a Cincinnati synagogue, a tracking shot down a hallway toward a blazing red light and old men in black hats. His parents told him he couldn't have been more than six months old.

For Spielberg, the visual imagination that would define his career was running before he could walk. He needed an outlet, and it happened to be film.

That outlet arrived when his father threatened to take away his train set after he kept crashing the cars into each other. Spielberg grabbed the family's 8mm camera and filmed the wreck instead, so he could watch it over and over without losing the trains.

That's a pretty clean origin story for a career built on spectacle. By the time he was 17, he had made a feature-length 8mm sci-fi film called __Firelight. He wasn't waiting for permission or film school. He was just making things.

The Dreaming Wasn't Always Pleasant

At SXSW this past March, Spielberg described his childhood imagination as something that frightened him.

“When I was really little, I had, you know, I had an abundance of fears, and the fears actually came from my imagination,” he told host Sean Fennessey (via KXAN). “I didn’t realize until later that the abundance of fear was because I had this, you know, kind of like overdose, overabundance of imagination. So whenever I saw something, I would extrapolate and make it much worse than it actually was.”

He described coming to filmmaking as a way to create "a talisman to protect" himself, a means of putting fear on screen so he didn't have to carry it alone.

That's a different relationship to the creative process than most people probably have. The typical version of this story involves a young person who loves movies and wants to make them. Spielberg's version is more about a kid overwhelmed by his own inner life and needing somewhere to put it.

He speaks about it as if the dreaming weren't optional. And "dreaming for a living" meant he had found a way to make that compulsion pay off, to take the thing that kept him up at night and turn it into the thing that kept audiences in their seats.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Credit: Universal Pictures

The Imagination Is the Job

In Time, Spielberg told Richard Corliss:

"I dream for a living. Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make. Sometimes I think I've got ball bearings for brains; these ideas are slipping and sliding across each other all the time. My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom."

Your imagination is the job. Not a perk of the job, not the fun part between the grind parts.

Notice Spielberg doesn't describe inspiration as a gift that arrives on its own schedule. He describes it as a problem. His imagination won't turn off, ideas are sliding across each other, the sky falls, and suddenly, he gains consciousness with another movie in his head.

It's less romantic than the usual creativity discourse. It definitely resonates with me. Creativity and ideation are often frustrating and backward processes.

Spielberg has been consistent about this when talking to emerging filmmakers. The most expensive gear in the world cannot save a weak narrative, and your unique voice is your most valuable tool.

The dreaming has to come first. Everything else is execution. If you find yourself chasing technical solutions to a problem that's really a story problem, you've gotten things the wrong way around.

"I Dream for a Living" Is Also a Little Bit of a Lie

Are you a filmmaker in the grind right now? I certainly am. Writing drafts that aren't working, cutting scenes that hurt to lose, trying to get a short film into the festival circuit on a budget that makes you want to cry.

Spielberg's quote is a clean way to describe something that is, in practice, pretty brutal. The quote romanticizes the creative life. The sky still falls on his head once a month. His imagination won't turn off. That's not a serene, candlelit creative process. That's a person who is, by his own description, a little bit at the mercy of his own brain.

The idealization is doing work here, though. "I dream for a living" is the version of the job you hold onto when the draft isn't coming together, and the festival passed, and the budget fell through. It might be the thing that keeps the whole enterprise from feeling like a slog.

Every working filmmaker needs some version of that story about themselves. The hard part is living inside the romanticized version long enough to actually make the thing.

The engine that powered one of the most prolific careers in Hollywood history wasn't a film school education, an early break, or the right connections. It was because of an imagination he refused to shut off. You either have that engine or you're building it, but either way, the job is to keep it running.

What's your favorite Spielberg filmmaking wisdom?