Like all unhappy families (with apologies to Tolstoy), Steven Spielberg’s family was unhappy in its own way. As an adult, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker has spent his profession recapturing the unique flavor of his family’s unhappiness—after which inserting it into blockbusters about robots, aliens and lonely little boys.
Over nearly five a long time, Spielberg has repeatedly returned to the identical themes. His parents’ divorce is famously the inspiration behind E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). In The Sugarland Express (1974), his big-screen directorial debut, a mother breaks her husband out of prison in an try and retrieve their son from foster care and reunite their family. Distant fathers are at the middle of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Hook (1991) and War of the Worlds (2005), amongst others.
“Every one in all my movies is a private movie,” the director tells CBS News. “I don’t make movies that I don’t consider to have something of myself left behind in them.”
But his latest film, The Fabelmans, is his first try and delve inward without couching personal anxieties inside something else. It’s not a science fiction blockbuster, crime caper or high-stakes historical drama. It’s, quite simply, the story of Steven Spielberg.
Or, moderately, it’s the story of Sammy Fabelman, the name Spielberg has chosen for his semi-autobiographical younger self (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a baby and Gabriel LaBelle as an adolescent). A flippantly fictionalized dramatization of his childhood, the film explores how a series of tensions—between a father and mother, science and art, responsibility and ambition—mirrored one another, and the way a boy working through those tensions with an eight-millimeter camera grew as much as develop into the highest-grossing director of all time.
Science and art at odds
Born in 1946, Spielberg was the oldest of 4 children. His father, Arnold, was an engineer, a practical man who wanted a practical life for his son. His mother, Leah, was a talented pianist, an exuberant woman trapped in an environment—midcentury suburbia—that might never nourish her artistic inclinations.
As a substitute, she nourished her son’s. Leah was supportive of his burgeoning interest in filmmaking from the start. Arnold supported his son’s interests but expected him to eventually deprioritize them in favor of a stable profession and adult responsibilities.
Spielberg’s mother struggled with similar expectations. She put her creative pursuits on hold to boost her children and move across the country, as Arnold’s profession took the family from Recent Jersey to Arizona to California. Leah was susceptible to whims, one time purchasing a monkey from a Phoenix pet store and bringing it home at the back of her Jeep. Free-spirited and deeply loving, she was also plagued with a continuing feeling of limitation and dissatisfaction.
“My mom all the time wanted more,” Spielberg says to CBS News. “She was the ‘more mom.’ Enough wasn’t enough for [her], you realize?” This approach, he clarifies, was an asset. She gave him permission to be artistically ambitious, modeling the right way to want more without feeling guilty about it.
In a 1999 episode of talk show “Contained in the Actors Studio,” host James Lipton asked Spielberg about Close Encounters. Throughout the film’s climax, humans use computers to generate and broadcast a series of musical tones, allowing them to speak with aliens. Perhaps, Lipton suggested, this climactic moment symbolized Spielberg’s foundational tensions. “Your father was a pc scientist, your mother was a musician,” he said. “When the spaceship lands, how do they impart? They make music on their computers, and they’re able to speak to one another.”
In The Fabelmans, Spielberg places this tension front and center. As Mitzi, the fictionalized Leah (played by Michelle Williams), not-so-subtly proclaims, “On this family, it’s the scientists versus the artists. Sammy’s on my team, takes after me.”
Spielberg’s distant fathers
In 1966, when Spielberg was 19, his parents divorced. His mother had fallen in love along with his father’s best friend, Bernie Adler, whom she would later marry. But Arnold (whose film analogue, Burt, is played by Paul Dano), hoping to guard Leah and her relationship with their kids, took the blame, telling the 4 children that the divorce was his idea.
“When my mom and my dad announced that they were separating, as is portrayed in The Fabelmans, my dad fell on the sword,” Spielberg tells CBS News. “But I didn’t know there was a sword to fall on. I simply took him at his word when he said, ‘It’s my concept that we separate.’ And I lived with that, and I blamed my dad for that, for years.”
Spielberg barely spoke to his father for 15 years. That period of estrangement, coupled with the present tensions predating that period, affected him deeply. It also influenced a few of his most successful movies, during which divorced parents and strained father-son relationships are fundamental themes.
Many critics, and Spielberg himself, have noted these parallels through the years, particularly concerning E.T., which focuses on a family reeling from a father’s departure. Because the director recalled on the TCM Classic Film Festival in April, he began fascinated with E.T. within the Seventies, when he was filming Close Encounters. At the identical time, he was also working on ideas for a script about his parents’ divorce. With aliens already top of mind, he wondered, “What if Elliott—or the child, I hadn’t quite dreamed up his name yet—needed, for the primary time in his life, to develop into accountable for a life form to fill the gap in his heart?”
Even in Spielberg classics without divorce, the distant father trope persists. In Close Encounters, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) develops an obsession with a UFO sighting, becoming increasingly alienated from his middle-class suburban family. In a single scene, his wife kisses him; he tries to kiss her back, but he can’t help opening his eyes and looking out as much as the sky. Within the film’s climax, Neary leaves his family—and the planet—behind.
