AUSTIN, Texas — One of the most anticipated events at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival wasn’t a movie at all, but a speaking appearance by director Steven Spielberg. The talk, a live taping of the podcast “The Big Picture” lead by co-host Sean Fennessey, covered many aspects of the Hollywood legend’s career, with a through line of sci-fi and space aliens in conjunction with Spielberg’s upcoming alien invasion thriller “Disclosure Day,” due June 12.
Though no real details about the new film were revealed, references to it peppered the conversation as if it were very much on Spielberg’s mind — the film he was ostensibly there to promote.
To an audience that included filmmakers Robert Rodriguez and Daniel Kwan, the event began with a clip reel that served as a reminder (as if anyone in the packed hotel ballroom needed one) of just how influential the 79-year-old filmmaker is. A selection of Spielberg’s work plays like a trailer for the idea of movies themselves; this one included “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.” “Schindler’s List,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Munich” and many more.
Fennessey noted that Spielberg wanted to make 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” his first sci-fi movie about the existence of aliens from other worlds, even before making 1975’s “Jaws.” Spielberg went further, saying he had actually wanted to make “Close Encounters” — then just referred to as “The UFO Movie” — even before 1974’s “Sugarland Express.”
Asked about President Obama’s recent comments about the possible existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and how his own feelings may have evolved over the years, Spielberg said, “I think that for one thing, when President Obama made that comment, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so great for “Disclosure Day,”’ and then, two days later, he stepped back the comment and said what he believed in was life in the cosmos, which of course everybody should believe that because no one should ever think that we are the only intelligent civilization in the entire universe. So I’ve always believed, even as a kid, that we were not alone. So that just goes without saying. The big question is: Are we alone now?”
He added this interest was “reinvigorated” by a 2017 New York Times article about U.S. Navy pilots seeing unexplained aerial phenomenon, then by a 2023 Congressional subcommittee hearing on the topic.
“I don’t know any more than any of you do,” Spielberg said, “but I have a very strong, sticky suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now. And I made a movie about that.”
Spielberg and “The Big Picture” co-host Sean Fennessey taping a live podcast at SXSW on Friday.
(Tibrina Hobson / Getty Images)
As to how he feels about that possibility, Spielberg added, “I’m not afraid of any aliens, there or here. I have no fears about that, whatsoever. I think our movie does take into consideration, without giving too much away, the social dislocation that could occur, theologically, if it would be announced that there’s evidence — not only evidence, where it’s interaction that’s has been going on for decades, that we are not just now finding out about. It is going to cause a disruption in a lot of belief systems, but I don’t think it’s a lethal disruption at all.”
Among other topics that were discussed, Spielberg revealed he is developing a western that would shoot in Texas, though he was reluctant to discuss it in any further detail except to say it would contain “no tropes.”
He also said he is not on any social media, but did install Instagram on his phone once for two weeks and felt as if he had been abducted by aliens for the amount of time he lost.
To that end, he also noted, with comic frustration, how he himself has never had any sort of alien encounter.
”I made a movie called ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ I haven’t even had a close encounter of the first or second kind,” Spielberg said. “Where’s the justice in that? If you’re listening out there, I’m talking to you.”
There was a brief moment of confusion when Fennessey asked Spielberg for his thoughts on AI and Spielberg wasn’t clear if he was asking about his own 2001 movie or the broader topic of artificial intelligence.
Once that was cleared up (Fennessey meant the latter, a serious labor issue in Hollywood), Spielberg noted he has not used AI on any of his own films. “I don’t want to go into a whole rant about AI because I am for AI in many different disciplines. I am not for AI if it replaces a creative individual.”
Speaking to the theatrical experience, Spielberg made a brief allusion to the flare-up around comments by Timothée Chalamet regarding the popularity of opera and ballet in relation to the movies.
He noted that he does not decry the at-home streaming experience and that he works with Netflix, but that “for me, the real experience comes when we can influence a community to congregate in a strange dark space. All us are strangers and, 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 nighttime with. And there’s nothing like that. I mean, it happens in movies, it happens at concerts and it happens in ballet and opera.”
Here there was a round of applause from the audience. “And we want that sustained and we want that to go forever.”
Spielberg noted how many of his favorite filmmakers, including David Lean and Billy Wilder and more recent examples such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan, are always making films that feel different from what they have done before. He sees himself as part of that same school.
“If we’re just not making the same sequel over and over and over again and they’re not the same Marvel title over and over and over again, we all get a real chance to experience something, which is freshness,” Spielberg said. “And that is why I don’t judge my accomplishments based on a single film.”
Mexican writer-director Michel Franco (“Memory”) explores dynamics of money, class and the border through the spiky, unsettling erotic drama “Dreams,” starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, a Mexican ballet dancer and actor.
In the languidly paced movie, Franco presents two individuals in love (or lust?) who experiment with wielding the power at their fingertips against each other. The film examines the push-pull of attraction and rejection on a scope that’s both intimate and global, finding the uneasy space where the two meet.
