Still filming, Spielberg, 76, wins Berlin lifetime award

Director Steven Spielberg, picking up a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin Film Festival, said the prospect of making new films continued to excite him at 76, and unveiled new details of his planned HBO series.

The director, whose credits include some of the biggest-grossing and best-loved works in cinema history, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Jaws, has just finished two films back to back: The semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans and West Side Story, a film of the classic Broadway musical.

"Whatever seized me as a little kid is the same feeling I retained all those decades later," he told reporters on Tuesday. "When I find a book or a script or come up with an original idea that I think would make a good movie: That excitement ... supersedes everything."

Spielberg, professing he "loves to work and needs to work", is finalising a script left unfinished by his friend Stanley Kubrick at the time of his death in 1999.

"If you want to be a movie director, first of all write," he said. "Because it's the stories that are going to get an audience to pay attention to you, not the shots."