Steven Spielberg’s frequent writing collaborator, the celebrated playwright Tony Kushner, shares with us the explosive circumstances under which The Fabelmans gradually came about.
Art is a way, in childhood and also in adulthood, that we have of organizing existence, giving it meaning and making it less overwhelming and sometimes less menacing, less terrifying.
—Tony KushnerThe Fabelmans co-writers Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner are unassailable geniuses. Spielberg is, of course, known for his blockbuster films, but history has re-evaluated his importance beyond populist entertainment and commercial prospects. Kushner is a Tony Award-winning playwright, whose six-hour fantasia Angels in America is considered to be one of the most important American plays ever written. The mind-meld between these two titans of their respective fields began with Spielberg’s 2005 Munich, then continued with Lincoln and West Side Story. Themes repeat in all three works: broken families and broken nations, both attempting to come together while outside forces pull them apart.
Drawing from many of Spielberg’s memories (and some of Kushner’s), The Fabelmans follows young filmmaking prodigy Samuel “Sammy” Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). As he navigates a pivotal family move across the country, a gap grows between his mother (Michelle Williams) and father (Paul Dano), which is enhanced by the family friend (Seth Rogen) who tags along westward with the Fabelmans. Through it all, Sammy’s camera is at the center of discovery, capturing both the good and the bad.
“Michelle and I talked about this: we felt so lucky to have words by Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg,” Dano told Letterboxd in a separate interview. “The language itself is the biggest source of inspiration, along with all the extra materials that Steven shared with us of home movies and recordings and photos… but I do think that the main source, the well, is that script, which is very beautiful.”
David Ehrlich begins his review of The Fabelmans with the big question: “Has any divorce had a more profound impact on the American imagination than the one between Steven Spielberg’s parents? It was the breakup that launched a million blockbusters.” Along with Kushner, The Fabelmans is buttressed by many frequent collaborators—like composer John Williams, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, production designer Rick Carter and film editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar—who all bring the love and dysfunction of Spielberg’s childhood to life.
It’s a work that will resonate with filmmakers; indeed, How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s Daniel Goldhaber writes on Letterboxd that it “hits so close to home it kind of broke me,” but Kushner and Spielberg also wanted to make a movie with enough tangible qualities such as family and school that anyone could enjoy it, no matter their level of film knowledge. They seem to have been successful, as evidenced by its whopping 4.2 out of five average rating (at the time of writing). As Sophia raves: “If anyone deserves to give color to his own mythology, to create a fable about nostalgia, and to discuss how film is the beautiful marriage of art and science, it’s Spielberg.”
My conversation with Kushner was the first in-person print interview I’d done since the Covid-19 pandemic (which factored greatly into the making of The Fabelmans), and it began by Kushner offering me baklava as I hesitated to find the best place to put my phone to record. It’d been a while, and I was sharing a couch with truly one of the greats. Kushner, a very approachable and jovial guy, was tickled by those nerves, even sharing his own story of losing the audio to an interview he once conducted. Thankfully, I did not, and here’s the proof.
Tony Kushner: The only time I’ve ever interviewed anyone was when I interviewed Liza Minnelli for the 25th anniversary of Stonewall for Out Magazine. I took her to the Russian Tea Room. She had a lot of vodka and she told me and my friend [Broadway director] Michael Mayer all these incredible stories about her father [Vincente Minnelli] being gay. Then I got home and I turned on the tape recorder and there was not a thing on it. So, I interviewed her again at a coffee shop in the morning and she wasn’t drinking and she said, “Darling, my father wasn’t gay.” [Though Minelli was private himself, his biographers have noted his bisexuality.]
I am always skeptical at the start of the interview as to whether it’s running—I have to check it. But it’s a pleasure to speak with you, while recording it! I’ve been a long-time fan of your work. Angels in America is one of the most important pieces of art in my lifetime.
Whoa, that’s very sweet. Thank you so much.
