‘My West Side Story is a reimagined model’: Steven Spielberg

By Express News Service

twentieth Century Fox India has launched an 11-minute dialog between Shoojit Sircar and Steven Spielberg forward of the worldwide launch of West Side Story, Spielberg’s adaptation of the famend 1957 broadway musical. 

In the chat, Shoojit quizzes Spielberg about summoning the braveness to make a musical (the director, in fifty years, has by no means tried the style). Spielberg says he grew up with the unique broadway album, and it’s the one musical he would ever have made.

Shoojit additionally praises the filmmaker on his choice to forged Latinx actors in an age of ‘xenophobia and racism’.  “It was important to me that this film represents the Latinx community,” Spielberg says. “There is not a single Puerto Rican character that is not played by a Latinx performing artist.” 

Spielberg explains he seen the movie not as a remake however as a up to date ‘reimagining’ of the unique basic. West Side Story, initially a stage musical by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, was tailored right into a 1961 movie by Robert Wise. The story follows two rival gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, on the Upper West Side in 50s New York. 

“This musical has been performed thousands of times in community theatre, high schools, colleges, and revivals all over the world,” Spielberg says. “And because it is so liberally reproduced, again and again, every new cast brings a different interpretation. (So) I didn’t feel like I was violating the great classic that the original West Side Story film was by telling this 2021 version.”