The Autobiography of Peter Pan

The past is no foreign country to Steven Spielberg. He lives there in his memory, in his fertile imagination and, triumphantly, in his films. "Everything that I do in my movies," he says, "is a product of my homelife in suburban U.S.A. I can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood." And each summer he invites moviegoers around the world to join him in that holy, haunted place. Here, as recounted to TIME Correspondent Denise Worrell, is the director's own montage of his first 16 years:

My father was an electrical engineer, part of the team that designed the first computers. In the late '40s and early '50s the computer industry was migratory, and my dad followed the movement. Within 13 years we moved from Cincinnati to Haddonfield, N.J., to Scottsdale, Ariz., to Saratoga, a suburb of San Jose. Just as I'd become accustomed to a school and a teacher and a best friend, the FOR SALE sign would dig into the front lawn and we'd be packing and off to some other state. I've always considered Arizona, where I was from nine to 16, my real home. For a kid, home is where you have your best friends and your first car, and your first kiss; it's where you do your worst stuff and get your best grades. Scottsdale was just like the neighborhood in Poltergeist: kitchen windows facing kitchen windows facing kitchen windows. People waved to each other from their windows. There were no fences, no big problems.

My mom and dad were so different. That's probably why they were attracted to each other. They both love classical music and they both love my sisters and me. Aside from that, they had nothing in common. With Dad everything was precision, accuracy, "bead-on." He had the fastest slide rule in Arizona and spoke two languages: English and Computer. When I was about eleven, my dad came home and gathered us all in the kitchen. He held up a tiny little transistor he had brought home and said, "This is the future." I took the transistor from his hand, and I put it in my mouth. And I swallowed it. Dad laughed, then he didn't laugh; it got very tense. It was like the confrontation scene between Raymond Massey and James Dean in East of Eden. One of those moments when two worlds from diametrically opposed positions in the universe collide. It was as if I was saying, "That's your future, but it doesn't have to be mine."

Mom had more energy than a hundred mothers her age. The image I have of her is of this tiny woman climbing to the top of a mountain, standing there with her arms out and spinning around. My mom was always just like a little girl who never grew out of her pinafore. The rest of us trailed after her, Dad and my three younger sisters and me. She left a large wake.

My mother was a classical pianist. She would have chamber concerts with her musician friends, in the living room, while in another room my father would be conferring with nine or ten other men in the business about how to build a computerized mousetrap. These opposite life-styles would give me circuit overload. My tweeters would burn out and my only insulation would be my bedroom door, which remained closed for most of my life. I had to put towels under the jamb so I couldn't hear the classical music and the computer logic. My bedroom was like all the rooms of all the kids in all the movies I've been a part of. It was a compost heap of everything I never put away. It's still that way today. Gravity undresses me; gravity decides where my things wind up. I don't think I've used a hanger in my entire life. I've always enjoyed living in my own debris. These days, I can really mess a place up in about twelve hours. When I was a kid, I was a little bit faster: it took about 30 minutes.

My first pets, when I was ten or eleven, were parakeets. My parents figured the parakeets would be easy to take care of, and that I'd never let them out of their cage in my room. They were wrong on both counts. I took the parakeets out of their little jail and trained them to live on the curtain rod. At one time there were eight parakeets living on that rod, dripping like candles in old Italian restaurants. After a while it changed the whole fabric of the curtains. The birds were living on the rod, on my head, on my shoulder. I'd find a name I'd like -- say, Shmuck -- and just give the other birds sequel names: Shmuck II, Shmuck III. No imagination. At one time there were four Shmucks in the room. We had dogs, too. Except for a period of six years or so after my father brought a dog home and the dog snarled at me, knocked me over and chased me upstairs into my room. I was terrified of dogs at that point. But then I made friends with our neighbor's cocker spaniel. Since then I've had one dog after another.

Except for shows like Jackie Gleason and Mickey Mouse Club, my parents wouldn't let me watch TV. Part of the reason is that, when I was four or five years old, when I did see things on TV I got scared. I remember crying for hours after I saw a documentary on snakes. That was the beginning of the end of TV for me. For six years my dad would rig the set with booby traps so he could tell if I snuck TV time while they were out to dinner. But I sneaked anyway. When baby-sitters would inevitably fall asleep, I'd sneak downstairs and watch Science Fiction Theater and other taboo shows with the sound on very low. My folks were also prudent about the movies I could see. They had taken me to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when I was six, and when the wicked queen turned into a hag and a skeleton crumbled into pieces, I burst into tears and started shaking. For three or four nights I had to crawl into bed with my mom and dad.

I had all the fears that a lot of kids have: of a society of the netherworld living under my bed, of monsters living in the closet waiting to suck me in and do terrible things to me. There was a crack in the wall by my bed that I stared at all the time, imagining little friendly people living in the crack. One day while I was staring at the crack, it suddenly opened about five inches, and little pieces fell out of it. That really happened. I was afraid of clouds, the wind, trees -- there was a forest outside my window in New Jersey, and at night the trees had silhouettes of arms and heads and tentacles. I liked being scared. It was very stimulating. In my films I celebrate the imagination as a tool of great creation and a device for the ultimate scream, and even as a kid I liked pushing myself to the brink of terror and then pulling back. In the morning I was the bravest guy -- little seven-year-old Steven walking around the closet, or talking to the trees, saying, "I'm not afraid of you." But once night fell, all bets were off.

