Film director Steven Spielberg tells STEPHEN WEBB about his new movie, his passion for movies - and about bribing his children

FOR a man who is at the forefront of the technological revolution that has driven the film industry in the last 10 years or so, Steven Spielberg's heart is very much in the past.

Just ask his kids.

The film director, whose new movie, the effects-laden The BFG, is released today, continues to draw inspiration from his film-making heroes from yesteryear, and has been determined that his offspring should share his love of old movies.

"I have a lot of affection for my predecessors, all of the geniuses we are learning from, on whose shoulders we stand," he said. "I do a lot of looking back to understand what makes a good story.

"My whole love of this medium comes from paying attention to the past. You need to look at the old films. I used to have to pay my kids $10 to watch a black and white movie with me. I’d actually bribe them – 'You watch Red River with me and I’ll give you $10'. They’d start watching the movie with me then 20 minutes later they’d give me the money back and leave the room."

Spielberg would happily talk movies all day long - and even in our allotted half hour he managed to talk about the past, the present and the future, dropping in the names of some of those heroes, such as John Ford, Frank Capra, Akira Kurosawa and David Lean.

It would be interesting to know what those luminaries would have made of The BFG, for which Spielberg has utilised state-of-the-art digital technology to turn the not particularly tall actor Mark Rylance into a 25ft tall giant, to say nothing of a magical land populated by even bigger giants - and, er, some farting corgis.

Ever the family man, Spielberg's first encounter with Roald Dahl's The BFG was reading the story to his children.

"I picked it up at a bookstore," he said. "I was more into Charlie And The Chocolate Factory than I was with The BFG, but it had a great illustration on the cover – it had a little girl, she was this big and there was this guy with huge ears and I had to buy it.

"So I read it out loud, I heard myself reading it about four or five years after it came out. I didn’t see it as a film back then, I saw it as a way of popularising myself with my own family."

Family and film are clearly to the two most important things in Spielberg's life. He's 69 now, but he exhibits as much energy and enthusiasm for making movies now as he did when he was the dynamic young director of films such as Jaws, Raiders Of The Lost Ark and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial.

His films still win awards - Rylance, a celebrated British stage actor, won an Oscar when he worked for Spielberg in last year's Bridge Of Spies - and he shows absolutely no sign of slowing down, embracing changes he has experienced in nearly 50 years in the movie industry. As much as anything, he puts it down to being part of the film-going audience.

He said: "What I love is that with everything I know about making a movie, I have been able to get in the habit of suspending my disbelief like every other audience member and forgetting everything I know about how a film is made and just let the film that someone else has made just wash over me. People ask 'Don’t you just think about where to put the camera, how it is lit and the special effects', and I swear I don’t.

"And even if it’s not a very good movie, I don’t fall back to try to figure out how the movie was made, I just let the film, like the audience does, have its way with me.

"The biggest change with how films are made today is that before the digital revolution, you needed to use your imagination to be able to craft an illusion that the audience would accept as real. Take a movie like the original War Of The Worlds – you could see all the wires on the flying machines; the audience could see the wires, but not include the wires because that would spoil the illusion. They forgot the wires and they were terrified when the aliens were invading America.

"With the digital revolution today there is no room for anyone’s imagination. You can literally put anything on the screen. So illusion is gone, we no longer have to use practical magic to make you believe something is real because of visual effects. Hopefully the success of The BFG is that 15 or 20 minutes into the movie you forget there are effects at all, you forget there are special effects to make Mark 25ft tall."

And what of his own movie legacy?

"I’m just proud that I have been able to stay in this industry and make movies all of these years. I’ve met a lot of my heroes as I came through the ranks of being a film director and I’ve seen that what happens when a lot of directors get older is they still have the passion and the determination to tell stories but because of their age the people who hire them look at them as a relic from the past.

"So I’m just happy that I get to keep working. I’m in my 70th year and I should get tired, but I don’t. I love what I do, I still tell stories, I work with great actors. I’m so busy now, I’m busy looking ahead. I’m really proud of the way people have grown up with my films. But I think if I dwell too much on that it would make me just want to sit back on my tush and I don’t really want to do that."