Here's Why Steven Spielberg Was 'Embarrassed' for Whoopi Goldberg's $98 Million Oscar-Nominated Film

A Steven Spielberg film that nearly made $100 million at the box office and earned 11 Oscar nods, The Color Purple, starring the inherently talented Whoopi Goldberg, was "a miscalculation of execution," as revealed by the stellar director himself in his documentary Spielberg. 

The director who's renowned for not giving many interviews apparently agreed to do more than 30 hours of interviews for his docuseries in 2017. In one of the sit-downs, the 77-year-old labeled his 1985 drama a significant disappointment despite his brilliant direction, the story's emotional depth, and Goldberg who was nothing short of a cinematic gem in the film, as per TIME. 

"I was timid. I was just a little embarrassed," Spielberg recalled a specific scene from the novel where he filmed two women getting intimate and one of them observing her genitalia. The critically acclaimed movie was an adaption of Alice Walker's epistolary novel which showcased the lives of black women living in the South in the 1930s. 

The book was raw, gritty, and way ahead of its time. But Spielberg treaded with a rather soft and mild depiction of originally passionate characters. As he described he was about to turn 40 years old when he was filming The Color Purple and wanted to change the trajectory of his filmmaking by venturing into more "mature" content so to speak. 

TIME's film critic, Richard Corliss, reviewed the film, "Spielberg has chosen to elegize the story by romanticizing it, swathing the characters in Norman Rockwell attitudes, a meddlesome symphonic score, and a golden fairy dust that shines through the windows like God's blessing." 

Surprisingly, the self-critical director acknowledged two more films as the ultimate failures of his directorial career, firstly, the 1979 comedy film 1941, and said, "It was like I had committed a war crime." While the movie wasn't a complete failure at the box office, Spielberg said he was deeply affected by some of the negative reviews that the film received at the time. 

Meanwhile, his third failure (in his own sight) was his 1987 World War II drama Empire of the Sun. Starring a young Christian Bale, which was one of his lowest-grossing films. Although the storyline was carefully centered around a child, and his perspective, in the documentary screenwriter Tom Stoppard called it "the end of the innocence of Spielberg." 

Irrespective of Spielberg's feelings about the film, The View host lucked out after landing a role in the historical drama. While she's been a theater artist in New York and San Francisco most of her life, her role as Celie in The Color Purple proved her acting prowess to a wider audience, which she acknowledged while receiving an award at the Globes.

During her acceptance speech at the 1986 Golden Globes ceremony, the 68-year-old said, "You dream about this kind of stuff." She also credited her director Spielberg for "pulling something out of me I didn't know I was capable of," and exclaimed, "Hattie McDaniel, here it is," as per The Hollywood Reporter.