Steven Spielberg reveals his next film is a Western with ‘no stereotypes’

Steven Spielberg is saddling up for a trip to the Wild West.

The Jurassic Park filmmaker discussed his body of work in a conversation with The Big Picture‘s Sean Fennessey at SXSW in Austin on Friday. Fennessey asked Spielberg if he was at liberty to share any information about his next film.

“Well, I’m developing a Western,” Spielberg said, prompting thunderous applause. “And it’s gonna have horses. There will be guns.”

However, the Raiders of the Lost Ark director noted that his Western will try to avoid the conventions — and baggage — of the genre’s past. “But there’ll be no tropes, I can just tell you that,” he said. “There are gonna be no stereotypes, no tropes.”

Spielberg has expressed his desire to helm a Western for several years. While promoting West Side Story in an interview with Yahoo in 2021, the filmmaker reflected on genres that he hadn’t yet tackled in his illustrious directing career.

“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?”

Last year, Spielberg reiterated that he has “an appetite for a Western, which I will someday hopefully do” in an interview with THR. “It’s something that’s eluded me for all of these decades,” he told the outlet.

The Close Encounters of the Third Kind filmmaker has repeatedly emphasized his admiration for the Westerns of John Ford, particularly The Searchers and Stagecoach, which he often revisits before beginning production on his own movies. “He inspires me, and I’m very sensitive to the way he uses his camera to paint his pictures, and the way he frames things,” he told AFI. “I really admire Stagecoach because, for one thing, it was John Ford’s first foray into Monument Valley, so he was starting to use landscape art to help tell his story.”

It’s true that Spielberg has never directed a full-blown Western, but he has paid tribute to the genre in multiple instances throughout his filmography. 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens with an extended chase sequence aboard a train in the American Southwest that draws significant influence from classic Westerns.

And in his 2022 autobiographical drama The Fabelmans, the filmmaker also immortalized a conversation he had with Ford as a young man, wherein the legendary How the West Was Won director (played by David Lynch) uses cowboy paintings to teach a lesson about the importance of framing to a young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle, the protagonist inspired by Spielberg’s youth). Sammy and his friends also watch Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at their local theater earlier in the film.

Spielberg has also produced and executive produced several Western projects including the 1989 time travel sequel Back to the Future Part III, the 1991 animated movie An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, the 2005 miniseries Into the West, and the 2011 genre-bender Cowboys & Aliens.

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Additionally, one of Spielberg’s first home movies from his childhood filmmaking days was a Western, which he’s referred to as both The Last Gun and The Last Gunfight. Spielberg made the nine-minute movie with his classmates to fulfill a merit badge requirement in his Boy Scout troop in Arizona when he was 13 years old.

Spielberg’s latest movie, Disclosure Day, stars Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, and Wyatt Russell. The film hits theaters on June 12.

Reporting by Tiffany Kelly and Selena Schorken.

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