And congratulations with The Fabelmans, your fourth collaboration with one of the most important filmmakers in anyone’s lifetime, Steven Spielberg. I wanted to start by just asking, at what point did he feel comfortable saying to you, “I want to make a movie about my life, and will you work with me on that?”
I actually asked him! The first day of filming Munich, it was a night shoot, and we were going to blow up a hotel room. We had done the one explosion and were waiting for them to set up the other one. Each explosion took a couple of hours each time—it was a big explosion—and I remember sitting next to him. We had only known each other at that point for a few months and we were in Malta. I said, “Steven, this is a silly question, but do you remember when you first thought you might want to be a filmmaker?” He told me a couple of things about making cowboy movies and war movies as a little kid, and then he said, “I’ll tell you a secret.”
He told me about what [ended up being] the central event of The Fabelmans: this camping trip when he was a teenager. I was absolutely blown away by the story, which seemed so full of real meaning about who he turned into as an artist. I was also tremendously moved by what he told me about his parents’ marriage and their divorce; it seemed like a kind of great love story. So I said, “I hope it’s okay if I say this, but at some point you have to make a movie out of this,” and he said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think I would really want to do that.”
Over the years as we worked on other things, when we were talking about other projects that we’d like to work on together, I kept saying, “I’m serious, I think that [your childhood] would be a great movie!” He sort of began to warm to the idea, then right before West Side Story, a couple of years before we started filming, Steven’s mother died, which was a huge blow. Then when we started filming West Side Story, Steven’s father Arnold, who was at that point 102 years old, really began to go into a decline. He had incredible health up till then, especially for a Jewish man. He always amazed me. But he started to really struggle, so it was clear that his days were numbered, and Steven was bracing himself for that loss.
During the long rehearsal period for West Side Story, we were both busy with things involving the production, but we didn’t have our usual roles and were struggling over some of the issues about the movie. We both are enormously proud of the film, but musicals are hard and he’d never done one before, and there was a lot to figure out. We were struggling about something, I don’t remember what, but I do remember that I got very mad at him and he knew that I was upset with him. He called me and said, “Why don’t you come over and let’s talk about this idea that we have been talking about?”
We met on Zoom three times a week, four hours a day, for two months and we wrote the first draft.
—Tony KushnerA new project to reconnect on the actual project at hand?
Exactly. A wonderful way to work. So I went over and we spent an evening talking through his memories, I took notes, then we had to go back to West Side Story. We never returned to what would become The Fabelmans until that was finished. After the release had been postponed for a year because of Covid and Steven’s father was clearly in his last few months, Steven said, “Let’s get together on Zoom and talk; I’m beginning to think that maybe I want to do this.” He said, “I’m not committing to anything at all,” and I said, “Yeah, I think the way to do this is, let’s not put any pressure on. We won’t tell anyone… we’re just going to have fun and see what happens. No commitments.”
So I took a bunch of notes, I pulled the notes that I’d already taken before, and I tried to start organizing them. Then after several of those sessions I [told him], since this wasn’t my life, what if I pull it together as a single story? I’m not going to omit anything, but I’m not going to necessarily follow the strict chronology. That was part of the advantage of us working on this together, is that I could bring a kind of objectivity to it since I hadn’t lived it.
First, I wrote an 81-page novella. I sent it to him, state by state. I did New Jersey and then Arizona and then Northern California. Some of it was exactly as he told me it happened, then there were things that I made up, and he said that it was sort of weird to see his life played around with like that. He said, “Let’s make an outline as if we’re going to make a movie of this, but I’m still not committed.” So, we’re outlining on Zoom during the summer [of 2020] and all the way through September [2021]. And Arnold had died that August.
West Side Story was dedicated to him…
Yes, his father loved, loved, West Side Story. We took it as our goal that we were going to make a fictional story—even though it was rooted in his memory—that anybody could watch and hopefully enjoy, get pleasure from in some way, even if they didn’t know Steven had made this movie or didn’t know who Steven Spielberg was. That became the clear line. It was anything that didn’t justify itself in terms of its function in this fictional story.
