Janusz Kaminski, who has shot all of Spielberg’s films since Schindler’s List, gives his thoughts on some of his most famous images in this fascinating interview with Vulture.

Minority Report, A.I., Catch Me If You Can and Saving Private Ryan are among the films mentioned, and Kaminski has some very interesting things to say.

Of the above shot from Minority Report, he explains:

“It’s just a gorgeous shot of two lost people. I used a bluish side light, which to some degree glamorized them, but also made them very lonely and alienated from the rest of the scene. You work in metaphors through lights and composition, and the worst thing for me is to see a movie that doesn’t have that. You see a cinematographer’s work and there are no visual metaphors, or they are so afraid to create a style that it just becomes this nothing.”

The contents of the special edition of the forthcoming Indiana Jones box-set.

(via blu-ray.com)

I’ve just finished reading Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate’s fascinating BFI Classics book about Back to the Future. The book closes with an interesting tidbit about an early draft of the screenplay and how a key scene from it was later used by Spielberg in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

“The climactic scene of the 24th February 1981 first draft of Back to the Future goes like this. Having fixed Mary’s future, he and Brown…travel to Nevada, where…the army is carrying out what will be its last surface nuclear tests. Brown smuggles him past the perimeter fence of a nuclear test site with the then-immobile time machine in the back of a truck, the projecting area of its ‘Tema Beam’ now conveniently encompassed by a fridge that Brown has lined with lead. Brown parks the truck in the fake town that the army have constructed to test the effects of the blast, and leaves via motorbike with a mannequin wearing Marty’s jacket in the sidecar. Speaking with Marty from a safe distance via walkie-talkie, he instructs him to add the Coca-Cola that…fuels the time machine’s power converter, but Marty realises that it is in his jacket. Panicked, Brown tells Marty to abandon the plan, get inside the fridge and hope that the lead lining will save him from the nuclear explosion. Instead Marty runs to a nearby house, in which mannequins watch Howdy Doody, and which are so realistic that their fridges are fully stocked, finds some bottle of Coke, uses them to power the time machine, and then has to race against time to get the truck into the right place so that when the bomb explodes, the radiation striking it will be at the correct level, while also avoiding the attentions of the artillery until that has spotted them.”

Spielberg often uses discarded ideas on other films (the gunpowder fight seen in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was in an initial draft of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), so it’s no surprise to see him do the same here. But why was the idea scrapped from Back to the Future?

Slash Film explain: “Director Robert Zemeckis has said in interviews that producer Steven Spielberg was afraid that children would start climbing into refrigerators and getting trapped inside, after replicating the scene in the film.”

This will only add further fuel to the debate over who is to ‘blame’ for the sequence (which, by the way, I think is really funny and is no more ridiculous than the rubber raft scene from Temple of Doom). Spielberg initially took credit for it, telling Empire in 2011 that it was “my silly idea”, but in January 2012, Lucas insisted that “it’s not true. He’s trying to protect me”.

Now it seems both were lying. Robert Zemeckis - the internet wants a word with you.