quality:corruption, information:extraction, structural:scholar_edition
Influences

"I was self-taught. But I had great teachers, you know? All my influencers were the directors and the writers of the movies I was watching in theaters and on television. And my film school was really the cultural heritage of Hollywood and international filmmaking because there's no better teacher than Lubitsch or Hitchcock or Kurosawa or Kubrick, you know, or Ford or William Wyler or Billy Wilder or Clarence Brown – I mean, Val Lewton. I mean, those were my teachers."

— Steven Spielberg, Fresh Air interview

Spielberg has cited Frank Capra 's It's A Wonderful Life (1946) as an influence on "family, community and suburbia". He enjoyed the work of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, and John Frankenheimer. In college, he was inspired by foreign films directed by Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Tati and François Truffaut. Truffaut was one of his favorite directors. Spencer Tracy has also influenced the characters of Spielberg's films, as did The Twilight Zone.