Steven Spielberg talks about dedicating West Side Story to his late father
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West Side Story marks Steven Spielberg's first musical in his illustrious career and it turned out to be a very personal one for him.
The new version of the classic musical arrives in cinemas this Friday (December 10), and it ends with a simple tribute "For Dad" as the credits start to roll. Talking to Digital Spy, Spielberg explained why it's dedicated to his late father Arnold Spielberg.
"My dad and my mum bought the record home when I was 10 years old. My dad loves West Side Story, he's seen a number of productions of it. He was 103-and-a-half when he passed, and I hadn't finished the film yet," he recalled.
"He was kind of on the set sometimes because he'd be in LA and we'd be in New York shooting and he'd be on the iPad on FaceTime. He'd be able to watch the set-ups and watch some performances and we'd bring the iPad over to the monitor so he could see the playbacks."
Spielberg continued: "My dad was really invested in West Side Story [but] at that point he was too elderly to travel to the set, and it was the only film set that he has not visited. The only one.
"He came to Poland for Schindler's List, he came to England for the Indiana Jones movies, and I just felt that he'd loved it so much and I was so sad he couldn't see it that I dedicated the film to him."
West Side Story has received strong praise in early reactions to the movie, which wasn't guaranteed since the 1961 movie was a multiple Oscar winner and beloved to this day.
Both movies are adaptations of Arthur Laurents' 1957 musical of the same name, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. When it came to updating the story for modern audiences, Spielberg didn't encounter any resistance.
"We were given tremendous latitude by the estate, especially by the Arthur Laurents estate, to be able to deepen the characters and create more complicated relationships," he explained.
"[We could] create people that were more relatable to this generation, more than perhaps the generations of 1957 when the play was first written and the music first devised.
"Tony Kushner really drilled down into those societies and the things really parallel the truths of today. Tony really did an amazing job in creating a contemporary-feeling story, while still keeping it in the original period."
West Side Story is released in cinemas on December 10.
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