I had no way to sublimate or channel these fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs. One story was about the old World War II % flier who had been rotting in our closet for 20 years. I took a plastic skull you buy in a model shop and put a flashlight inside so the eyes and face would glow; then I put my dad's World War II aviator cap over the skull and put goggles over the eyeholes. At night, I'd dare them to peek into the closet. They wanted to see it, and they didn't want to see it. But one by one they would slowly open the door and go in. When they were inside I put a plug in the wall and the skull would light up and they would scream, and eventually I would let them out. It's amazing that they even grew up. It's amazing that I grew up and they didn't kill me.

I wasn't a religious kid, although I was Bar Mitzvahed in a real Orthodox synagogue. The first four rows were filled with Jewish men in their 80s who sang the Haftarah along with me, so that whenever I forgot something all I had to do was listen -- they were way ahead of me anyhow. It was like having a hundred prompters. My mother observes the dietary rules now, but back then our family was storefront kosher. Whenever the rabbi left our house it was, "Strike the sets, remove the props." My mom and I were seafood nuts, but of course lobster is not kosher. We'd bought three live lobsters for dinner, and sure enough, the rabbi pulled into our driveway. Mom panicked and threw the live crustaceans at me; I had to hide them under my bed. Then the rabbi came to my room to see how I was doing. You could hear the lobsters clicking and clacking each other with their tails. The rabbi just sort of stared and sniffed the air; he must have wondered what that tref scent was, lingering in the kid's bedroom. The minute the rabbi left, my mom and I gleefully threw the lobsters into a pot of boiling water and then ate them.

When I was twelve my mother bought my father a movie camera for Father's Day. He'd take the camera out on family camping trips, and then we'd have to endure his photography. So one day I said, "Dad, can I be the family photographer?" And he gave me the camera. I dramatized everything. My dad had to wait for me to say "Action!" before he could put the knife into the fish to clean it. That was my first PG-13 moment. My first real movie was of my Lionel trains crashing into each other. I used to love to stage little wrecks. I put my eye right to the tracks and watched the trains crashing. My dad said, "If you break your trains one more time, I'll take them away!" So I took his camera and staged a great train wreck, with shots of the trains coming in different directions and shots of little plastic men reacting. Then I could look at my 8-mm film over and over and enjoy the demolition of my trains without the threat of losing them.

I hated school. From age twelve or 13 I knew I wanted to be a movie director, and I didn't think that science or math or foreign languages were going to help me turn out the little 8-mm sagas I was making to avoid homework. During class I'd draw a little image on the margin of each page of the history or lit. book and flip the pages to make animated cartoons. I did just enough homework to get promoted every year with my friends and not fall to the wrath of my academically minded father. I give my dad credit for singlehandedly keeping my math grades high enough so I wouldn't be held back. My other worst subject was phys. ed.; I failed that three years in a row in high school. I couldn't do a chin-up or a fraction. I can do a chin-up now, but I still can't do a fraction.

At school I felt like a real nerd, the skinny, acne-faced wimp who gets picked on by big football jocks all the way home from school. I was always running to hide in my bedroom, where I felt safe. I would actually call out, "Safe" to myself. When I was about 13, one local bully gave me nothing but grief all year long. He would knock me down on the grass, or hold my head in the drinking fountain, or push my face in the dirt and give me bloody noses when we had to play football in phys. ed. Once he threw a cherry bomb between my legs in the school toilet. I got up before it exploded. This was somebody I feared. He was my nemesis; I dreamed about him. Then I figured, if you can't beat him, try to get him to join you. So I said to him, "I'm making this movie about fighting the Nazis and I want you to play this war hero." At first he laughed in my face, but later he said yes. He was this big 14-year- old who looked like John Wayne. I made him the squad leader in the film, with helmet, fatigues and backpack. After that he became my best friend.

I don't think my parents ever figured movies would be something I'd succeed at. But they were both very accommodating. My dad would tolerate my movies if I kept my grades up. My mom let me off school at least once a week. I would fake being sick on Mondays so I could cut the movies I'd shot over the weekend. I'd put the thermometer up to the light bulb -- young Elliot does the same thing in E.T. -- and call her in and moan and groan. She'd play along and say, "My God, you're burning up. You're staying home today." When I was shooting a war movie and needed our family Jeep for production value, I said, "Mom, could you put on this tin helmet and this army surplus uniform and drive the Jeep through my shot?" And she'd drop everything, climb into the Jeep, race out behind Camelback Mountain and helter-skelter barrel through the shot, hitting the potholes, her blond hair sticking out from under the pith helmet. And I would have my "production value." My $7 film suddenly looked like a $24 film.

I was about 16 when our family moved from Phoenix to Northern California, and soon after, our parents separated. They hung in there to protect us until we were old enough. But I don't think they were aware of how acutely we were aware of their unhappiness -- not violence, just a pervading unhappiness you could cut with a fork or a spoon at dinner every night. For years I thought the word "divorce" was the ugliest in the English language. Sound traveled from bedroom to bedroom, and the word came seeping through the heating ducts. My sisters and I would stay up at night, listening to our parents argue, hiding from that word. And when it traveled into our room, absolute abject panic set in. My sisters would burst into tears, and we would all hold one another. And when the separation finally came, we were no better off for having waited six years for it to occur. I have two wonderful parents; they raised me really well. Sometimes parents can work together to raise a wonderful family and not have anything in common with each other. That happens a lot in America.

I have always felt like Peter Pan. I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up. If my kids take me seriously as a father, they're going to have a tough time growing up too.