Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film The Fabelmans is a deeply personal one.
Based “a hundred percent” on the legendary filmmaker’s family and shot on sets carefully constructed to faithfully resemble his childhood homes, Spielberg says he’s finally made the film that his late parents “nagged” him to make before their deaths.
“They were actually nagging me, ‘When are you going to tell that story about our family, Steve?’ And so this was something they were very enthusiastic about,” the E.T. director told The Hollywood Reporter of his parents, Leah and Arnold, who passed in 2017 and 2020, respectively.
It was shortly before his father’s death that Spielberg realized that after a 50-year career, he was finally ready to make an only-slightly fictionalized film about his family.
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“I started seriously thinking, if I had to make one movie I haven’t made yet, something that I really want to do on a very personally atomic level, what would that be? And there was only one story I really wanted to tell.”
The Fabelmans stars Michelle Williams and Paul Dano as fictional versions of Spielberg’s parents, Mitzi and Burt; relative newcomer Gabriel LaBelle joins the cast as “Sammy,” the son caught in the dissolution of his parents’ marriage.
Spielberg Says He Hopes ‘Emotional’ The Fabelmans Will Impart the Important Lesson He Learned From His Parents
Amblin Entertainment
Spielberg, who says the movie is “the first coming-of-age story I’ve ever told,” credits his parents’ split with teaching him an important lesson—there will always come a time when a child begins to see their parents as not just protectors, but flawed human beings.
“My life with my mom and dad taught me a lesson, which I hope this film, in a small way, imparts. Which is, when does a young person in a family start to see his parents as human beings? In my case, because of what happened between the ages of 7 and 18, I started to appreciate my mom and dad not as parents but as real people,” he said.
In telling such a vulnerable story, emotions often ran high on the set.
“It was a very emotional experience. He was crying a lot on set. It’s very based on his life and pretty much everything that happens in the movie is something that happened to him,” actor Seth Rogen, who plays a family friend of the “Fabelmans,” recalled to People.
“As we were shooting, I’d be like, ‘Did this happen in real life?’ and the answer was ‘yes’ a hundred percent of the time.”
Written and directed by Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans arrives in theaters on Thanksgiving Day.
