Journalist Rachel Abrams sat down with director Steven Spielberg on the flagship Sunday show from The New York Times, The Daily, to probe his belief in extraterrestrials and the shifting landscape of modern cinema. Introducing the episode, she declared, "From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily on Sunday." The interview marked a rare, deeply philosophical conversation about faith, film, and what lies beyond our planet.
During the interview, Rachel Abrams did not shy away from confronting Steven Spielberg directly about his personal convictions regarding alien life. "I mean, you sound, you sound very much like you believe aliens exist," she observed, challenging him to reconcile his current stance with his past work. She noted that in preparation for the sit-down, she discovered he once described his iconic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind as being about what he hoped was in the universe.
Beyond the cosmos, the conversation turned to how modern audiences engage with cinema in an era of fractured attention spans. Rachel Abrams pointed to the pacing of his early masterpieces, noting that "the thing that I found so striking was that Close Encounters opens more slowly. The storytelling-" serves as a stark contrast to today's rapid-fire blockbusters. As Spielberg continues to contemplate humanity's place in the universe, expect Abrams to keep pushing culture's biggest figures to defend their legacies.