Mazel Tov, Steven Spielberg

It’s been a fantastic week for Steven Spielberg. Just one day after his film The Fabelmans won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, and winning the award for best director for The Fabelmans, he just received his 13th nomination with the Directors Guild of America, breaking his own record.

It took Spielberg decades to co-write his deeply personal, semi-autobiographical drama, which is loosely based on his Jewish childhood. Examining his relationship to filmmaking and his experiences with antisemitism, the movie is a love letter to his mom and looks back at cherished memories with his family.

“There's five people happier than I am,” said the Oscar front runner, as he triumphantly accepted the accolade. “There's my sister Anne, my sister Sue, my sister Nancy, my dad Arnold and my mom, Leah. She is up there kvelling about this right now!"

While his parents had repeatedly encouraged him to write a coming of age script about their early life, the legendary director held back his thoughts.

"I've been hiding from this story since I was 17 years old," he acknowledged. "I put a lot of things in my way of this story. I told this story in parts and parcels all through my career. E.T. has a lot to do with this story, Close Encounters… but I never had the courage to hit this story head-on until (playwright/screenwriter) Tony Kushner, when we were working on Munich...sat me down and said, 'Start telling me about all these stories I've heard about your life.' And we started a conversation."

In writing, Spielberg came to terms with the ghosts of his past.

(From left) Natalie Fabelman (Keeley Karsten), Lisa Fabelman (Sophia Kopera), Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams)and Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle)

“Everything I’ve done up to this point has made me ready to finally be honest about the fact that it’s not easy to be a kid. Everybody sees me as a success story… But nobody really knows who we are until we’re courageous enough to tell everyone who we are.”

He added, “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out when I could tell that story, and I figured out when I turned 74 years old. I said, ‘You better do it now.’ And I’m really, really happy I did.”

Backstage in the pressroom, he opened up further to the journalists present.

“I think in a way, I had to find forgiveness. The Fabelmans is an act of forgiveness. It is how I was able to forgive and how my parents were able to forgive each other. So at the core of this really is wanting to be able to have a conversation with my past, that I would be very proud to share with a lot of people I don’t know.”

Spielberg hopes that when young filmmakers watch the film, if they have an idea that they don’t know how to express it in words, they can take out their device and express it on their video apps.

“The idea is, they have a plan, they call their friends and have a time they are going to meet the next day… I wish for that filmmaker to have no sleep that night! To be so excited, to get up in the morning and tell that story, even if it’s to his camera phone. That’s how it worked for me in eight-millimeter. I know that’s how it works with a lot of young people today. You have to be able to be so excited about storytelling that you literally can’t eat or sleep! And keep track of where the horizon is!”

In the production notes, Kushner talked about working with Spielberg.

“Part of the reason that we bonded during Munich the way that we did was that we both have a very powerful, bone-deep love of being Jewish and Judaism,” says Kushner. “That was just going to be part of what the story was going to be—a story about a Jewish family. The Fabelmans are who they are, and they live and own it so easily and proudly.”