Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg are good friends. They’ve vacationed together a number of times on the director’s yacht, the Seven Seas. They
Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg are good friends. They’ve vacationed together a number of times on the director’s yacht, the Seven Seas. They went to Portofino in 2019, Sicily in 2017, and to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in 2024—the latter time with Bono and The Edge. But when Springsteen took the stage at MoMA Thursday night to toast Spielberg at the museum’s annual Film Benefit, he had a bone to pick with the director.
“In June of 1975, I went to a small theater directly across from the Atlantic Ocean and I saw Jaws. I was 25 years old,” Springsteen said. “Now, one of the great pleasures on the Jersey Shore in 1975 was night swimming, preferably naked, on one of those 90-degree, 80% humidity August nights, preferably with someone you wanted to have sex with. There was nothing like after the bars closed, you had a few drinks in you—naked night swim.”
“Steven Spielberg fucked that up,” Springsteen continued. “He fucked it up good. Now, many times over the years, I asked myself, Why? Why would a nice man like that—why would he do that?”
Here at MoMA, a guitar slung around his back, Springsteen then attempted a bit of playful psychoanalysis. He recalled his trips on the Spielberg family yacht. Maybe, thought the guy who wrote “Born to Run,” the guy who directed Jaws is scared of swimming.
“I’ve been on that boat many times and I can tell you: Steven Spielberg does not go in that water— ever. Steven’s boat is so fucking big it has water on it. There’s a pool on it. Steven Spielberg does not go in that fucking pool—and I mean ever,” Springsteen said. “I’m not sure I’ve seen him in a bathing suit. So the reason night swimming is fucked—not just on the Jersey Shore, but every fucking place in the world—is because that nice man, Steven Spielberg, is very afraid of the water.”
