With Ready Player One , Steven Spielberg plans to leave himself on the cutting room floor. The book by Ernest Cline is a thriller about a kid on a high-stakes treasure hunt through a virtual reality world created in a society that obsesses about ’80s pop culture – so Spielberg was all over the story even before he signed on to direct the film version. But with one exception. “The movie won’t have any of my films in it,” the director tells EW in a wide-ranging interview. “I’m not putting myself in this movie.” The film will still include an odyssey through Gen X nostalgia, but for now he intends to cut the book’s references to the Indiana Jones movies, and works he produced, like Back to the Future and Goonies . “They reference so many ’80s movies. I’m doing the whole pop culture thing. I’m just going to leave myself out of it,” he says, shaking his head. “I can’t do that. Too self-referential.” What hooked him on the story was Cline’s presentation of a world where everyo