How ‘The Fabelmans’ team brought Steven Spielberg’s childhood to screen

It was the first night of filming on Munich in 2005, and Steven Spielberg was in Malta preparing to blow up a hotel room. “I had never really been on a film set before, and was somewhat mystified by what was going on,” recalls the film’s co-writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. “At that point, we knew each other for only about four or five months. I asked him when he first thought he might become a filmmaker, and he told me some stories about these early movies he had made.”

Kushner was intrigued, but at around 2am, while waiting for the scene to be reset, Spielberg mentioned a family camping trip that had proved a defining moment of his childhood, and which is at the core of The Fabelmans — the director’s 33rd and most personal feature film, a semi-­autobiographical coming-­of-age drama about a young boy, Sammy Fabelman, who dreams of becoming a filmmaker. “I listened to it, then said, ‘You’re going to have to make a movie out of this, this is amazing.’”

Spielberg said maybe, someday, but had other projects on his plate and a movie to direct. As he and Kushner continued to work together, the latter kept pushing him to make it. “After Munich, we went right onto Lincoln, and I began to feel more comfortable suggesting he might do something with me. I was always serious about it, but I never really thought he was going to do it. So we treated it as a kind of running joke.”

The turning point, says Kushner, was the death of Spielberg’s mother Leah Adler in 2017, followed by his father Arnold’s deteriorating health. “He was getting weaker and weaker, and it was clear he wasn’t going to last,” recalls Kushner. “So [Steven] was bracing himself for the loss.” Things came to a head during pre-­production on West Side Story, which Kushner wrote and executive produced. “We had a particularly ugly disagreement about something — musicals are very hard — and I got very upset with him.”

That night, Spielberg called Kushner and asked him to come over the following afternoon to talk about the film and the camping trip. “I was a little surprised. Then I thought, ‘This is very Steven and very sweet. He wants me to be reassured he’s not angry at me and he wants me to re-assure him we’re still pals.’ I also knew he was still in mourning for his mother, and there was a concern Arnold was going to die during filming, so he was in a complicated place. We talked about that as a possible reason for doing this. Then we started filming. But during that time, he said, ‘I’m really thinking about this now.’”

“I always knew there was a movie about Steven’s life in Steven. I just wasn’t sure what it would be and when it would happen,” says Kristie Macosko Krieger, who began as Spielberg’s assistant in 1998 and has since produced The Post, Bridge Of Spies, Ready Player One and West Side Story for him, as well as The Fabelmans, which launched at Toronto and began its North America rollout in early November via Universal Pictures. “I don’t think he said, ‘Yes, I’m doing this,’ until after his father passed away [in August 2020, aged 103], and they really got to working on it. It was a way for Steven to process his grief and the loss of his parents.”

Telling stories

At first, Kushner and Spielberg would get together over Zoom and talk for hours, interview sessions the latter likens jokingly to therapy. “After a few weeks, I said, ‘What I want to do is take all this stuff and try to fit it into a narrative,’” recalls Kushner, who had met Arnold but not Leah. “If I need to know something, I’ll ask. But I also said, ‘I’m going to make up shit and re-arrange stuff.’ I didn’t make up any incidents, but I started to weave through-lines for characters.”

Kushner took the information he had gleaned from Spielberg and wrote an 81-page novella, split into three sections, following his family’s migration from New Jersey via Arizona to California, then sent it back to him. “He loved it. He thought it was a hoot. He said, ‘It’s so weird reading my life, but it’s not my life.’ We didn’t know it at the time, but the reason I did it by myself was to be the objective eye that could take this out of memory and move it towards fiction.”

It was Spielberg who named the family the Fabelmans. “It was important we regarded it as [fiction] because it must mean something to somebody who cares nothing about filmmaking, who doesn’t know [Spielberg] or his movies,” says Kushner. “It works as a story of a young artist discovering his abilities and his vocation and about a family and a marriage falling apart.”

In September 2020, they whittled Kushner’s 81 pages into an outline. “Then we were on Zoom, and Spielberg said, ‘Is there some way if you typed, I’ll see what you’re typing?’” says Kushner. “We set it up and I thought we were going to say goodbye, but he said, ‘Let’s start writing.’” Kushner was taken aback. “I never write without wasting many days and weeks trying to think of ways to not write, but I called up a new document…”

The two men started writing, four hours a day, three days a week. They had a draft by December that year. They showed it to Krieger and Spielberg’s wife Kate Capshaw. “Kate was very excited about it but let me know certain things about the family she felt I should know. There were a couple of things about the marriage she thought were there but maybe needed to be built up more.”

Spielberg also sent it to Tom Stoppard, with whom he had worked on Empire Of The Sun in 1987. “He responded very warmly, very enthusiastically. That gave us both a lot of confidence,” says Kushner, who interviewed Spielberg’s sisters Anne, Nancy and Sue before diving into another draft. “They read it around the fourth. [Steven] was very nervous. But they all responded with incredible generosity.” All three also worked on the film. “They were a part of it every step of the way,” says Krieger. “They were like historical consultants.”

