Steven Spielberg tells the story of his childhood in ‘The Fabelmans’, which opens on November 11

Director Steven Spielberg He has decided to bring the story of his parents and his own childhood to the cinema, after losing his 103-year-old father in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Is about The Fabelmansa film that is not his farewellhe clarifies, but a job so vulnerable and personal that being on set, with houses that recreated his childhood homes, gave him and his sisters a feeling of “nostalgia that bordered on pain.”

After decades of estrangement, Spielberg and his father Arnold had reconnected, and this new separation created the need to piece together family history. Spielberg has spent a 50-year career entertaining with titles like ET, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan, Hook Y Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 2020, as he said in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter, he realized he was ready to move on from the mystery, suspense, and alien sightings. “There was just one story he wanted to tell.”

That is The Fabelmans, based on his childhood and the divorce of his parents (Michell Williams and Paul Dano in the main roles). When they take their 5-year-old son to the movies for the first time, they create in him a fascination with cameras and filming. This is the 75-year-old filmmaker’s most vulnerable proposal, “the first coming-of-age story I’ve ever told.”

Life with his parents, he explains, has taught him lessons that he hopes to impart with this film. “When does a youngster start to see his parents as human beings? In my case, because of what he went through between the ages of 7 and 18, I began to appreciate my dad and my mom not as parents, but as people”.

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So he went to shoot in New Jersey, Arizona and California, states where he lived, and rebuilt the homes of his childhood and adolescence. He recreated home recordings that he made as a child. He invited his sisters to the set to get her opinions at all times. And the result It will be seen in theaters on November 11.

What would their parents have thought? Before they died, they had already made a decision. “When are you going to tell the story of our family, Steve?” “It was something they were very excited about.”

Spielberg’s father was an engineer who worked for General Electric and RCA. His mother, Leah, was a concert pianist and painter, and later the owner of a kosher restaurant in Los Angeles. While he was methodical, sweet and quiet, she was funny, magical and unusual. Kristie Macosko Krieger, Spielberg’s producer, says their spirits are “married inside Steven.”

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The film is written by Tony Kushner, who has already done the same for other Spielberg productions (West Side Story, lincoln Y Munich). The Fabelmans it is something that was on the mind of the two creators since 2004. The project picked up speed in 2020, in confinement, for long hours on Zoom several times a week. When Arnold Spielberg died, in August of that year, they had already started writing scenes, despite the fact that Steven is not a writer and Kushner had reservations about him. Kushner admits that he tried to cancel the meetings, but Spielberg wouldn’t let him get away. Macosco Krieger thinks he understands why. “Steve needed to work through his grief over the death of his father, life without his parents.”

In those videoconferences, Spielberg revealed to Kushner his family secret, the one he discovered as an adult, by reviewing the home movies he had made at home., and that he will share with those who will witness his story in the cinema. Both affirm that it is not a farewell film. They want it to be something that people can enjoy without being conditioned by Spielberg’s previous work or obsessed with finding nods to previous titles (but there are). (AND)