‘No plans ever to retire’: why Steven Spielberg and the movie brat generation just won’t quit

Spielberg, 78, has announced he’ll keep making films till he dies – and he’s a spring chicken next to Coppola, Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Ridley Scott, all still working in their 80s. What makes directing a job for life?

If life behaved in the same way as movies, then The Fabelmans would have been Steven Spielberg’s last film. He spent the previous five decades writing the rulebook of modern cinema, and then The Fabelmans was the rare work of art that wrapped everything up with a neat little bow. Part autobiography and part tutorial, it was like the work of a man looking back on his life with a sense of satisfied completion.

But real life doesn’t behave like that, and Spielberg has just announced that he is never going to retire. In fact, he announced it twice. In a speech he gave during a star-studded event unveiling a new Steven Spielberg Theater on the Universal lot last night, the 78-year-old said: “I’m making a lot of movies and I have no plans … ever … to retire.” And then, talking to the Hollywood Reporter afterwards, he added that he has “an appetite for a western which I will someday hopefully do. It’s something that’s eluded me for all of these decades.”

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