Steven Spielberg

And he wrote about in this profile not just how the audience has changed in terms of attention span.

And I understand your answer that you can only make the movie that you know how to make, right?

Yeah.

Wesley also wrote about how you two spent a lot of time together.

You went to see a play.

Yes.

And he wrote about your deep appreciation for the audience reactions to this play.

Right.

And it made me wonder how you would describe the different experience of seeing a movie alone, as, of course, so many of us now do when we watch it on our TVs or, dare I say it, our iPhones, perhaps.

What do you...

It's okay when the movie's been out for a year.

Or older, right?

Or older.

But go ahead.

So what do you lose when you don't watch a movie surrounded by other people?

Well, it's not what I lose because I can watch a movie alone.

In a sense, when I watched Dr. Strangelove, it was a full house when I was 18 years old.

but I felt like I was alone watching it because it had affected me and it excluded everybody in the theater and I was all by myself.

That's how deeply the film had grabbed up all of my attention.

But then when I, at the end of the movie, when I realized that people were having similar reactions all around me, I suddenly had strangers who were allies in my experience of what that film, how that film affected us.