Chastain stars as Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist and socialite who runs a foundation that supports a ballet school in Mexico City. But Franco does not center on her experience, but that of Fernando (Hernández), whom we meet first escaping from the back of a box truck filled with migrants crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. He’s abandoned in San Antonio on a 100-degree day.
His journey is one of extreme survival, but his destination is the lap of luxury: a modernist San Francisco mansion where he makes himself at home and where he’s clearly been before. A talented ballet dancer who has already once been deported, he’s risked everything to be with his lover, Jennifer, though, as a high-profile figure, she’d rather keep her affair with Fernando under wraps. He’s her dirty little secret but he’s also a human being who refuses to be kept in the shadows.
As Jennifer and Fernando attempt to navigate what it looks like for them to be together, it seems that larger forces will shatter their connection. In reality, the only real danger is each other.
The storytelling logic of “Dreams” is predicated on watching these characters move through space, the way we watch dancers do. Franco offers some fascinating parallels to juxtapose the wildly varying experiences of Fernando and Jennifer — he almost dies of thirst and heat stroke; she arrives in Mexico on a private plane, but both enter empty homes alone, melancholy. During a rift in their relationship, Fernando retreats to a motel, drinking red wine out of plastic cups with a friend in his humble room, ignoring Jennifer’s calls, while she eats alone in her darkened dining room, sipping out of crystal.
These comparisons aren’t exactly nuanced but they are stark and, for most of the film, Franco just asks us to watch them move together and apart, in a strange, avoidant pas de deux. Often dwarfed by architecture, their distinctive bodies in space are more important than the sparse dialogue that only serves to fill in crucial gaps in storytelling.
Cinematographer Yves Cape captures it all in crisp, saturated images. The lack of musical score (beyond diegetic music in the ballet scenes) contributes to the dry, flat affect and tone, as these characters enact increasing cruelties — both emotional and physical — upon each other as a means of trying to contain each other, until it escalates into something truly dark and disturbing.
Franco loses the plot of “Dreams” in the third act. What is a rather staid drama about the weight of social expectations on a relationship becomes a dramatically unexpected game of vengeance as Jennifer and Fernando grasp at any power they have over the other. She fetishizes him and he returns the favor, violently.
Ultimately, Franco jettisons his characters for the sake of unearned plot twists that leave the viewer feeling only icky. These events aren’t illuminating and feel instead like a bleak betrayal. The circumstances of the story might be timely, but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and liberty. Anything it suggests we already know.
Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.
SXSW 2026: On aliens and UFOs, Spielberg says, ‘We are not alone’
AUSTIN, Texas — One of the most anticipated events at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival wasn’t a movie at all, but a speaking appearance by director Steven Spielberg. The talk, a live taping of the podcast “The Big Picture” lead by co-host Sean Fennessey, covered many aspects of the Hollywood legend’s career, with a through line of sci-fi and space aliens in conjunction with Spielberg’s upcoming alien invasion thriller “Disclosure Day,” due June 12.
Though no real details about the new film were revealed, references to it peppered the conversation as if it were very much on Spielberg’s mind — the film he was ostensibly there to promote.
To an audience that included filmmakers Robert Rodriguez and Daniel Kwan, the event began with a clip reel that served as a reminder (as if anyone in the packed hotel ballroom needed one) of just how influential the 79-year-old filmmaker is. A selection of Spielberg’s work plays like a trailer for the idea of movies themselves; this one included “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.” “Schindler’s List,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Munich” and many more.
Fennessey noted that Spielberg wanted to make 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” his first sci-fi movie about the existence of aliens from other worlds, even before making 1975’s “Jaws.” Spielberg went further, saying he had actually wanted to make “Close Encounters” — then just referred to as “The UFO Movie” — even before 1974’s “Sugarland Express.”
Asked about President Obama’s recent comments about the possible existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and how his own feelings may have evolved over the years, Spielberg said, “I think that for one thing, when President Obama made that comment, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so great for “Disclosure Day,”’ and then, two days later, he stepped back the comment and said what he believed in was life in the cosmos, which of course everybody should believe that because no one should ever think that we are the only intelligent civilization in the entire universe. So I’ve always believed, even as a kid, that we were not alone. So that just goes without saying. The big question is: Are we alone now?”
He added this interest was “reinvigorated” by a 2017 New York Times article about U.S. Navy pilots seeing unexplained aerial phenomenon, then by a 2023 Congressional subcommittee hearing on the topic.
“I don’t know any more than any of you do,” Spielberg said, “but I have a very strong, sticky suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now. And I made a movie about that.”
Spielberg and “The Big Picture” co-host Sean Fennessey taping a live podcast at SXSW on Friday.
(Tibrina Hobson / Getty Images)
As to how he feels about that possibility, Spielberg added, “I’m not afraid of any aliens, there or here. I have no fears about that, whatsoever. I think our movie does take into consideration, without giving too much away, the social dislocation that could occur, theologically, if it would be announced that there’s evidence — not only evidence, where it’s interaction that’s has been going on for decades, that we are not just now finding out about. It is going to cause a disruption in a lot of belief systems, but I don’t think it’s a lethal disruption at all.”
