Steven Spielberg is the latest celebrity to weigh in on Timothée Chalamet’s hotly debated comments about ballet and opera.
Spielberg was speaking about the importance of movie theaters during a SXSW keynote conversation when he made the jab. After saying that he values streaming and enjoys working with Netflix, he added, “But for me, the real experience comes when we can influence a community to congregate in a strange, dark space where all of us are strangers. At the end of a really good movie experience, we are all united with a whole bunch of feelings that we walk into the daylight with, or into the nighttime with. And there’s nothing like that. It happens in movies, and in concerts. And it happens in ballet and opera, by the way.”
Spielberg grinned as the audience broke out into laughter and cheers. “And we want that to be sustained,” he continued. “We want that to go forever.”
Chalamet has come under fire recently for joking that ballet and opera are dying during Variety and CNN’s town hall conversation between him and Matthew McConaughey.
“I admire people [saying], ‘Hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive. We gotta keep this genre alive,’” he said. And another part of me feels like, if people want to see it — like “Barbie,” like “Oppenheimer” — they’re going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore’ — all respect to the ballet and opera people out there.” With a laugh, Chalamet also added that he was “taking shots for no reason” and that he’d lose the broadcast “14 cents in viewership” for dissing those art forms.
Several celebrities have slammed his comments. Whoopi Goldberg called him “vapid and shallow” on “The View,” while ballerina Misty Copeland called him out for including her in the marketing campaign for his film “Marty Supreme” and later dissing ballet. Other detractors have included Juliette Binoche, Andrea Bocelli and Doja Cat — though Doja Cat later retracted her comments and admitted to using the controversy to get attention.
Chalamet has also been defended in essays in the New York Times, Vanity Fair and more, with journalists and even a former opera singer pointing out that while his tone was callous, he was making a point that the audiences and ticket sales for operas and ballets have declined, and it would be bad for Hollywood to see the same fate.
