3/30/2023 0 Comments Peter pan tree copy spaceBut as a filmmaker who's often accused of having a Peter Pan Complex (and who made a Peter Pan film called Hook), he let NPR's Terry Gross know that his films have always been filled with personal tidbits that armchair psychologists could sleuth out if they want - say, a gnarly tree outside his bedroom window that scared him as a toddler. It's intriguing to have it spelled out so clearly. Getty Images Steven Spielberg directs on set of the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.Īll of these moments are detailed in The Fabelmans, as is Jewish family life and youthful encounters with antisemitism that informed the making of Munich and Schindler's List. ![]() In real life, after listening to his dad's service buddies talk about their World War II experience, and watching war movies on TV, the budding 15-year-old filmmaker deployed his Boy Scout troop in a 40-minute battlefield epic called Escape to Nowhere. Wars of a more down-to-earth sort were Spielberg's starting point. Still, might that have been part of the attraction the filmmaker felt for the story of Catch Me If You Can, with its con-man father whose wife leaves him and marries his best friend?Īnd might it be why Tom Cruise spends the whole of War of the Worlds dodging aliens with two kids in tow, trying to get them back to their mother? He reconciled with the old man in adulthood, and the portrait of him in The Fabelmans is generous and empathetic. Spielberg has said that for many years he had a distant relationship with his father, whom he initially blamed for his parents' divorce though it was his mother who'd strayed. with its single mom, Jurassic Park with its unaccompanied grandkids, Empire of the Sun with its wartime separation of a boy and his parents - there are fractured families. The mom and kid the Dreyfuss character takes along for the ride are a sort of pick-up family unit, not his own wife and kid, which makes a certain amount of sense when you know that Spielberg's parents divorced while he was still in his teens. The Extra-Terrestrial.Īnd if you accept as autobiographical the scene where mom grabs the Fabelman kids and drives straight toward a tornado, it's clear where the inspiration came from for Richard Dreyfuss grabbing the car and heading straight for the UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ![]() Getty Images Spielberg directs on the set of the 1982 film E.T. The clowning around with props in a closet with his Fabelman siblings as Sammy starts making movies feels a whole lot like Elliott and his siblings getting acquainted with their otherworldly guest in E.T. And once you're in that "origin story" head space, you'll start seeing parallels in other scenes. Watching what little Sammy comes up with in The Fabelmans, it's hard not to think of the evocative train sequences in Spielberg films, from the Indiana Jones movies to Schindler's List. Great plan, though the six-year-old ends up staging many, many crashes as he works to get the camera angles just right. "Only crash the train once, OK? Then after we get the film developed, you can watch it over and over 'til it's not so scary any more." "We're going to use Daddy's camera to film it," she says. The delight fades when Sammy starts crashing his expensive Lionel model trains, but mom realizes he's trying to get past his fear, and has an idea. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) is a circus story, but its most famous scene is a train crash that terrified little Stevie (and Sammy in the movie).Īfter sitting wide-eyed through the film, Sammy goes home and, to his dad's initial delight, asks for a model train set for Hanukkah. The Fabelmans begins by dramatizing a story Spielberg's been telling interviewers for years about the first time his parents took him to a movie. Close Encounters has a lot to do with this story."Īnd now, armed with The Fabelmans as a key to unlock the code of his other pictures, it's easy for audiences to tease out what he means. "I've told this story in parts and parcels all through my career," he continued. ![]() Hiding in plain sight, let's note, since he's been making movies pretty much non-stop in the ensuing years, including such era- and genre-defining smashes as Jaws, Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones films, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln.īut he's right that The Fabelmans is different - a lightly fictionalized version of the filmmaker's own life, without raptors, sharks, or historical figures for him to hide behind. ![]() "I've been hiding from this story since I was 17 years old," Steven Spielberg told the audience as he accepted the directing prize for The Fabelmans at this year's Golden Globes ceremony.
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