Steven Spielberg has revealed that his next film is going to be a Western with no “stereotypes, no tropes”.
In a conversation with The Big Picture’s Sean Fennessey at SXSW in Austin on Friday, the Jurassic Park filmmaker decided to share with the audience what he was working on next.
“Can’t reveal anything right now, but I have a Western in development. And it kicks a**,” Spielberg said to massive applause, according to Deadline. “And it's gonna have horses. There will be guns.”
“But there'll be no tropes, I can just tell you that,” he said. “There are gonna be no stereotypes, no tropes.”
Spielberg has previously talked about wanting to make a Western, telling The Hollywood Reporter in June last year that he had “an appetite for a Western”.
“It’s something that’s eluded me for all of these decades,” he said, adding that the genre “requires an operatic flair he hasn’t been able to crack”.
He also talked with Yahoo in 2021 about genres he hadn’t yet worked on. “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 said.
“So who knows? Maybe I’ll be putting on spurs someday. Who knows?”
The Jaws director also subtly shaded Timothee Chalamet’s recent claim that “no one cares” about ballet or opera in the modern world.
The Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme actor, 30, found himself in hot water this week after he said in a viral interview: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’”
Spielberg referenced Chalamet’s comments while speaking about the value of consuming communal entertainment, saying: “At the end of a really good movie experience, we are all united with a whole bunch of feelings that we walk into the daylight with, or into the night-time with. And there’s nothing like that.”
“It happens in movies, and in concerts,” Spielberg said, per Variety. “And it happens in ballet and opera, by the way.”
“And we want that to be sustained,” he continued. “We want that to go forever.”
Chalamet’s comments drew ire from figures across the arts, including rapper Doja Cat, actor Jamie Lee Curtis and renowned ballet dancer Misty Copeland.
Spielberg also spoke about his latest alien encounter movie, Disclosure Day, based on his own original idea and a screenplay by his Jurassic Park collaborator David Koepp.
Set to be released on June 12 next year, the film’s first trailer introduces Mary Poppins Returns star Emily Blunt as a television meteorologist and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery actor Josh O’Connor as an unnamed character who urges: “People have the right to know the truth.”
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