Two actors were required to play Sammy. Casting director Cindy Tolan put out an open casting call and watched 2,000 young actors on tape before finding Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord for young Sammy and Gabriel LaBelle as the teenage version. “She was looking for somebody that didn’t look exactly like Steven, didn’t act exactly like Steven, but had a self-possession Steven had as a young boy. Gabe has that,” says Krieger. “We cast him over Zoom. He and Steven never met in person until we got on set.”

To prepare, LaBelle had access to Spielberg’s home movies and photographs as well as the director over Zoom or the phone. He also gave LaBelle a series of films to watch that were inspirational to him growing up, including The Guns Of Navarone, The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach and Lawrence Of Arabia.

As for Sammy’s parents Mitzi and Burt, based on Leah and Arnold, it quickly came down to Michelle Williams and Paul Dano. “Because there are few actors as extraordinary,” says Kushner, who had first caught Williams in a production of The Cherry Orchard. “I’d never seen Dawson’s Creek and it was before Brokeback Mountain. I followed her into the bar after and said, ‘I don’t know who you are, but you’re one of the greatest actors I’ve ever seen.’ And I’ve been obsessed with her ever since. This was a dream come true to be able to work with her. Steven felt the same way.”

“Steven knew after seeing Blue Valentine, then Fosse/Verdon, that Michelle would make a great Mitzi because she’s got a natural rawness about her,” says Krieger. As Spielberg’s right-hand for more than two decades, Krieger has “spent family holidays together, family gatherings, birthdays, anniversaries” and got to know his parents and sisters well. “There were times I would come around the corner of the trailer and Paul would catch my eye, and I would say, ‘Oh my God, he is Arnold.’ Michelle, the same. They didn’t look exactly like them, but they had an essence about Leah and Arnold as Mitzi and Burt that was spectacular to behold.”

Seth Rogen was cast as “Uncle” Bennie, the third wheel in the marriage of Sammy’s parents. “Seth, we settled on immediately,” says Kushner. “In fact, we knew as we were writing that if he would do it, this would be great. There’s a joke in [Knocked Up] about Munich that’s really great.”

Emotional shoot

Budgeted at around $40m and financed by Amblin Partners, The Fabelmans shot for 59 days between July and October 2021, with locations and studio work centred in and around Los Angeles. Behind the camera, Spielberg surrounded himself with familiar faces, among them cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and production designer Rick Carter, who was tasked with recreating all three of Spielberg’s childhood homes. It was all rather emotional for the director. “Sometimes it wrecked him. Sometimes it made him thrilled that he was able to spend some time with his parents again,” says Krieger. “It’s overwhelming. I think he handled it with a lot of grace. There were some days that were tough and some that were beautiful and joyous.”

The Fabelmans recreates several of Spielberg’s 8mm movies as Sammy’s fledgling directing efforts. “This thing we call Gunsmog is a compilation of two westerns he made,” says Kushner who watched them all. “Escape To Nowhere, his big Second World War epic, doesn’t look quite as good as the version [here], but it’s extraordinary. It has these moments of combat, but with 14-year-old boys, that looks like stuff in Saving Private Ryan. You can see something is starting to happen. It’s not just a kid goofing around with a camera.”

What is missing is Firelight, Spielberg’s two-and-a-half-hour 8mm sci-fi epic that was a precursor to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. It existed, says Kushner, in the novella and was his pick for the film’s title, but he was overruled by his director. One thing they agreed on from the get-go, however, was ending the film with an incident from Spielberg’s teenage years when he met John Ford, director of The Searchers. Ford is played by David Lynch, a casting suggestion of Kushner’s husband.

“It was not easy to get David Lynch,” admits Krieger. “I don’t think he was interested in acting. But he had a conversation with Steven. Laura Dern was helpful. And when he said yes, he had one request — whatever costume John Ford was going to be wearing, could he have it for two weeks before we shot, so he could get comfortable in it. We shot that and the very last shot of the entire film the same day.”

The Fabelmans’ final shot sees Sammy exit Ford’s office onto a studio lot, and the camera adjusts the horizon as per the advice Ford has just imparted. They did it practically on the day, but it did not work as well as Spielberg wanted, so he had visual effects jitter it a bit, producing a wonderful final moment that almost did not make it into the film.

“The end is incredibly important in a way I didn’t understand,” says Kushner. “I thought it was a lovely little joke. Several people who read the script, including some very fancy people, said, ‘Don’t end it with a cheap little joke, that’s not worthy of this film.’ I loved it, he loved it, and it was his idea. It wasn’t until we showed the first audience, I realised it’s one of those tiny things that retro­actively informs everything you’ve seen, because it’s the first time in his six-­decade career he steps out a little bit from behind the camera and says hello.

“It’s one of those things that can keep you awake at night, thinking, ‘What if we had listened to those people and taken it out?’ Because it would’ve been easy to do it.”

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