U2 is busy prepping a new album and a Las Vegas residency, but on Tuesday, Bono took time out from their busy schedule to present director Steven Spielberg with a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin Film Festival.
According to Deadline, Bono gave Spielberg the festival’s Honorary Golden Bear and then launched into a detailed explanation of why he loves the director’s work so much.
He started by praising Spielberg’s 1974 film, The Sugarland Express, which stars Goldie Hawn as a mother who, desperate to reunite with her son, takes a policeman hostage.
“I watch the mother’s face and it’s projected 30 feet tall. The mother is played by the great Goldie Hawn, but all I see is my own mother, as I saw her as a child, gigantic, imperfect,” Bono recalled of watching the film. “I cry though my heart is full of joy because I know that my own mother will always come looking for me. That is pure cinema. No, that is pure Spielberg.”
The singer also professed his love for Spielberg’s film A.I., about a child robot who’s programmed to love the woman to whom he’s given.
“In A.I., the boy is a machine who develops a soul, so he can love his mother back to life. In the machine that is Hollywood. Steven Spielberg is the soul in the machine,” he noted.
Bono then said of Spielberg, “He’s kind of out of this world. He’s not really a celebrity, is he? Thank God for that. We know he’s one of the biggest of the big shots in Hollywood, but we get the sense he doesn’t quite belong there and we’re kind of relieved.”
Bono was at the film festival for the premiere of Kiss the Future, about U2’s 1997 concert in Sarajevo.
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