With new movie, Destry Allyn Spielberg puts a scare in the family business

USA Today

a day ago

After so many of her father's movie nights at home, Destry Allyn Spielberg finally got the chance to host her own.
The 28-year-old director says it was 'so special' but also 'crazy' to screen her debut feature, the horror movie 'Please Don't Feed the Children,' for her family, including her parents: iconic filmmaker Steven Spielberg and actress Kate Capshaw. Mom and dad were 'super proud,' she reports, and older brother Sawyer even cried. 'I watched my movie with them, which I was telling myself I wouldn't do, but we have such a good sound system. So it was like going to the theater and I was just, like, looking at everyone, like, 'Oh, my gosh, this is so weird!''
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Fifty years after Steven Spielberg made people afraid of the water with 'Jaws,' Destry is adding more scares to the family business. 'Please Don't Feed the Children' (now streaming for free on Tubi) imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario in which a pandemic has infected adults but not kids, forcing the youngsters into a fight for survival. A group of teens on the run is taken in by a seemingly kind British woman (Michelle Dockery), but between her poison cookies and the dark secret in her basement she's more sinister than sweet.
Destry Spielberg thanks members of her clan in the credits, including someone film lovers might not know: Chicken Spielberg, an adorable Irish Setter/Poodle mix. 'She's my child,' the director says. 'She was the set emotional therapy dog.'
Here's what you need to know about the latest Spielberg making waves in Hollywood:
Destry Allyn Spielberg loves horror (especially 'The Shining')
Spielberg won acclaim for her 2022 psychological thriller short film 'Let Me Go (The Right Way)' – written by Owen King, Stephen King's son – but didn't know if she wanted to direct a horror movie right out of the gate. 'It didn't feel like it was going to be my wheelhouse, to be honest,' says Spielberg, who was inspired by 'Children of Men' and 'Coraline' when crafting 'Children.' She adores horror, though, going back to her lifelong obsession for 'The Shining.'
When Destry Spielberg was 8, her father was driving her to a tutoring session and listening to the car radio when she heard a snippet of the 'Shining' score and the scene with the two creepy twin girls on Sirius XM's Cinemagic channel. 'It fascinated me so much,' she says. Destry wanted to watch Stanley Kubrick's classic film, but Steven said no because she was too young. That was his same answer two summers later, when he played it on a movie night. 'The TV room in our house is right below my bedroom, and the walls are paper thin,' she says. 'You're basically in there with them, so I listened to the entire movie.'
It wasn't until a film studies class in her sophomore year of high school when Destry finally saw 'The Shining." 'It was everything I could have imagined. I watched it, like, five times that week at home,' she says. 'It was the first film that really got me intrigued with just the history of cinema and specific directors. It taught me a lot.'
Directing wasn't always the plan for Steven Spielberg's daughter
Growing up, Destry had friends over to make movies, 'but I didn't look at that activity as a future career, even though I was living in a house where that was a career. It just felt like a fun activity to do,' she says. As she got older and started realizing how important her name was in the film world, Spielberg shied away from it. "That's natural, especially when you're in your teens and you're wanting to make friends and you start to learn that people will get excited about (her dad). And it's really confusing because you're like, 'Why are you so excited about this person? I don't get it.''
Destry had been an equestrian from a young age and that was her career path until an injury at 19 derailed that dream. 'I didn't have a Plan B,' she says. 'I definitely was dealing with some depression and mental health issues.' She started studying comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade, which proved therapeutic, and then took acting classes. She had roles in 2021's 'Licorice Pizza' and HBO's 2020 miniseries 'I Know This Much Is True,' but work was scarce. There was only so much rejection she could take, so she and a friend wrote a short film they could star in to show a reel to filmmakers. They couldn't afford a director, so Spielberg did it herself and was hooked.
'I had all this knowledge that I didn't really know I had or hadn't tapped into yet that I'm so grateful for. A lot of it's just because I grew up around it,' she says. 'It was a very spiritual experience.'
Destry Spielberg was named after a classic Western
The youngest Spielberg child has never met another Destry, and her mom originally was going to name her Ruth-Louise. At one of her dad's summer movie nights, he was trying to show the family the 1939 Marlene Dietrich/James Stewart Western 'Destry Rides Again' but 'no one wanted to watch it,' she says. 'Right before they were going to bed, he goes, 'What if we named her Destry?' And then my mom loved it. Thank God.'
This Destry is riding again as well: Spielberg returned to equestrian competition in February and starts filming her next feature, a murder mystery, this summer. And she's still wrapping her head around her family's filmmaking legacy.
'It took me some years to really understand how lucky we are to have been able to be in that environment that so many people would kill to be in,' Spielberg says. 'It's strange having to separate: that's my dad, and then this is a whole other world that is so appreciated on so many levels that's studied and cared for. You just don't really understand that appreciation until you're kind of in it yourself.'