In Hook, a revisionist Peter Pan sequel, the boy who once said he would never grow up leaves Neverland, becomes an adult and has children of his own. By the point viewers meet workaholic lawyer Peter Banning (Robin Williams), he’s, as Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) puts it, a “cold, selfish man who drinks an excessive amount of, who’s obsessive about success, and runs and hides from his wife and kids.” Unluckily for the pirate captain, Hook is one in all the rare Spielberg movies that permits a fictional father to redeem himself. Peter rekindles his zest for all times, throws his work phone out the window and saves his children from Hook’s grasp. By the top of the climactic battle, the one casualty is Rufio (Dante Basco), one in all the Lost Boys; in his final moments, he tells Peter, “Do you realize what I wish? I wish I had a dad—such as you.”
Grappling with Jewish roots
In 1993, Spielberg released what the Recent York Times called “his riskiest, most personal film”: Schindler’s List. The historical drama follows Oskar Schindler, an industrialist who saves greater than 1,000 Jews in the course of the Holocaust by bringing them to work in his factories. It’s one in all Spielberg’s most serious movies—and one in all his most ambitious.
Unlike The Fabelmans, Schindler’s List isn’t autobiographical (the director was born the 12 months after World War II ended), however it is deeply personal. Greater than a dozen of Spielberg’s older relatives perished in the course of the war, and the atrocities of the Holocaust were all the time top of mind for his family. “In a wierd way, my life has all the time come back to pictures surrounding the Holocaust,” he told the Times. “The Holocaust had been a part of my life, just based on what my parents would say on the dinner table.”
When he was a young boy, Spielberg’s grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors. One in all them, a former Auschwitz prisoner, used the numbers tattooed on his arm to show the long run filmmaker about numbers. “He would roll up his sleeves and say, ‘This can be a 4, this can be a seven, this can be a two,’” Spielberg recounted. “It was my first concept of numbers. He would all the time say, ‘I actually have a magic trick.’ He pointed to a six. After which he crooked his elbow and said, ‘Now it’s a nine.’”
Because Spielberg was often the only Jewish boy within the neighborhood, he was a frequent goal of bullying. In Arizona, neighbors would stand outside the family’s house chanting, “The Spielbergs are dirty Jews.” Later, in California, a number of of the favored kids smacked and kicked him in the varsity locker room. “We weren’t totally accepted,” Spielberg’s mother told the Times. “We were all the time on the periphery.”
As he grew older, Spielberg became ashamed of his roots. Sometimes he told people his last name was German, not Jewish. (Incidentally, the moniker “Fabelman” “appears like Jewish wordplay on the concept of fables, or storytelling,” because the Jewish Telegraphic Agency puts it.) Within the film, Sammy’s classmates taunt him, calling him “Bagelman.”
Spielberg has said that the anti-Semitic bullying wasn’t a “governing force” in his life. Still, it influenced his relationship with Judaism, which didn’t factor into his movies before Schindler’s List. Around the identical time, the director married his second wife, Kate Capshaw, who converted to Judaism before the marriage. He later decided to boost all seven of his children with a Jewish education.
“The experience of constructing Schindler’s List made me reconcile with all the reasons … I hid from my Jewishness,” he said within the 2017 documentary Spielberg. “And it made me so proud to be a Jew.”
Spielberg tells CBS News that making The Fabelmans was similarly cathartic. “It’s an amazing privilege … realizing with this movie, what have I just done? Has this been $40 million of therapy?”
“Capture every moment”
Spielberg’s mother died in 2017; his father died in 2020. In interviews, he has insisted that he wasn’t waiting for his parents to die to start out writing about them. Quite the opposite, his mother was all the time asking when he was going to inform their story. “There’s a little bit little bit of this story in all of your movies. But you’ve all the time felt safer using metaphor,” she once said to him. “And I believe you’re probably afraid of the lived experience.”
She needn’t have anxious. Even when he takes his time, Spielberg all the time gets around to using film to confront the shadows of his psyche.
The Fabelmans opens on the day Sammy, age 5, learns to employ this coping mechanism: January 10, 1952, when he saw The Best Show on Earth in theaters. He’s terrified by a scene of two trains colliding. Because the crash plays on a loop in his mind, he decides to recreate the scene using his model train set. When his father admonishes him for not taking higher care of the toy, Sammy protests, “But I would like to see them crash.”
This explanation confounds his father, but his mother eventually understands: “He’s attempting to get some form of control over it,” she says. She suggests filming the crash. That way he can watch it as much as he wants without damaging the train.
Since that moment played out in Spielberg’s own childhood, the director has never stopped committing his fears to film. The tagline for The Fabelmans is “Capture every moment”; it’s an imperative that Spielberg adheres to compulsively. If a moment will be captured, then it may possibly be understood—and, eventually, perhaps resolved.
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