Spielberg

Spielberg (2017) is an HBO documentary you can watch online on iFILM — 147 minutes tracing one director's career from a teenager with an 8mm camera in Arizona to the man who reshaped Hollywood twice over. Susan Lacy directed, and she had access that most filmmakers only dream about: years of conversations with Spielberg himself, his collaborators and his critics.

The film follows professional choices more than biographical milestones. How Jaws got made on a sinking budget. Why Schindler's List stayed in black and white. What drove the shift from Jurassic Park blockbusters to Lincoln. The roster of talking heads is staggering — Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Tom Hanks, Cate Blanchett, Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis among them — but Lacy keeps each voice tethered to a specific film or moment rather than letting it drift into tribute.

What makes this more than a career retrospective is Spielberg's own candour about failure, fear, and the personal obsessions he keeps hiding inside crowd-pleasing plots. Stream Spielberg (2017) online on iFILM.