Young Steven Spielberg Got Kicked Off A Legendary Director's Movie Set

Steven Spielberg, when all's said and done, may go down as the best filmmaker to ever do it. He directed "Jurassic Park" and "Schindler's List" in the same year. He's behind stone-cold classics like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He's been doing it at the highest level for more than 50 years. Taking that into account, it's hard to imagine him being thrown off of a movie set, but that's precisely what happened when he tried to drop in on an Alfred Hitchcock thriller during its production.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair in honor of his new movie "Disclosure Day" (which has a surprising connection to another Spielberg alien classic), the director recounted a story from early on in his career when he tried to visit the set of Hitchcock's 1976 thriller "Family Plan." When asked which director he'd like to meet, Spielberg cited Hitchcock, then proceeded to tell the tale of his run-in with the filmmaker:

"I think it would be Alfred Hitchcock. I tried to meet Hitchcock several times. He wouldn't meet me. And then after 'Jaws' came out, I thought I had a little more chance to meet Hitchcock because it became a big hit that summer. And he was shooting — I'm not sure what the movie was — it might have been 'Family Plot,' but he was shooting a movie right around the time in 1975 when 'Jaws' came out."

Spielberg's "Jaws" reshaped the box office forever and is literally credited with creating the summer blockbuster as we know it. So, while his career was only just getting started, Spielberg was certainly not a nobody and would have been pretty well known on the Universal lot. That didn't get through to Hitchcock, though.

"I had a reporter from The Washington Post doing a profile on me, and he was hanging out with me. So, I said, 'Let's go see if we can both meet Alfred Hitchcock," Steven Spielberg added. "I walked onto the Hitchcock stage, and there was Hitchcock with his back to me in a director's chair, and the cameras were on both sides. One camera and all the lights, and they were shooting something in this direction, and there was no way for him to know I was there."

Or so he thought. Spielberg then revealed that, in short order, the "Psycho" director noted his presence and proceeded to have him and the reporter thrown off the set:

"I noticed that Hitchcock made a gesture with his hand and an assistant director came running over, and Hitchcock went like this and whispered something to the AD, and the AD turned and looked right at me, walked right over and said, 'You have to leave.'"

"Maybe there was a mirror in the set, maybe he saw a reflection, but we were thrown off the set," Spielberg concluded.

Bruce Dern, who starred in "Family Plot," previously revealed that Hitchcock rejected an offer to meet Spielberg for a pretty weird reason. Evidently, Spielberg felt that he could just ask for forgiveness rather than permission and just mosey onto the set in the hopes of getting to meet one of his cinematic idols. That didn't exactly pan out.

It seems fitting that the then-young director was hung up on meeting Hitchcock. Spielberg even borrowed a brilliant moment in "Jaws" from Hitchcock. The influence was crystal clear.

"He's a genius. I want to ask him. [...] I had nothing but questions for him," Steven Spielberg concluded, making it clear that he has no hard feelings. He just wanted to meet one of his heroes.

Amazingly enough, this wasn't even the first time that Spielberg was thrown off of one of Alfred Hitchcock's sets. As one of the things we learned in HBO's "Spielberg" documentary, as a younger man, he also tried to visit the set of the 1966 thriller "Torn Curtain." At the time, Spielberg was sneaking onto the Universal lot over the summer long before he managed to break into Hollywood. He was just a kid trying to learn the craft.

"I was on the 'Torn Curtain' set for about 10 minutes before someone came and told me to leave," Spielberg once recounted (via Master Communicating). "I got to see Hitchcock and Juile Andrews, but I was on the 'Phantom of the Opera' stage, they were far away, and I had just come through an entrance. I was at the back of the theater. There were 500 extras in the seats. That's when an AD, or maybe even a second or a third AD — I got kicked off by a third AD."

The two legends never got to properly meet, which feels like a real shame in retrospect. All the same, Spielberg ended up having one of the most successful careers of any director in cinema history. He's the highest-grossing director ever at the box office, with plenty of Oscars to his name as well. Who knows? If Hitchcock had lived a little longer, maybe things would have been different.

"Disclosure Day" is in theaters now.