Ready Player One actor Ralph Ineson has admitted that he was originally so intimidated by working with legendary director Steven Spielberg that he forgot to actually listen to the notes given to him by the filmmaker.
Ineson recently made this admission when I talked to the actor over the phone about his extremely busy month, which began with his performance in “The Hurricane Heist,” and will conclude with his turn in “Ready Player One” as Rick.
But while “Ready Player One” might have cost over $100 million to make, Ralph Ineson insists that his experience with Spielberg was still “intimate” and “creative.”
“With ‘Ready Player One’ most of my work was with two other actors and Steven Spielberg inside a caravan. Even though it was an enormous film, with the most enormous director, the entire experience was very intimate and creative and just mind-blowingly brilliant really.”
It was at this point that Ineson confessed that he had a little problem adjusting to the fact that he was being directed by the legendary “Jaws,” “Jurassic Park,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and “E.T.” filmmaker.
“It takes a little while to adjust to the fact that it is him. He is one of the most iconic figures of the last 100 years. So when he is speaking to you your mind vaguely goes blank the first few times.”
“Because your internal monologue just goes, ‘My god Steven Spielberg is giving me a note.’ And then you realize you haven’t actually heard the note.”
“Me and Susan Lynch and Tye Sheridan all noticed that we kept looking flustered after he spoke to us, so we listened to each other’s notes to help each other out.”
“We quickly got over that. He was just an amazing director and so creative. He would improvise and pull out lines in a way that you just wouldn’t expect on a set of that scale.”
Ineson then recalled one specific example of Spielberg using a line from “The Godfather” to provoke a reaction from him.
“There was one time, he threw a line from ‘The Godfather’ to me. It won’t end up in the film, because it was when we were just working on a scene, to just drop in and mix it up”
“I said to him afterwards, ‘That seemed really on the fly to be changing the script.’ Then he explained that a lot of his best and most famous work came from thatprocess. Stuff like the line from ‘Jaws,’ ‘We are going to need a bigger boat’.”
You can see Ralph Ineson in “Ready Player One” when the film is released on March 29.
