Never has it been more difficult to select just six of a director’s films to form the ‘Unmissable Picks’ than it has with Steven Spielberg. Arguably, every film Spielberg has ever helmed is worthy of a place on the list, with

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notable omissions including The Colour Purple (1985), Catch Me If You Can (2002) and recent Best Picture nominee The Post (2017). For many, the director’s pictures are emblematic of their childhood and even his more mature outings have remained timeless classics that are unparalleled in terms of their technical quality and emotional brilliance. It’s this amalgamation that has made Steven Spielberg one of the very best film-makers not just of his generation, but of all time.
Spielberg was born in 1946, Ohio. At the age of 12, he made his first foray into filmmaking by creating a nine-minute 8mm film called The Last Gunfight that garnered him the photography merit badge as a Boy Scout. As Spielberg recounted many years later, “That was how it all started.” At only 16, he wrote and directed his first full-length independent feature called Firelight, a sci-fi that would later go on to inspire the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). After graduating from high school and moving to Los Angeles, Spielberg applied to the University of Southern California’s film school but was rejected because of his unimpressive grades. However, this setback didn’t scupper the budding director’s dreams and he was later offered an unpaid intern job with Universal Studios that would eventually become a seven-year directing contract. Studio producers grew increasingly more impresses with Spielberg’s work and they selected him to direct Jaws (1975), a thriller-horror based on the Peter Benchley novel of the same name. The production of Jaws faced both literal and metaphorical choppy waters and it has become one of the most infamous of all time; the animatronic shark (named Bruce) was extremely temperamental, they went over budget and over schedule and Spielberg was nearly fired several times. To this day, the director posits that the making of Jaws is on of his most arduous creative endeavours, but the end result transformed him into a star.
Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws in 1975

Steven Spielberg on the set of The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997