Spielberg on Lucas: "We've never had a fight"

Despite the constant rumors (most recently fueled by this piece in Slate) that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas enjoy a "friendship" that veers towards a vicious rivalry, Spielberg insists in a recent Newsweek interview that it's really not like that. "We've been friends since 1967, and we've never had a fight," says Spielberg. "It's the longest friendship I've had in my life."

Still, he can't resist ribbing Mr. Star Wars just a little bit. Spielberg says that after Lucas returned from shooting Star Wars in London, he visited Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. "The first thing he said was, "I'm done with these big pictures. This was a horrible nightmare. From now on I'm just going to make little quirky esoteric films," Spielberg laughs. "We're still waiting, George!" So, essentially, the interview confirms what Slate Tom Shone suspected - that the friendship resembles "something ... like the impacted, covert, passive-aggressive version of rivalry practiced by siblings—wherein any hint of hostility is buried in a bear hug and conflict covered with a smile."
 
In the same interview, Spielberg also insists that all of the recent hoopla surrounding Tom Cruise has had no impact on the promotion for their big summer movie, War of the Worlds, and that the public's reaction to Cruise's relationship with Katie Holmes is an indication that "people think that the people who make movies are fake: our movies aren't real, and our private lives aren't real. It's all for publicity. I think it's more a commentary on Hollywood than a commentary on Katie and Tom."