LIFE ON FILM

THE FABELMANS How Steven Spielberg brought his cine-memoir to the screen.

- JORDAN FARLEY

The idea of The Fabelmans – a semi-autobiographical cine-memoir inspired by a young Steven Spielberg’s life – has existed at least as long as his first collaboration with screenwriter Tony Kushner (Lincoln, West Side Story). On their first night of filming 2005’s Munich, Kushner casually asked Spielberg what had made him want to become a director. The resulting answer – a story about his formative years – felt to Kushner like the basis of a movie.

Though he suggested the idea then, they’d collaborate on three more screenplays (filming two) before working on The Fabelmans as cowriters, a first for their partnership. It wasn’t until September 2020 that their collaboration began in earnest.

“We got the first draft done in two months,” Kushner tells Teasers. “It was three days a week, four hours a day. I never work with anything like that kind of discipline. And even Steven was impressed with how fast that came together. So that was a wild difference.”

Kushner is candid about the disagreements he often has with the director on set, but the writing process was more relaxed. “Directing a movie – you’re commanding this entire city’s worth of people,” says Kushner. “So that puts us at loggerheads in a very complicated way.” The process of assembling the script really began in the spring of 2020. “I asked him all the questions that I could think of asking him about,” says Kushner. “And we sort of covered everything in his childhood. It felt overwhelming to both of us. How do we extract a coherent story out of this vast amount of material?”