10 Filmmakers Obsessed With ONE Thing

10. Steven Spielberg - Family

It won't be surprising to anyone who pays attention to the subtext of Steven Spielberg's movies that he had a strained relationship with his own late father, because family - especially fraught father-son relationships - are majorly apparent throughout his work.

From Indiana Jones' (Harrison Ford) tricky relationship with his own dad (Sean Connery), to Close Encounters' selfish father Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), basically everything about Hook's Peter Banning (Robin Williams), the android child (Haley Joel Osment) craving his own family in A.I., John Anderton's (Tom Cruise) disappeared son in Minority Report, and the broken homes in both E.T. and War of the Worlds, it is by far the most prevalent thematic across his five-decade body of work.

Spielberg himself admits it as much, saying, "It's a nagging theme in my work, a family divided, a family united. It's a theme that also works into films that aren't as fantastic, like Empire of the Sun, The Color Purple, and Catch Me if You Can."

Though serving as the backbone to so many of his movies, it impressively doesn't feel overly repetitious across his filmography.