That’s around the time that I made up the name The Fabelmans. I said to him one day, “What is this kid named?” and he said, “Samuel.” “What are his sisters’ names?” and he gave everybody their name. By the end of September, we had this pretty good outline that we were excited about and he said, “Let’s write it.” We met on Zoom three times a week, four hours a day, for two months and we wrote the first draft.
There are moments in the film that are identifiable for people who know a little bit of Spielberg’s young filmmaker stories, or saw the documentary, but then there’s these great extended scenes that feel incredibly textural and indelibly new. I could list a few of the ones that really stood out to me: Uncle Boris’s (Judd Hirsch) visit, and Chloe East, the Christian obsessed with the Jewish boy and taking him home to pray…
Those were so much fun to write.
Then you have this bully character, or rather, the Adonis bully character. In teen films, there’s always a bully, but it’s rare to see a bully like this who is actually kind of vacillating between dismissing things, laughing them off, or engaging as a traditional bully. And then of course over time, without spoilers, it creates this massive confusion for him.
I am so glad you caught that, in particular. The reason I love the central story of the camping trip and the footage of what the camera showed is that, and this is true for me as well as for Steven, and I think for anybody who uses art either as an artist or as an avid consumer of art, that one of its functions is to revisit what scared us. Especially when we’re little.
I was very close friends with [Where the Wild Things Are author] Maurice Sendak. I learned that the function of children’s literature, the function of a book like Where the Wild Things Are, which [Steven and I] talked about a lot when we were working on the movie, is that it scares the shit out of you the first time you read it. Then you read it over and over and over again. By the time you’re done, you’ve cycled through the book for a year or whatever and you’ve memorized it. The thing that scared you is now safe, it’s yours, you’ve incorporated it, you’ve survived the encounter with it repeatedly.
Art is a way, in childhood and also in adulthood, that we have of organizing existence, giving it meaning and making it less overwhelming and sometimes less menacing, less terrifying, so that we can encompass it, we can culturate ourselves to it and feel a mastery over it, and thus, over our life. Whatever weird chemistry in Steven’s brain that makes the inside of his head an editing room with incredible spatial sense and everything else… I was really moved by this kid, Samuel. He finds this camera which becomes a conduit for this gift that he has. The camera becomes his way of conquering the world.
But of course, as art always will, it leads you right over a cliff, because the world is not safe and it’s not ultimately containable. It reveals things he doesn’t want to see when he goes back to look at it. What kind of powers are you really putting in motion when you work in art? What do you control and what can’t you control? And it’s not just true of art, it’s true of anything.
So many scenes and characters in this movie that work extraordinarily well contain a power over Samuel that he’s not sure how to behave opposite of. There is a fear of being placed in front of someone, and you don’t know what energy they’re giving you or what they want from you, that is so off-kilter.
The dynamics of any family always involves secrets. Nobody is transparent to anyone. Your mother is not transparent to you, nor is your father, nor are they to each other. This business of being in a house full of people whom you know as well as you’re ever going to know anybody, who are also strangers to you because we all keep parts of ourselves sealed off, gives it a certain sense of complexity and menace. Because of my mother, who was a bassoonist, I felt a great connection with Steven’s mother, who was this frustrated but very talented pianist.
I’m glad that you picked up on Logan [Sam Rechner] being more complex, because I’m proud of that. In that first bullying scene, even when [Samuel] hits Logan in the head accidentally, his friend Chad [Oakes Fegley] goes crazy and Logan is attempting to calm it down. He has bullying moments, but he has more power, so he has more choices. Chad is full bully. This is to show a kid with a real problem [Chad] and the other kid is more complex [Logan].
He’s not invested. He’s not a real, full-blown sadist. We all met those kids in school, which this guy is not, but he goes along with it. When he’s with this friend, they become part of something ugly, and his girlfriend [Isabelle Kusman] hates that he’s that way. Some of that came out of Steven’s experience. Some of it, including one of the two names, is from one of my elementary school bullies.
