Steven Spielberg is about to have a very, very busy fall. Not only is he releasing two movies in December, the historical epic War Horse and the classic comics adaptation The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, but he's finally ready to start shooting Lincoln, the biopic of our 16th President that's been in development so long that Liam Neeson finally got too old to play him and had to be replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis.

As he prepares to shoot Lincoln around Richmond, Virginia, Spielberg for some reason talked to The Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore about his plans for the movie, and said that even though the film is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals-- which spanned Lincoln's entire Presidency-- the movie will focus only on the last four months.

“There are battles in it, and being in Virginia, we have access to those historic battlefields. It is really a movie about the great work Abraham Lincoln did in the last months of his life. We’re basing it on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, ‘Team of Rivals,’ but we’re only focusing in on the last four months of Abraham Lincoln’s life.

He also said the movie's release date, presumably sometime during Oscar season next fall, will be intentionally planned for after the November election, because "I don't want it to become political fodder." That's an interesting strategy, and completely opposite from what Kathryn Bigelow is planning with her SEAL Team Six movie, which is deliberately set for an October release. Pretty much every political candidate, on either side of the spectrum, wants to compare himself to Lincoln, and it's hard to imagine Spielberg's film being perceived as partisan one way or another. But if he wants the freedom to make the movie he wants without having to worry about becoming a political football, I'd say he earned that right.