Steven Spielberg fictionalizes his childhood in ‘The Fabelmans’: NPR

“I was a fearful kid, and my parents didn’t really know what to do with it,” says Steven Spielberg. He is pictured above in New York in March 2017.

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“I was a fearful kid, and my parents didn’t really know what to do with it,” says Steven Spielberg. He is pictured above in New York in March 2017.

Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg still remembers the first time he went to the movies. His parents took him to see The greatest show on earth Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 drama is set in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, but there was a misunderstanding.

“I had never been to the movies,” Spielberg recalls. “And … In fact, I thought they were saying to me: “We’re taking you to the circus”. “

Settling into his seat in the theater, Spielberg felt betrayed. Where was the big tent? Where were the circus animals he was expecting? But then the red curtain opened and the movie started and it didn’t take long for her to fall in love.

“I didn’t understand the story, I didn’t understand what they were saying, but the footage was amazing,” he says.

Afterwards, he was haunted by a terrifying train derailment he had seen in the film. At home, he began to re-enact the scene, using his Lionel Electric train and his father’s 8mm camera.

“I really think it helped ease the fear…the idea of ​​using a camera to film,” he says. “That’s how my obsession with image making… led to storytelling.”

Spielberg went on to make more than 30 films, including Jaws, AND, Indiana Jones movies, Saving Private Ryan and the recent adaptation of West Side Story. He says all of his films are personal, but his most recent film — which he jokingly calls “40 million dollars in therapy” — especially is.

The Fabelmans is a semi-autobiographical film based on Spielberg’s childhood and adolescence. The film is about the tensions in his family during those years and why his parents divorced when he was 19. It also tells the story – in a fictional way – of how he fell in love with cinema and became a filmmaker.

Interview Highlights

To be a fearful child

There was nothing that didn’t scare me. I was afraid of everything. I was scared of that scary, bare tree outside the window that looked like it had tentacles, with those horrible branches and it looked like arms, long fingers and long nails. And the tree terrified me. Later, as an adult, when I wrote Fighting spirit, I created a tree by the window that comes to life and grabs a child and starts sucking him into one of his sappy nodes. And it was a direct flight of that tree out my window that scared me.

I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of small places — and I still am today. I am very claustrophobic. But I was a fearful kid, and my parents weren’t sure what to do with that, because my mom wasn’t afraid of anything and my dad was extremely stoic about things like that. And no amount of bedside talking could calm me down once the sun went down and I went to bed and my parents turned off the lights. The only consolation I guess I had was that they left my bedroom door cracked an inch or two. So I had this little comfort of an incoming hallway light, and that was about it.

Gabriel LaBelle embodies the young filmmaker Sammy in The Fabelmans.

Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures

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Gabriel LaBelle embodies the young filmmaker Sammy in The Fabelmans.

Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures

Learning his numbers as a kid from Holocaust survivor tattoos

That’s how I learned my numbers. It’s a very perverse version of sesame street, where I would be seated at these tables. I was just a child. I was like 3 years old. It was in Cincinnati. … I just remember sitting around the table and lots of very, very old people, and those people were probably not very old. They were probably in their 30s or early 40s, but when you’re a little kid, anyone who looks 30 or 40 looks like they’re about to die. … They mainly spoke either Yiddish, or they spoke German, or they spoke Hungarian. … My grandmother was their English teacher and she taught a class in the Cincinnati house, a large dining room table full of survivors. And one man in particular, I kept staring at his number tattooed on his forearm. During lunch break, when everyone was eating and not learning, he would point to the numbers and say, “That’s a 2 and that’s a 4.” And then he would say, “And this is an 8 and that is a 1.” And then I’ll never forget that, and he said, “And that’s a 9.” And then he cooked his arm and reversed his arm and said, “And see, it becomes a 6. It’s magic.” That’s really how I first learned my numbers. And the irony of it all and the gift of that lesson never really woke me up until I was much older.

On his early fascination with World War II because of his father’s stories

My father constantly told me stories about World War II. So I made war films in 8mm. Escape to nowherethat I describe in The Fablemans, is a real movie that I made when I was about 16 years old. …And because I was really obsessed with war, I made an air force movie about World War II called fighter squadron in black and white when I was about 14 years old. And so it just comes from my kind of fascination with what I watched on TV or the stories my dad used to tell me.

Steven Spielberg is pictured in a photo from 1978.

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Steven Spielberg is pictured in a photo from 1978.

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Sometimes my dad would have meetings with other members of his fighter squadron and the Ford 90th Squadron, and they would come over to the house sometimes, once every two years, and there would be seven or eight guys together, and I ‘ I was going in and out of my room or going into the kitchen, but I was hearing some of their stories and their conversations. And the thing that disturbed me the most was that all of a sudden a grown man would pull over sobbing, and my dad and everybody would sit down and… pat the person on the back and try to get a glass of water. And there would be tears. It’s unusual when you’re a child and you hear adults sobbing at home. … It wasn’t until years later that I found out that the PTSD that came out of that war was causing [it]. And that’s why it was so healthy for these veterans to get together once every two years.

To want to make a war film that does not glorify war

I knew from the stories my father and his friends told about World War II that there was no glory in war. It was ugly and it was cruel. It was visually devastating. And so I thought that one day if I ever do a war movie for real, it has to be something that tells the truth about what those experiences were like for those young boys of 17, 18, 19 who stormed Omaha Beach, say.

So when I had the opportunity to turn Robert Rodat’s screenplay into a film, Saving Private RyanI had read Stephen Ambrose’s book Citizen soldiers, and I got to know Steve really well. He became a consultant to me because he had spent time interviewing veterans who landed on this beach at 6:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944. And he had interviewed dozens of those guys in the first wave. And he actually sent me to interview a few of them myself to ask my own questions. And that’s when I realized that if I’m going to tell the story, it can’t be a glorification of war. It’s gonna have to be the low, dirty truth of what it was like for those young boys.

Steven Spielberg speaks onstage at the 2017 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Awards in Hollywood, CA.

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Steven Spielberg speaks onstage at the 2017 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Awards in Hollywood, CA.

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On her fear that the public wouldn’t see Saving Private Ryan because of the violence

It was DreamWorks money, and I was kind of convinced that it was going to lose its shirt, that every dollar that we invested in Ryan and the cost of the movie (which is now a bargain) but then the movie cost $59 million – shot in 97, came out in 98. I just wanted to tell the truth and didn’t think anyone would see this film. And I was absolutely surprised that so many people around the world went to see it. I was afraid that the first people who saw it would just say, “It’s too bloody, don’t put yourself to the test.”

Be a self-taught filmmaker

I didn’t go to film school. And I was self-taught, but I had great teachers. You know, all my influencers were the directors and writers of the movies I watched in theaters and on TV. And my film school was really the cultural heritage of Hollywood and international cinema, because there is no better teacher than Lubitsch or Hitchcock or Kurosawa or Kubrick or Ford or William Wyler or Billy Wilder or Clarence Brown. I mean, Val Lewton. I mean, these are my teachers.

Heidi Saman and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.