There weren’t actually two bullies; I added the second one because I thought it would be interesting, because we began to play with the idea that he uses this film not just to flatter his tormentor, but to drive a wedge between the two of them… When he’s shooting, he thinks he’s figured out a way to weaponize [the camera]. He has an edit bay in his brain, remember. It reminds him, I’ll work with you [Logan] but you don’t actually control me. That’s that scene towards the end when, as you say, [Logan] winds up in a very confusing and surprising place. I love that scene.
You and Steven are both known to revisit and revise your work. Do you feel like, in talking this movie out with Steven and when it’s been shot, that there is a type of desire to revise how his family looked or how divorce looked in his earlier films?
It wasn’t spoken of directly but that would be interesting to ask him. When we did Lincoln, it was poor Sally Field’s first day on set, and she had to go in front of the camera with Daniel Day-Lewis. The first thing that we filmed was the big fight between Lincoln and Mary…
Steven always gets to the set early; he’s figuring out the shot, and I went up and said, “I just want to say good morning.” He said, “I’m really nervous.” I asked, “What are you nervous about? Because it’s Sally’s first day?” And he goes, “No, no, no, it’s not that. I’ve made so many movies; I’ve never filmed a flat-out fight between a husband and wife before. It makes me think about my mother and my father. I’m going to find this really unpleasant.”
We talked about it a little bit, and it was surprising to me because you think about the families in the Spielberg films, and they’re always very important and not happy families. They’re loving, but somebody’s missing. As in E.T. or Jaws or Catch Me if You Can, or certainly, the family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a fucked-up situation; families are splintered. That was intriguing to me, that he felt that way [when shooting Lincoln].
There were other familial moments where he was apprehensive. I’d often talk to him about Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. [O’Neill] wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1939. He put it in Bennett Cerf’s vault at Random House and put in his will: “No one can read this play until 25 years after I die. And it should never be performed by anyone on stage.” His wife broke the will immediately when he died, it was performed a few years later, and it became recognized as the greatest play ever written by an American playwright. His parents and his brother were dead when he wrote it, but O’Neill felt he was betraying them terribly by writing it. Tennessee Williams gave 50 percent of the royalties for The Glass Menagerie to his mother. It’s a scary thing to do, to put your family out in the world like this.
There were times in writing [The Fabelmans] where he worried, “Are people going to hate my mother? Are they going to think my father’s spineless?” It moved me enormously. This is one of the things that I love about working with him: he understands that in order to do your job, you have to scare yourself all the time. He picks projects that are anything but safe, that have huge challenges. Like, he’s never directed a musical before. Making the first studio film about Lincoln in 70-something years and the only one that’s ever attempted to deal with the administration—it’s not a biopic. Or Munich. I told him right before he started filming that “we’re going to get into so much trouble with this movie”. He looked nervous, but he said, “Okay, let’s get into trouble.” I like that courage. This was not an easy thing for him to put out into the world. He’s a very private guy, basically.
Something that you both and Michelle Williams as Mitzi Fabelman do very well together here is to show how charisma and confidence ebbs and flows with mania, which is often one-note in cinema. There’s a great line that Julia Butters’ character Reggie had—
The incredible Julia Butters.
Reggie’s line is something like, “It must be so hard to be with someone so accomplished and who everyone looks up to”, which is necessary for Samuel to hear. While the audience might look at her as selfish, her oldest daughter is able to define it for him with a fuller understanding of her mother’s increasing invisibility. And in that scene, he’s the selfish one!
I’m glad you picked that line. I mentioned to you my mother was a bassoonist. She was the first bassoon in New York City Opera. Then we moved down to Louisiana when I was two years old, and she continued to play and teach, but she gave up a career.
That was the Betty Friedan generation. The Feminine Mystique was just about to come out, but modern feminism was still forming itself. There was a sense that those women had, since World War II and obviously all the way back to Seneca Falls, a real sense that it wasn’t enough to be a wife, that you had other things that you wanted, and you maybe needed to think about doing something with them. But there was no consensus in our society or anywhere in the world that you should do something; it was still sort of considered forbidden. They were really on the cusp of this revolution. I felt that with my mother.
