John Lee Hancock on The Little Things and How Steven Spielberg Almost Directed

Jan 30 2021

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Some movies get made in an instant and others can take a long time. John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things, which stars Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, and Jared Leto, is the latter. Originally written in the early '90s around the time he wrote A Perfect World, Hancock's The Little Things at various points had Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, and Danny Devito attached to direct. But, for one reason or another, The Little Things never made it to the starting line. Over the years, Hancock's filmmaker friends (including Scott Frank) kept pushing him to return to the script, but it wasn’t until recently that he actually dusted off his original screenplay and decided to helm it as his next feature after directing The Highwaymen at Netflix. What happened when he tried to get the screenplay from Warner Bros. (who originally paid him to write it and still owned the material) is a wild story that is best left to the filmmaker to describe.