After all, we all do the same things. We wait, worry, ask ourselves how the trip will go on while clothing ourselves, buying things and feeding ourselves in exactly the same way. The no man’s land of a ‘transit lounge’ is in reality everyone’s land.........

 David Mann and Viktor Navorski: two emblems of the allure and danger of the wayfarer’s dimension in America. With Duel (1971), Steven Spielberg’s directorial debut in featurelength, and The Terminal (2004), a tragicomedy about a transiting tourist stranded for months at New York City’s airport, he analyses man’s relationship within time and space and a world constantly on the move. In Duel, Mann is the ordinary man and the designated victim(Dennis Weaver in the movie) driving through a semi-deserted Californian highway, suddenly pursued and threatened by a menacing truck, whose disgruntled driver remains faceless.The story in The Terminal is inspired by the real-life experience of an Iranian traveler who lived for months in the transit lounge of Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. Foreign Navorski (Tom Hanks) is denied a visa to access the USA by the authorities, in this case Homeland Security, turning the international flights terminal into his temporary home. Duel, a cult-movie, has been deconstructed ad nauseam especially by European intellectuals, who see in Mann’s odyssey the metaphor of the working classes’ plight and oppression by a ubiquitous and sinister power. It can be credited with having reinvented the “on the road” genre, a genre that was held dear by directors in the past as well as after Duel, who’ve used American roads as the backdrop to innumerable features.   “The thematic nucleus of that first movie of mine hinges itself upon a large truck, a metaphor for the anonymous omnipotence of power”, remembers the 60-year-old Spielberg, an Oscar-winner for Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), during an interview given to this journalist at the launch of the DVD of ET, during which we retraced some of the salient points of his filmmaking career. “Mann represents the alienated individual’s sense of loss for his own life. The open road turns the citizen, weakened by his urban existence, into an easy target. Not even the sheltered environment of a gas station can protect those who roam into the highway jungle. The ‘hero’ of Duel is the typical, lowermiddle class American isolated by the modern metropolis. The theme of the common man overwhelmed by technology and social hyperdynamism is recurrent in many of my movies.” In 2004, for The Terminal Spielberg once again joined forces with his favorite actor, Tom Hanks, who’d previously played the lead in Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can (2002). Hanks’s Navorski lands in New York City from his native Krakozhia, a fictional country probably situated in the Balkans. During the flight, his nation is overturned by a violent coup d’état. Navorski therefore becomes the citizen of an “illegitimate state”, without a valid passport according to the American authorities at the border. He must stay in JFK’s terminal until the political situation in Krakozhia is re-established. The movie’s project had originally been conceived before 11 September, but the only real change that Spielberg brought to the film was turning the airport security staff into the Homeland Security, whose role was being defined by theAmerican government precisely at that time. For the movie’s sets, recreated in a hangar in Palmdale (close to where Spielberg filmed Duel), Alex McDowell, The Terminal’s set designer found inspiration from the terminals in Denver, Frankfurt and Tokyo’s Norita. “Full of designer things and art, they’re close to the airport of his dreams”, says the director. “At that point I idealized a normal terminal in an  ordinary airport within the best airport in the world, and all this imagination came together in a 747’s hangar in Palmdale.” “I think the story in The Terminal is a simple one”, continues Spielberg, who directed Munich and War of the Worlds after this movie. He is now busy with the production of the much anticipated and often postponed Indiana Jones 4. “It’s the story of a man whose optimism, joie de vivre and generosity creates a magical atmosphere in an otherwisecold and impersonal environment, bringing cheerfulness to all those he meets in the terminal. In that sense everyone in the terminal is happy once Viktor Navorski becomes a character there. It’s what he brings to that environment, leaving something magical behind him. Not the magic in the alchemist’s sense, but the magic that his behavior and personality infuses it with, making the airport become a happier place thanks to his existence in that terminal.” Careful, though, adds Spielberg: “Through a light context I still tried to reflect upon a serious issue, that is the way in which theUnited States are distancing themselves from the great ‘melting pot’ of its heterogeneousimmigration roots, moving towards a process of tribalization. I’ll reword that: we’re goingthrough an isolationist stage that sociologists describe as self-segregation. It may be true,but if by chance you happen to be in the transit hall of a large international airport, circumstances seem to suggest the exact opposite. After all, we all do the same things. We wait, worry, ask ourselves how the trip will go on while clothing ourselves, buying things and feeding ourselves in exactly the same way. The no man’s land of a transit lounge is in reality everyone’s land. In a terminal, one’s sense of time is hazy: someone arrives with a non-stop flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles and thinks it’s breakfast time, while others land in Vancouver and is ready for dinner.”The Terminal thus contains a positive message on today’s America, states Spielberg withconviction. “That original ethnic and racial melting pot survives in meeting points such asairport terminals. That’s where we meet people from every corner of the world, people withdifferent nationalities, cultures and religions who’ll start communicating among one another.Terminals are exemplary rainbows on how the world can get along even when faced byadversities, such as forced waits, delayed and cancelled flights. A terminal doesn’t havea history, tradition and dialect, but borrows little fragments of all these things from thosepassing through it. It’s the ultimate example of a post-modern metropolis: desperate peoplethrown within the same narrow space, forced to co-habit and perhaps communicate.” According to Spielberg, airports have become microcosms in themselves, biospheres and experimental labs for the latest forms of commerce, catering, entertainment, and information. “A terminal is a gigantic shopping center,” he says, “it is reassuring in its use of global brands. How can you be afraid ofbumping into the next Bin Laden if you’re standing in front of a Starbucks or Gap store?” This doesn’t exclude that after 11 September, the atmosphere of innocent cheer and the charm of adventure in airports have been replaced by a profound feeling of suspicion  and underlying circumspection. “If they’re no longer places that ooze charm, to me airports still remain interesting places under a human and sociological point of view, which is what I was reflecting on in The Terminal,” states Spielberg. His film’s success has confirmed the vast public’s attraction for theunsinkable narrative thread represented by the on-the-road trip, and by a love story on theopen road. “In an immigrant nation like ours,” says Spielberg, “one lacking great Cathedralsor local mythologies, the road is a creationist metaphor of the foundation, a backdrop anddouble for the individual’s path of rebirth and self-revelation. The transit hall is the newcamp fire around which the various tribes sit peacefully, and with amicable patience theydiscover themselves in others.”  ed. by Silvia Bizio - On the Move (Skira 2008)