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“I’m very private about my private life, and I’ve never revealed my private life until now,” Steven Spielberg said on Sunday. It was the existential threat of the Covid pandemic in its deadliest past in 2020 that pushed his personal family story to the big screen.
“I thought if I had to make another film, if I had to tell another story, what would that story be? And that’s why I decided to put it into production,” he told Martin Scorsese in a Q&A after the NYC screening of The Fabelmans at the DGA Theater.
“My mom and I had a secret for a long time, and my mom always told me, ‘Gee Steve, this is going to be a really good movie. Why don’t you do that one day.’ So I had him come in from one side and Tony Kusher, who had heard the stories and was really pushing it.” He was referring to the award winning playwright and screenwriter and his longtime co-writing collaborator The Fablemenas well as a central mother-daughter plot point in the film.
Aspiring teenage filmmaker Sam Fabelman is played by Gabriel LaBelle. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano are her parents. Seth Rogen and Judd Hirsch also star in the Universal release, which is currently in theaters.
When asked about the origin of the film’s story, Spielberg told Scorsese that the sense of loss and grief after the death of his parents in previous years made him serious about the fall of his story. He and Kushner wrote the script but “I had no intention of doing it… and I would have been happy to put it in a drawer somewhere. But Covid gave me so much time to think about it. And especially when Covid is really bad,” he said. “At a time when we’ve lost 500,000 Americans, let alone millions around the world…is it really a foregone conclusion that this is not an event in end of life?”
Scorsese also likes the backstory with a delightful cameo by David Lynch playing John Ford, an inspiration to Sam Fabelman. Ford offers brief but memorable advice at the end of the film and at the start of the young man’s career.
“I was chasing an actor who was new to me personally and was going to ask him to stand in as John Ford,” Spielberg said. Before he did, Kusher’s husband Mark Harris suggested asking David Lynch “and a light bulb went off.”
Lynch was flattered but declined. “He said he’s not an actor, and has other projects, and John Ford is so good, what if he doesn’t reach those standards? He’s just a little shy about it.”
Lynch softened when he learned that Spielberg and his wife had become lovers of transcendental meditation through Lynch’s foundation. But he still said no. “So I went to my go-to person, her best friend, Laura Dern. “You’ve got to talk to David to do this. You’ve got two weeks to talk to him about it.”
When the two directors spoke next, “He said, ‘I’ve decided to do it under one condition…I want to get the costume two weeks before it’s time to live.’ I said, ‘You mean you’re going to wear it? He said, ‘Yes, every day.’ The hat, the [eye] patch all. And he showed up in a pretty ratty costume,” Spielberg said.
“And the time it took him to light that cigar?” Scorsese asked. It’s a ridiculously slow process.
“That’s one of the things we all know about the magic of film editing, you can do anything you want,” Spielberg said.
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