Among other topics that were discussed, Spielberg revealed he is developing a western that would shoot in Texas, though he was reluctant to discuss it in any further detail except to say it would contain “no tropes.”
He also said he is not on any social media, but did install Instagram on his phone once for two weeks and felt as if he had been abducted by aliens for the amount of time he lost.
To that end, he also noted, with comic frustration, how he himself has never had any sort of alien encounter.
”I made a movie called ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ I haven’t even had a close encounter of the first or second kind,” Spielberg said. “Where’s the justice in that? If you’re listening out there, I’m talking to you.”
There was a brief moment of confusion when Fennessey asked Spielberg for his thoughts on AI and Spielberg wasn’t clear if he was asking about his own 2001 movie or the broader topic of artificial intelligence.
Once that was cleared up (Fennessey meant the latter, a serious labor issue in Hollywood), Spielberg noted he has not used AI on any of his own films. “I don’t want to go into a whole rant about AI because I am for AI in many different disciplines. I am not for AI if it replaces a creative individual.”
Speaking to the theatrical experience, Spielberg made a brief allusion to the flare-up around comments by Timothée Chalamet regarding the popularity of opera and ballet in relation to the movies.
He noted that he does not decry the at-home streaming experience and that he works with Netflix, but that “for me, the real experience comes when we can influence a community to congregate in a strange dark space. All us are strangers and, 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 nighttime with. And there’s nothing like that. I mean, it happens in movies, it happens at concerts and it happens in ballet and opera.”
Here there was a round of applause from the audience. “And we want that sustained and we want that to go forever.”
Spielberg noted how many of his favorite filmmakers, including David Lean and Billy Wilder and more recent examples such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan, are always making films that feel different from what they have done before. He sees himself as part of that same school.
“If we’re just not making the same sequel over and over and over again and they’re not the same Marvel title over and over and over again, we all get a real chance to experience something, which is freshness,” Spielberg said. “And that is why I don’t judge my accomplishments based on a single film.”
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‘Dreams’ review: Jessica Chastain’s socialite toys with ballet dancer
Mexican writer-director Michel Franco (“Memory”) explores dynamics of money, class and the border through the spiky, unsettling erotic drama “Dreams,” starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, a Mexican ballet dancer and actor.
In the languidly paced movie, Franco presents two individuals in love (or lust?) who experiment with wielding the power at their fingertips against each other. The film examines the push-pull of attraction and rejection on a scope that’s both intimate and global, finding the uneasy space where the two meet.
Chastain stars as Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist and socialite who runs a foundation that supports a ballet school in Mexico City. But Franco does not center on her experience, but that of Fernando (Hernández), whom we meet first escaping from the back of a box truck filled with migrants crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. He’s abandoned in San Antonio on a 100-degree day.
His journey is one of extreme survival, but his destination is the lap of luxury: a modernist San Francisco mansion where he makes himself at home and where he’s clearly been before. A talented ballet dancer who has already once been deported, he’s risked everything to be with his lover, Jennifer, though, as a high-profile figure, she’d rather keep her affair with Fernando under wraps. He’s her dirty little secret but he’s also a human being who refuses to be kept in the shadows.
As Jennifer and Fernando attempt to navigate what it looks like for them to be together, it seems that larger forces will shatter their connection. In reality, the only real danger is each other.
The storytelling logic of “Dreams” is predicated on watching these characters move through space, the way we watch dancers do. Franco offers some fascinating parallels to juxtapose the wildly varying experiences of Fernando and Jennifer — he almost dies of thirst and heat stroke; she arrives in Mexico on a private plane, but both enter empty homes alone, melancholy. During a rift in their relationship, Fernando retreats to a motel, drinking red wine out of plastic cups with a friend in his humble room, ignoring Jennifer’s calls, while she eats alone in her darkened dining room, sipping out of crystal.
These comparisons aren’t exactly nuanced but they are stark and, for most of the film, Franco just asks us to watch them move together and apart, in a strange, avoidant pas de deux. Often dwarfed by architecture, their distinctive bodies in space are more important than the sparse dialogue that only serves to fill in crucial gaps in storytelling.
Cinematographer Yves Cape captures it all in crisp, saturated images. The lack of musical score (beyond diegetic music in the ballet scenes) contributes to the dry, flat affect and tone, as these characters enact increasing cruelties — both emotional and physical — upon each other as a means of trying to contain each other, until it escalates into something truly dark and disturbing.
Franco loses the plot of “Dreams” in the third act. What is a rather staid drama about the weight of social expectations on a relationship becomes a dramatically unexpected game of vengeance as Jennifer and Fernando grasp at any power they have over the other. She fetishizes him and he returns the favor, violently.
Ultimately, Franco jettisons his characters for the sake of unearned plot twists that leave the viewer feeling only icky. These events aren’t illuminating and feel instead like a bleak betrayal. The circumstances of the story might be timely, but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and liberty. Anything it suggests we already know.
Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.
‘Dreams’
In English and Spanish, with subtitles
Not rated
Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, Feb. 27 in limited release
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