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CrankyCritic: Is it harder to recreate something grounded in reality as opposed to dropping ET into a domestic situation?
Steven Spielberg: Of course. You're restricted. Your limitations are you're telling a story that really happened. I wanted to get all the scams right, the way Frank perpetrated them, so all the scams are very accurate. I couldn't embellish the scams and the reason I couldn't embellish the scams is that I don't have the imagination he did. As a fiction director I never could have dreamt up how he always eluded the FBI (and Carl Hanratty). His true life exploits are beyond the limits of my imagination to have fictionalized. Anything any better than what he enacted in his life.

CrankyCritic: Can we talk about how you and Leo built this character
Steven Spielberg: Well, Leo studied Frank. Leo hung out with Frank Abignale and basically did a study of him and learned the handshake and to never take your eye off a mark and the smile was very important. It's best illustrated when he goes to the bank and asks the young teller out to a steak dinner. That was pure Abignale. Leo didn't much guidance from me because he got all the clues about how to carry himself physically from the actual man. Luckily this isn't a story that took place a hundred years ago and they're not living anymore, we had Frank in our company helping us tell his story well. My job with leo came as I director. I just modulated his performance. A little faster here. A little less. Leo really had this guy down
CrankyCritic: About not wanting to meet Frank did the real man match up with his vision?
Steven Spielberg: I felt that it was a good thing I didn't meet him so I could get the rewrite with Jeff Nathanson who did the screenplay, just based on bringing some of the touchstones of my own life, like my parent's divorce, into this. After I met him we began writing more scenes that he told us happened to him that we put in the movie. We probably have 30% more scams in the movie having met Frank because he said I did this and that. He talked about the hooker that he hooked, and that wasn't in the original screenplay, so that was what was fun. We were then able to continue the process of completing his life story.

CrankyCritic: You brought out a lot of family issues that weren't key points in the book.
Steven Spielberg: I don't think I would have told the story had the family not been the key motivation that made this boy run away from home to make him find a place in the lonely world. I really think the divorce motivated everything. Now, in real life he never saw his father again after he ran away from home. Every night, when he would be alone in his hotel room in the middle of the county - remember he scammed in all fifty states and 27 foreign countries - he would lie in bed with tears in his eyes thinking about his dad. He called him daddy and fantasizing about having his mother and father someday coming back together again and perhaps he could earn their respect by the things he was doing and maybe that would do the trick. He told me those stories which justified how much work we did in actually keeping Chris Walken's character further into the second act with the Frank character sending postcards home and meeting his dad in that great restaurant scene. That was one of the extensions of reality we brought to it.

CrankyCritic: Did you talk with Frank about those extensions?
Steven Spielberg: He said every single scene about he and his father, even past where he ended his relationship with his father, is exactly what he felt in his heart and what he yearned for. So he loved those scenes because it was wish fulfillment for him.

CrankyCritic: I'd like to pass on a question from one of our readers, Eric Stieglitz, asking about the effect of the PG-13 Rating since you asked that it be implemented on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We both admit our history could be wrong.
Steven Spielberg: No, it didn't get a PG-13 rating. My two films Gremlins and Temple of Doom created such a controversial stir that I called Jack Valenti and I said we need a rating and it needs to be PG-13 and it would suit both films. I created the rating PG-13 and then Jack Valenti thought about it and called me back, some of this was in a New Yorker magazine piece last year about the whole story of how PG-13 happened; it happened because of the controversy of those two movies and I felt responsible to it. We had a gap between PG and R, and there needed to be one more step so I pretty much started the rating

CrankyCritic: How do you think the ratings system has stood up over the last thirty years?
Steven Spielberg: It works good when the theater management takes a strong moral position about not letting kids into R rated movies and actually stops them. Often a kid will go into a multiplex and a child will go into a PG-13 movie and once he's inside he'll jump out and, once the other movies are starting, he'll sneak down the hall and he'll go into an R rated movie. In some theaters they actually have more employees making sure that doesn't happen but I don't know how many police the switching the screens in an indoor multiplex. Do you know what I mean?

