I just saw Hamnet, which I highly recommend. Seeing Emily Watson on screen, in a film produced by Steven Spielberg, gave me flashbacks to Minority Report.
In particular, I started thinking about one of my favorite scenes in any movie. It’s the scene where the character played by Emily Watson, who has precognition, is leading the character played by Tom Cruise to safety as they are being chased by the bad guys.
He looks bewildered, but she, being a Precog, knows exactly where to go next to evade capture. At one point she tells him to grab a large umbrella. He just looks at her, with a confused look on his face. Why would they need an umbrella?
But then she starts to panic, thinking maybe he won’t do what she says, and he senses her urgency. So at the last moment he grabs the umbrella and opens it – just in time. At that moment, the bad guys are passing overhead. Because of the open umbrella, they are unable to see our heroes, who manage to get away.
What I love about this scene is that it feels like Spielberg telling us what it’s like to make a movie. The director knows exactly what is going to happen, yet his job is to make us feel the suspense and uncertainty of an unknown outcome.
In a sense, this scene is Spielberg giving us a glimpse into what it is like to be Spielberg.
It was Samantha Morton in Minority Report not Emily Watson but who could have seen that coming?