Director does a Spielberg on past
STARS Michelle Williams and Gabriel LaBelle and director Steven Spielberg have opened up about his deeply personal new film, The Fabelmans.
“This movie is his life. You don’t want to ruin Steven Spielberg’s life!” laughs rising star Gabriel LaBelle when we sit down to talk about The Fabelmans, the veteran film-maker’s most personal movie yet, in which the 20-year-old plays his likeness.
“The first thing I asked him was ‘How much of this script really happened to you?’ And he said
‘All of it’.
“So I just tried to get to know him to the best of my abilities, ask him as many questions about his childhood, his relationships, what it was like for him growing up, the people around him, his perspectives on the world and how he felt about himself. Because then I could understand this character, and what story he really wanted to tell.” The Fabelmans, a coming-of-age drama directed by Spielberg, who co-wrote it with Angels In America playwright Tony Kushner, explores his childhood and seminal years through a fictionalised lens.
LaBelle plays Sammy Fabelman, a young aspiring film-maker who stuns his parents and peers with his innate directorial talent.
Over the years, he becomes the documentarian of his family’s life and creates his own increasingly elaborate productions starring his friends and sisters.
“I looked for somebody who was much more handsome than me,” laughs Spielberg (76), talking about casting Sammy. “I cast somebody who had insatiable curiosity, which I know I’ve always possessed. And, as a person, Gabe has insatiable curiosity.”
The Fabelman family move around the US, chasing patriarch Burt’s computer design career.
Paul Dano’s Burt, an ambitious but grounded computer engineer and loving father, contrasts with Fabelman mother Mitzi, played by Michelle Williams, an accomplished musician who gave up her artistic career to raise her family.
Spielberg based Burt and Mitzi on his own parents, Leah Adler and Arnold Spielberg, to whose memory the film is dedicated.
With a bold personality and restless soul, Mitzi loves her family, but it’s evident how much she has had to sacrifice to meet society’s expectations of motherhood.
Williams says she loved Mitzi’s “energy, her passion, her ability to fill up a room”.
“You know, I think it’s really why he made this movie,” she adds. “Because her presence, his father’s presence, continues to be so strong that he wanted to make something to honour them, and to bring them back for a short period of time… and then also forever. Like, they get to live in this movie forever.”
The Fabelmans is out today.