West Side Story is Steven Spielberg’s first musical. And what a debut it is. “West Side Story feels like Spielberg is in control and knows exactly what he wants to do,” our own Mike Ryan wrote in his glowing review of the film, adding that people will inevitably argue about which version of the musical is better, the 1961 Best Picture-winning original or the 2021 adaptation with Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler, but “there’s little debate that this West Side Story will go down as a Steven Spielberg Classic. Hot damn.”
Now that Spielberg has crossed musical off his genre list, what’s left?
“I was asked that question over the last 40 years of my career, if not longer, and I always say ‘A musical is the one thing I haven’t done.’ The thing I neglected to say is the one genre I haven’t really tackled yet is the Western,” he told Yahoo! Entertainment. “So who knows? Maybe I’ll be putting on spurs someday. Who knows?”
Spielberg has made loads of movies with horses (the dinosaurs of the wild west, I always say), but the closest he’s come to making a Western is producing Cowboys & Aliens. If his Western movie, should he choose to make one, consists of a two-hour unbroken shot of a cactus, it will still be better than Cowboys & Aliens.
(Via Yahoo! Entertainment)