I can remember when my mother was in her 40s and 50s and the next wave—Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem and the founding texts of feminism—became available. She would gobble them up, but there was a painful sense that this had arrived maybe twenty years too late for her. Leah Spielberg may have been somewhat manic—some people say yes, some people say no—but certainly, apart from that, there is frustration.
I mean, these two people created Steven Spielberg! Part of what obviously went into Steven Spielberg was a need, a desire to perform and entertain, which his mother had. As I researched his family, I began to realize that Arnold Spielberg is a really historically significant figure in the development of computers. We make those claims in the movie, but that’s not an exaggeration. It’s there on record. He really helped to invent the idea of a computer having multiple users attached to it, and things that led the way to personal computing and Bill Gates and all that stuff. He was a seminal figure and not a showman, but a man with incredible authority. So you can see how these two people combine to make this guy. That’s moving to me.
Michelle, I’ve known her since she was a very young actress. I saw her in a production at the Berkshire Theater Festival of The Cherry Orchard, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I’ve always wanted to work with her and have chased her through various New York theaters for years. Paul Dano is just a magnificent actor, and what he does subtly and quietly… they’re perfect.
A final quick question: what do you think is the most underrated Spielberg movie, or one that people should revisit, that doesn’t get looked at as much now?
Oh god. I could answer that, if we can take away the “most” part of it, if it’s just one.
You can definitely do that.
I really love Ready Player One. I think people maybe didn’t get what [Ready Player One] is. It’s a really radical, experimental, strange movie. It’s the joy ride that it’s supposed to be. I’m sort of surprised that people were so put off by it. It didn’t get serious, critical attention… I think it’s beginning to get some now, which is why it’s hard to say “underrated” for Steven, because people are going to revisit his entire body of work and find new things in it all the time.
I really love Amistad. One thing people should know is, there’s an incredible episode on NPR where they revisited a big scandal in Oakland, California, when a school of Black kids were brought to see Schindler’s List and there were moments of light laughter.
I know the exact episode you’re talking about, yeah, This American Life.
That’s right. They did a deep dive twenty years later into what actually happened. They talk to the kids. I didn’t know the story and I was just listening to it, driving to my house one day, and Steven appears—not twenty years later, but in the moment that the story is getting coverage. Steven has this incredibly impressive role. He shows up at that high school with the Governor of California, Pete Wilson, who was Republican.
Everybody thinks they’re there to scold these kids for being insensitive, and Steven makes this great speech, and he says, “I’m here because I want to apologize to you. I think you’ve been treated badly. I don’t believe these reports of what happened. Schindler’s List is a hard movie. My own kids got freaked out in exactly the way I bet you got freaked out watching it. I think we owe you a big apology.” Then they all got together in this library with him, the students and Steven.
One of them said, “You’ve made a movie about your Holocaust; make one about ours,” and he asked, “Well, what is your Holocaust?” and the kids said, “The Middle Passage.” And the next movie Spielberg makes is Amistad. There’s a moment in Amistad, in the Middle Passage, when these people chained together are being thrown into the ocean. That’s just one of the most horrifying and indelible images of the monstrosity, barbarity, the satanic malice behind slavery. It’s a really interesting film.
Bridge of Spies is an amazing film. The Adventures of Tintin, which again, people I think “got”, but they didn’t completely get. Tintin is like watching the inside of Steven’s brain, where he could make these Rube Goldberg machines endlessly without being confined by actors or gravity or anything. It’s amazing to watch the constructions that he came up with in that.
Yeah, there are so many.
I’ve been talking too much. I said I could only do one and then I kept going… Oh, and Duel!
Oh, I’ll end there. Because the person who’ll look over this, that’s their favorite Spielberg, so it’ll be a treat to end on Duel.
Good, good. Pleasure to meet you, we’ll end on Duel!
‘The Fabelmans’ is in limited US release now and expands nationwide on November 23 courtesy of Universal Pictures.
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