He just stopped by Cannes to premiere his latest feature, The BFG (our review), and he’ll begin production next month on the sci-fi adaptation Ready Player One, but Steven Spielberg found some time in between to impart some wisdom onto the graduating class of perhaps our country’s most prestigious place of education: Harvard. This week, he took the stage to give a commencement speech in which he touched on how opening up his worldview changed the kinds of movies he’s made, how we’re a nation of immigrants, not regretting 1941 (we agree!), and much more.
“Now in a two-hour movie, you get a handful of character-defining moments, but in real life, you face them every day,” he says. “Life is one strong, long string of character-defining moments. And I was lucky that at 18 I knew what I exactly wanted to do. But I didn’t know who I was. How could I? And how could any of us? Because for the first 25 years of our lives, we are trained to listen to voices that are not our own. Parents and professors fill our heads with wisdom and information, and then employers and mentors take their place and explain how this world really works.”
Check it out below, along with Harvard’s Class Day speech from Rashida Jones.