How hiding in a toilet helped Steven Spielberg get into the movie business

0:12Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne. Welcome to Desert Island Discs Postcards, where we share funny, moving and memorable moments directly from our desert island with you every weekday. Today's postcard comes from the director, Steven Spielberg, who I spoke to in 2022. He gave the world Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park. But Steven told me how he got his start in the film industry by employing both skill and stealth. I heard that there was a tour at Universal. You could get on a bus. So I took the tour on the bus and we had a bathroom break and everybody was allowed to get out, stretch their legs and go to the restroom.

0:51and I hid in the stall of one of the restrooms. I didn't come out until I was sure everybody had gotten back on the bus and the bus drove away. And I spent the rest of my day literally walking around the lot, going into sound stages and watching some television being shot. And there happened to be a very nice man there named Chuck Silvers who ran the library at Universal where all the films were kept. And when I said I jumped off the bus because I wanted to be a movie director, he thought that was really original and kind of novel and thought that was terrific. And he said, what kind of movies do you make?

1:21and I told him about my little westerns and war movies back in Phoenix. He said, look, if you can come back tomorrow, bring some of those films with you, and I'd like to see them, and I'll write you out a pass. And Chuck loved these little movies, and he gave me a three-day pass. He said after three days I was on my own, but I had had four days where I passed by the guard at the gate. His name was Scotty. He was Scottish, by the way. And I took a chance. I had a little sport jacket on, a little string tie, and I walked past Scotty with no pass on that next day and I waved to him and he didn't ask me to show him my papers.

1:56He waved back at me and I basically spent the next two months at Universal Studios and that was how I kind of became an unofficial apprentice for that summer. And you showed the same kind of ingenuity when you were making your first blockbuster, Jaws. You were just 27. It was a very difficult shoot, working on small boats in a cold sea with a mechanical shark that kept malfunctioning. It's a much better movie that The Shark Kept Breaking Down because I had to be resourceful in figuring out how to create suspense and terror without seeing the shark itself. And Hitchcock did that, and I think Hitchcock was a tremendous guide for me in the way he was able to scare you without really seeing anything.

2:34It was just good fortune that The Shark Kept Breaking. It was my good luck, and I think it's the audience's good luck too because I think it's a scarier movie without seeing so much of The Shark. Now, the sea around your desert island could be inhabited by real sharks. How would you feel about that? That's one of the things I still fear. Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975, which I truly and to this day regret. The decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that.

3:13You can listen to the full episode on BBC Sounds. Just search for Steven Spielberg Desert Island Discs.