Steven Spielberg relives his childhood in “The Fabelmans”

Filmmaker tells, in his latest film, the awakening of his passion for cinema

Steven Spielberg his long-awaited debut The Fabelmans amid thunderous applause at the Toronto International Film Festival, his most autobiographical film and the one the 75-year-old director claims to have built for his entire life.

The Fabelmanswith whom Spielberg wrote Tony Kushner, largely based on the director’s childhood – his parents, played by Michelle Williams And Paolo Dano in the film and his initial training as a director. The film begins with a shy boy outside a cinema who goes to see his first film (The greatest show on earth). His mother encourages him: “Films are a dream, honey”.

“Obviously it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Spielberg said on stage after Saturday’s screening. 10. “I really didn’t know when I was going to do it. It’s not because I decided to retire and this is my swan song. Don’t believe any of this.”

Spielberg said he first talked about what he would become The Fabelmans with Kushner during the production of Lincoln, in 2012. The playwright, Spielberg said, played the role of the therapist as Spielberg unloaded his memories. But it was only with the pandemic that the director first decided to tell his own story.

“As the situation got worse and worse, I felt like I had left something behind, what was the thing that I really had to choose and present?” Spielberg wondered.

The director, whose three sisters were in the audience, added: “This film is a way for me to bring back my mother and father. It also brought my sisters – Annie, Sue and Nancy – closer to me. than I ever thought possible. So it was worth making the film. “

Universal Pictures will release The Fabelmans November 11 in New York and Los Angeles premiere nationally on November 23 – in Brazil, is scheduled for February 9, 2023. Its world premiere in Toronto at the Princess of Wales Theater was an important and unusual event. Spielberg said during the presentation that it was his first time in the official lineup of a film festival.

The two-and-a-half-hour film was immediately hailed as a grandiose and personal work for Spielberg, almost certain to play a starring role at the Oscars. In addition to Williams, who is pregnant with her third child, and Dano, the cast includes Seth Rogen as a close family friend, a short hit performance by Judd Hirsch, Jeannie Berlin, and newcomer Gabriel LaBelle, who plays Sammy. Fabelman, the young imaginary Spielberg.

“Steven was generous in letting us into his life,” said Dano, who had access to the director’s old photos, home movies, and long Zoom conversations with the director. “The goal was to capture your life.”

While there are cinematic moments that carry Sammy, fabelmans it may surprise some for the complexity with which it combines cinema and family life. Cinema, in this work by Spielberg, carries both a transforming power and something dangerous; a way to express genuine emotion and hide from it. Kushner, a frequent Spielberg collaborator, said the film demonstrates that “a film is an unreliable friend.”

“It will take you to a safe place and security is something unexpected and scary,” said Kushner. “It happens over and over in the movie.”

The Fabelmans it is populated by early experiments with Super-8 cameras, short films made with family members and increasingly ambitious short films. All mirror Spielberg’s early forays into film, although there are some differences.

“I recreated all the behind the scenes of this movie much better than when I was Sammy’s age,” Spielberg said with a smile. “It was a great turning point.”

Source: Terra

Emily

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