The Story Behind Super 8

Hero Complex has written a long article that gets into the origins of Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams and them coming together to work on Super 8. It turns out this ideas for this movie started back in their childhood. The full article is here but below are segments of interest.

The finished film is, in a way, three stories projected on one screen — the history of Spielberg, the childhood of Abrams and of the characters from the script. The huge train crash in the film, for instance, takes on different shadings when you find out that the first movie Spielberg remembers watching in a theater was Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which featured a spectacular collision of trains. It was later that the youngster carefully set up his Lionel train set so he could film his own wreck. In a moment of epiphany, the boy realized that with three cuts (train going left to right; train going right to left; trains crashing) he was telling a story with moving pictures.

“It was more than seeing someone’s movie and saying, ‘You know, I bet I’d get along with him.’ It was more than seeing a painting and thinking, ‘I bet I know what matters to that artist.’ This was an oddly personal thing never intended for viewing at least not in the context I was seeing it in. I always kept that in my heart and head.”