Spielberg leans on playwright
Tony Kushner on playing therapist to director.
NEW YORK — “The Fabelmans” is Steven Spielberg’s most autobiographical movie, but the introspection it required wasn’t done in isolation.
The film, rather, grew out of conversations between Spielberg and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, the “Angels in America” playwright who penned three of Spielberg’s best films: “Munich,” “Lincoln” and “West Side Story.” As Spielberg reflected on his childhood memories, he had in Kushner one of the most decorated therapists anyone’s ever had: a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright turned amateur psychiatrist.
As one of the great dramatists of the last half century, Kushner is used to doing copious amounts of research. (Spielberg once bragged that Kushner read 400 books on Abraham Lincoln in preparation for their 2012 historical drama.) But this time, most of the investigative work was long chats and Zooms during the pandemic that dug into Spielberg’s roots as a filmmaker and the two figures most responsible for making him who he is: his mother, Leah Adler, and his father, Arnold Spielberg. In “The Fabelmans,” they’re fictionalized as Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano).
“The Fabelmans,” which has opened in select theaters and expands today, opening locally, is the first time Kushner and Spielberg have shared screenwriting credits. And it represents the closeness that’s evolved in their ongoing collaboration. In a recent
interview, Kushner reflected on their dialogue together on “The Fabelmans,” his own upbringing and his unexpected second career as a screenwriter.
AP: While making “Munich,” Spielberg first told you about a formative moment for him relating to a home movie he shot that contained a family revelation. In the film, it’s a powerful, almost Rosebud-like moment. Was that the initial germ to making “The Fabelmans”?
Kushner: I didn’t know it at the time when he first told me — it was the first day of filming on “Munich” — but it rang a lot of bells for me. Not just as a kind of amazing thing that happened, which it is, but also that it speaks to certain things that I feel create the spinal cord of this movie. What it has to say about the uses of art as one is growing up in trying to make a world that isn’t safe and that is unmanageable and overwhelming into a place that one can inhabit with an illusion of security and an illusion of control. The more masterly you get over the tools that produce these illusions, the more powerful those tools become. But they have a life of their own and they will lead you places you didn’t expect to go. They turn out to be a means of both self-protection and self-exposure, of safety but also danger.
AP: Spielberg has never seemed to me someone naturally prone to self-reflection. Did your conversations about his childhood strike you as different?
Kushner: I’m not in therapy and psychoanalysis right now, but I’ve done many, many, many years of it. I’m a confirmed old Freudian. Steven has not spent a lot of time in therapy and doesn’t really want to — which is true of a lot of artists. For the most part, it felt like a continuation of our conversation. It became a little more instrumental and pointed. I began to grill him about certain things. There were some places where he let me know there was a kind of pain he didn’t particularly want to share. I didn’t want to be intrusive. I have good manners. Sometimes I even thought: Would a tougher interviewer bust him on this and make him divulge these things? He also was so forthcoming and open and generous. His mother had just died before we really started working on “West Side Story,” and his father at 102 was going into his final decline while we were filming. So at a fairly old age, in his 70s, Steven was arriving at orphanhood. He was in a period of mourning.
AP: The mother in “The Fabelmans,” as played by Michelle Williams, is an enormously rich, complicated character who’s largely drawn from Spielberg’s own mother, a pianist who gave up performing to raise their family. But is there some of your mother there, as well? She was a concert bassoonist and an actor. You’ve described her as having “a very deep and somewhat tragic sense of life.”
Kushner: It certainly made it possible for me to understand Mitzi/leah, who I didn’t meet. It gave me insight and made it possible for to really dig in with Steven in thinking about his mother and her choices and her behavior, including some of the more outlandish things she did in terms of being a woman of real artistic ability. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the women of that generation, specifically. This is before modern, post-war feminism has really cohered into a visible movement. It’s the Betty Friedan moment, where it’s beginning to cohere. For women like Steven’s mother — my mother was a bit younger — they were aware that there was something coming. That the role of women had changed profoundly over the course of the 20th century and that new possibilities were opening, but opening up in fitful ways. It was an exciting period, I would imagine, but also a period filled with a lot of uncertainty and pain and guilt, I think. That became really important to me and to Steven in thinking about her. We talked about the similarities a lot.