For over half a century, Steven Spielberg has been directing enormous groundbreaking blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, and Ready Player One. However, according to the filmmaker, the most daunting project of his career has been The Fabelmans.
This might come as a surprise because The Fabelmans is not a blockbuster, an action movie, or technically complex. Instead, it is a story about a young boy growing up in the 1950s and learning about the power of movies. As seen in the recent first The Fabelmans trailer, it's a small and quiet examination of childhood, family, and dreams about the future. What makes the film so interesting though is that it is based in part on Spielberg's real childhood.
Back at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film made its world debut, Spielberg spoke about his experience making the film and how difficult it was. “I thought it was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be. I know the material and I’ve known all the characters my entire life, but I found it to be a very daunting experience,” Spielberg said in Toronto, per Deadline. “I was attempting in a semi-autobiographical way to recreate huge recollections, not only in my life but in the lives of my three sisters and my mother and father who were no longer with us and the responsibility of that began to build. As we started working on this, I realized there would be no aesthetic distance between me and the experience. I wasn’t going to be able to put a camera, the way Sammy is able to put a camera between himself and horribly realistic things that are happening to him."
“I’ve always been able to put a camera between me to protect myself and I couldn’t do it telling this story. The cast knows this was, emotionally, a very difficult experience. Not all of it, but some of it was really, really hard to get through," Spielberg continued. At Toronto, Spielberg revealed that Sammy's short films in The Fabelmans are based on things he really shot as a teenager. He recalled that with one of these, he even toyed with ideas that he would later use in Saving Private Ryan, and had the crew watch his teenage short film on set. “They were all gathered around the monitor. I wanted to show them, this old movie I had made when I was like 16 years old. I think to an actor, they all felt. ‘What are we doing in Ireland with this guy? Is it gonna look like that? Why is he showing us this?'”
Spielberg looks back fondly on his days spent shooting 8mm films as a teenager. “Not a lot of people were going out and shooting 8mm. It was physical, it was a craft. There were no pro tools," he said. "You had to sit there with a bud splicer and scrape the emulsion off in order to get a seal when you put glue on it. You literally had to glue the film together. I miss it. I was the very last person to cut on film in Hollywood.”
In the movie, young Sammy Fabelman is encouraged by his mother not to give up his dream of making movies. Throughout, we see him passionately making short films on his small 8mm camera, including using his toy train set to make a film about a train crash.
The Fabelmans releases theatrically on November 23, 2022.
Source: Deadline