CrankyCritic: Does being a family man have a great influence on your projects?
Steven Spielberg: Well, so far, the only project that I've made in the last ten years that my kids can see is Catch Me If You Can and my kids cannot believe that for the first time in their memory - my ten year old son wasn't even born when I made Schindler's List - suddenly my kids are able to see a movie in the theater with me and I'm so excited about that aspect of it.

CrankyCritic: What do you look for in a project these days?
Steven Spielberg: Something that I've never seen before. Something that grabs me something that makes me say if anybody else made this movie I'd be the first in line to see it. That's kind of like the simple reasons that grab me to make movies. I love it when I'm surprised by a story and don't see the surprises coming at me. I'm always fooled and everything I'm talking about stories that I don't generate myself stories that are sent to me that I end up doing.

CrankyCritic: Did you see the South Park where they spoofed you and Lucas
Steven Spielberg: I loved it. It was great! [laughter] George Lucas sent it to me and I watched it with my kids and my kids loved it and I called George back and I said 'George they got one thing wrong. And George said 'What's that?' And I said 'It's usually you saying to me Stop Steven! Turn around! Do what I say! And they gave me the power over you!', and I said "Man, I love that so much. I never have the power over you!" I wrote a letter to the boys and I said it was great and really funny and 'Thanks for the great idea of remastering and changing Raiders of the Lost Ark. Y'know without that show I never would have thought of that and now George and I are busy remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark. I appreciate the suggestion.'

CrankyCritic: You know if you write to them it only encourages them . . .
Steven Spielberg: Exactly! That's OK!

CrankyCritic: How goes the work for the Shoah Foundation?
Steven Spielberg: Thank you for asking that question. It goes great. We have 52,000 Holocaust survivors on tape. We have a CD ROM course on tolerance education that is being taught right now to kids in Germany. We have five states with one school in each state doing beta testing on our tolerance education curriculum and at the end of I think the experiment is over early next year and then we do a feasibility study and then we try to move our entire archive out into the public school districts to try to get teachers to mandate tolerance education right next to science and biology and a language and mathematics. We'll be happy to combine it with social science but it must be taught in schools and it must be compulsory. My whole goal now with the Shoah Foundation is to try and make tolerance education compulsory. It is so needed. All the kids need to know about racial hatred and kids should celebrate what is different among us not condemn us for the differences.
CrankyCritic: Are you still taping the stories of the survivors?
Steven Spielberg: No, we're not. If we hear an extraordinary story we'll send a videography crew out to get the story but we're not taping any more because we have to catalog. These tapes are no good unless you catalog everything so on your computer you can jput a keyword in and bang a section comes up. We'll have all 52,000 testimonies cataloged by '04, which is really cool, and then hopefully we'll get into the school system by '05
CrankyCritic: We found letters from the survivors in our family hidden away in our grandmother's papers. Even in those letters, the only comment about the camps was "You know what those bastards did . . ."
Steven Spielberg: What's powerful is that maybe 60% of the survivors have never told their children what happened to them but will tell an impartial interviewer during the videotaping of their living histories what happened to them. Often they'll take the tape, we send each survivor a copy of their interview, they'll often say to their kids 'you can look at the tape of what I said' and they teach their kids that way. Most of them won't speak about it. They don't want to bring it into the lives of their children.

CrankyCritic: Has your philosophy of film making changed?
Steven Spielberg: Well I made a kind of big change, philosophically, with Schindler's List. I had made both The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun. Those were stepping stones. Without those films I would have never been able to make Schindler's List. After Raiders and ET and Close Encounters I got into more serious subjects with The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun which changed my life. I spent the entire 90's I think I spent making historical movies like Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and threw in The Lost World for fun but then A.I. and Minority Report are kind of dark futuristic visions of the scary stuff that awaits all of us. Maybe now with catch me if you can I get a chance to reinvent myself again and have some happy years. I don't want to commit to that coming out of a dark place because history is important and I know I want to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln and I have a script in development right now about the relationship between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and John Logan is writing it and that's a movie I'll probably make it in the next 18 months to 2 years.