Why Steven Spielberg Was Unhappy With Hook

It was on an interview with the Kermode & Mayo Film Review programme, back when he was promoting Lincoln, that director Steven Spielberg admitted that Hook was the film of his that he had the most problems with. “I want to see Hook again,” he said. “I still don’t like that movie. I’m hoping some day I’ll see it again and perhaps like some of it.”

He’s come back to the topic of the film in a new interview with Empire magazine, in its current issue. Quizzed as to whether he’d ever felt that he wasn’t getting the material while shooting a film, he admitted that “I’ve made a few films like that.”

You can guess what’s coming.

“I felt like a fish out of water making Hook,” he continued. “I didn’t have confidence in the script. I had confidence in the first act and I had confidence in the epilogue. I didn’t have confidence in the body of it.”

He added that “I didn’t quite know what I was doing and I tried to paint over my insecurity with production value,” admitting “the more insecure I felt about it, the bigger and more colorful the sets became.”

Whenever we bring up Hook on this site, though – as we have in the past – it’s clearly a film with a lot of fans, and a lot of people who like it more than the made who made it.

The new issue of Empire, with the full Steven Spielberg interview, is available now.