When walking away is the right call: Spielberg, Porgy and Bess, and knowing your lane

Steven Spielberg spent years developing a remake of Porgy and Bess. He had the studio backing, the budget, A-list interest. Then, in 2020, he quietly shelved it. Not because of COVID logistics or scheduling conflicts, but because he concluded—after extensive consultation—that he wasn’t the right person to direct it. No press release spinning it as “creative differences.” Just a decision, made and honored.

The film industry runs on momentum and ego. Once a project has studio approval and financing, walking away looks like failure. Directors are expected to wrestle productions into existence, to overcome obstacles through sheer force of will. Spielberg had already proven himself immune to that pressure with Lincoln—casting actual historians as advisors, reshaping dialogue based on their input. But Porgy and Bess required something harder: recognizing the limits of consultation itself. You can hire experts. You can listen carefully. You still might not be the right storyteller for this particular story.

This matters beyond one unmade film. I work with productions across Europe and North America, and the conversation around cultural sensitivity has shifted dramatically in five years. Ten years ago, the question was: “Can we afford a consultant?” Now it’s: “Are we the right team for this project at all?” That second question makes people profoundly uncomfortable, especially when they’ve already invested months in development. But it’s the only question that actually protects both the story and the production itself.

The instinct to push forward anyway is understandable. You’ve secured funding—no small feat. You have a crew ready to work. You’re capable of technical excellence. Surely good intentions and rigorous research can bridge the gap. This is where productions run aground. Cultural sensitivity isn’t a problem you solve through diligence alone. It’s not a checklist where sufficient effort guarantees authenticity. Some stories require a lived proximity to the material that can’t be replicated through preparation, no matter how thorough.

I’ve sat in pre-production meetings where the producer says, “We’ve hired a cultural consultant from the community we’re depicting,” as if that inoculates the project. But the consultant is there to advise, not to carry the entire burden of authenticity while a disconnected creative team makes final decisions. If the director can’t grasp why a particular scene feels extractive rather than exploratory, if the writer keeps defaulting to outside-looking-in framing—consultation becomes a fig leaf. The consultant knows it. The crew senses it. Audiences will definitely clock it.

Spielberg’s decision models something different: consultation that genuinely changes the shape of the project, including the decision of whether it should exist at all. By most accounts, he didn’t just listen to Black creative voices about Porgy and Bess—he absorbed their concerns about who should helm a story so embedded in Black American experience, particularly one with a fraught performance history. And he concluded: not me, not now, maybe never. That’s not defeatism. That’s creative maturity.

The counterargument goes: if only directors from a particular background tell those stories, doesn’t that ghetto-ize both the storytellers and the material? And yes, there’s a version of cultural gatekeeping that’s corrosive. But we’re nowhere near that problem yet. The dominant industry pattern remains: outsider perspectives shaping insider stories, with the actual community members hired in subordinate roles, if at all. We’re still working through decades of extraction disguised as appreciation. The pendulum hasn’t swung too far. It’s barely moved.

What’s required is discernment about what “your lane” actually means. It’s not about staying in rigid demographic boxes. It’s about honest assessment of your relationship to the material. Can you access the emotional core without flattening it into metaphor? Are you drawn to the story’s specificity, or just its aesthetic? If your main reference points come from other films rather than lived knowledge, that’s a warning sign. Doesn’t mean you can’t tell stories outside your immediate experience—means you need to examine why this story, and whether your distance from it will serve or diminish what makes it vital.

This gets complicated in documentary work, which is where I started before moving into consulting. Documentary assumes a degree of outsider perspective—you’re observing, not inhabiting. But even there, the question of proximity matters. I’ve turned down documentary projects where I knew my presence would shift the dynamic in ways that would undermine the story. Not because I couldn’t technically shoot it, but because someone else’s relationship to the subjects would yield something more true. That calculus is professional, not personal.

Key Takeaways:

1. Cultural consultation can’t fix a fundamental mismatch between storyteller and story—it can only help you recognize the mismatch exists.

2. Walking away from a developed project isn’t admitting defeat; it’s exercising creative judgment about what serves the story better than your involvement.

3. “Staying in your lane” isn’t about demographic boxes—it’s about honest assessment of whether your proximity to the material serves or diminishes its core truth.

The projects that don’t get made rarely show up in career retrospectives. Spielberg will be remembered for the films he directed, not the one he stepped back from. But that decision—quiet, unglamorous, probably agonized over—might be more instructive than another entry in his filmography. It suggests that the real flex isn’t proving you can tell any story, but knowing which stories need you to step aside so someone else can tell them properly. That kind of restraint looks like weakness until you understand it as strength.

Todd Max Carey — Seven Journeys