Steven Spielberg is known for making a variety of movies throughout his career. But if it wasn’t for having children, the filmmaker quipped he might’ve been fine just working for George Lucas for the rest of his life.

How having kids changed the type of movies Steven Spielberg made

Filmmaking has had such a huge impact on Spielberg’s life, that his profession is even the reason why the director started his family. In an interview with Variety, Spielberg confided that having children couldn’t be further from his mind. But doing the feature E.T. gave him paternal instincts he didn’t know he had.

“I didn’t want to have kids because it was not a kind of equation that made sense for me as I went from movie to movie to movie, script to script,” Spielberg said. “It never occurred to me till halfway through E.T.: I was a parent on that film. I was literally feeling like I was very protective of Henry [Thomas] and Mike [McNaughton] and my whole cast, and especially Drew [Barrymore], who was only 6 years old. And I started thinking, ‘Well, maybe this could be my real life someday.’”

After Spielberg became a father, however, he discovered that having children had an unexpected impact on his filmmaking. Spielberg once joked to The New York Post that he would’ve gotten comfortable just doing films with Lucas. His newfound family made Spielberg want to branch out his already diverse filmography.

“I would have been happy to have just gone to work for George Lucas making cliffhangers and adventures,” Spielberg said. “But when my first child was born, everything kind of changed.”

George Lucas didn’t consider his and Steven Spielberg’s ‘Indiana Jones’ movies action-adventure

Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films is one of the filmmaker’s most popular and successful movies. The first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was Lucas’ brain child, and was formed through a casual conversation between friends.

“George and I happened to be in Hawaii at the same time,” Spielberg once told The Guardian. “This was before Star Wars had been released and George was hiding out, feeling very nervous and convinced he had a flop on his hands. We started complaining to one another about the problems you get making these big films. He’d tell me about his difficulties with the robots on Star Wars and I’d tell him my nightmare stories about the mechanical shark in Jaws.”

During the conversation, Spielberg told Lucas that he wanted to develop his own 007 feature.

“Then I mentioned I’d always wanted to make a James Bond picture and George said, ‘I’ve got something better than Bond’. He told me the plot of Raiders and he said the very best thing would be, we wouldn’t have a single piece of hardware in the film,” Spielberg recalled.

Since then, Indiana Jones has become a franchise that produced five movies. But it wasn’t until the fourth film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, that Lucas revealed the films weren’t really action adventure films.

“But ultimately, these are supernatural mysteries,” Lucas revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “They aren’t action adventures. Everybody thinks they’re action-adventure films, but that’s just the genre we hang them on.”

Why Steven Spielberg was once no longer attracted to action films

Although Spielberg has been highly praised for being one of cinema’s top action directors, he planned on taking a long break from the genre. Later on in his career, he found doing action movies a bit too easy to tackle. He would’ve rather set his sights on projects that might’ve presented more challenges and fulfillment like Lincoln.

“I knew I could do the action in my sleep at this point in my career,” Spielberg said in a 2012 interview with The Guardian. “In my life, the action doesn’t hold any … it doesn’t attract me any more.”