10 Behind-the-Scenes Facts You Might Not Know About ‘The Fabelmans’

Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Script Was 17 Years in the Making

Spielberg started discussing the idea of making a movie about his childhood with Kushner while they were working on “Munich” in 2005. Kushner recalled that during a lull on the first night of filming, he asked Spielberg when he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker. Spielberg responded by telling him how he shot a video of his family’s camping trip and realized that his mother was in love with his father’s best friend while editing the footage. Kushner instantly knew that the story had cinematic potential.

“I said, ‘That’s an absolutely astonishing story, and someday you have to make a movie about it,’” Kushner told IndieWire. “He sort of laughed it off, and I wasn’t serious — I mean, we had never worked together before.”

The idea stuck in their heads, and they began to pursue it more seriously during the pandemic after completeing “West Side Story.”

“His mother had died about two years before we started filming ‘West Side Story,’ and his father was 102 and going into a pretty steep decline,” Kushner said. “It was clear that he wasn’t going to live a lot longer, and I think that made Steven think that it was possibly time to give this serious consideration.”

The Writing Process Was the Fastest of Kushner’s Career

One benefit of thinking about a script for nearly two decades before you sit down to write is that the process can go pretty fast when you eventually start.

Speaking to IndieWire on the red carpet of the film’s Toronto premiere, Kushner explained that their close relationship and decades of planning led to a quick writing process during the pandemic. “We wrote three days a week, four hours a day, and we finished the script in two months,” he said. “Ny leagues the fastest I’ve finished anything. It was a blast. I loved it.”

Many of Spielberg’s Collaborators Spent Time with His Actual Family

Spielberg tends to keep working with the same collaborators for decades, so his movies are always something of a family affair. He’s worked with composer John Williams and editor Michael Kahn since the 1970s and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski since the early 1990s — and those men had all met Spielberg’s actual parents at various points. That made the process of making a movie about the Spielberg family considerably easier. 

“I knew these people,” Kaminski told IndieWire. “I’ve been around the family for close to 30 years.”

As for the collaborators who didn’t have a chance to meet Spielberg’s parents? The rest of his family still tried to make them feel welcome. Michelle Williams recalled spending time with Spielberg’s sisters before she played his mother in the film.

“They were very generous,” Williams said. “There was so much information about the family, so many beautiful home movies and photos and recollections. Even spending time with Steven and his sisters. [Rehearsing was about being] allowed in and getting to know somebody.”

One of the Film’s Most Iconic Shots Was an Accident

One of the most famous images from “The Fabelmans” is a shot of a young Sammy projecting film onto his hands. It’s a perfect metaphor for one of the film’s key ideas: Sammy saw filmmaking as a way to gain control of an otherwise chaotic world. You might think something like that was one of the first things that Spielberg planned, but Kaminski told IndieWire that it only happened because Spielberg happened to project something on his hand while they were watching old home movies during pre-production. 

“Steven was just looking at that image and he said, ‘Wow, that is such a beautiful thing,’” Kaminski said. “That digital projection on his hand was so romantic and such a metaphor of the entire movie: [Sammy] can have the image in his hand and shape it.”

The Production Team Meticulously Recreated Spielberg’s Childhood Films

For serious cinephiles, one of the most fun parts of “The Fabelmans” was getting a window into the films Spielberg made as a child. The early WWII and Western stories that he shot on 8mm film with his friends are the amateur first entries in one of the greatest professional filmographies ever, and Spielberg’s teams went to great lengths to recreate them. 

Spielberg’s longtime production designer Rick Carter explained that Spielberg sketched out the sets and storyboards from his childhood films to the best of his recollection, and then the team went to work bringing them to life using the same equipment that he had used as a teenager.

“The most interesting one was in Phoenix,” Carter said of the western they recreated. “Because, as a filmmaker, he became more himself. So not only the equipment that was there is accurate, but all the storyboards that Sammy used to make his movies. And Steven drew all the storyboards, and he still draws his storyboards the way he did as a teenager.”

…Up to a Point

While Spielberg’s collaborators wanted viewers to see what his early films really looked like, they also knew that they needed to sell the audience on the idea that Sammy was a filmmaking genius. Since they didn’t have the luxury of showing him at the peak of his prowess directing films like “Jaws” and “Schindler’s List,” they made a conscious choice to execute his early films slightly better than the real Spielberg did. 

“We had to make them better than he had done it,” Kaminski said, with Carter adding that the end result “is not only what it was — it has a different and even more meaningful resonance based on how [Spielberg] thinks about it now.”

The Monkey Is a Hidden Link to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

“The Fabelmans” is the only Spielberg movie that’s overtly about his own life, but like any great artist, all of his work is influenced by his childhood. The newfound knowledge about Spielberg’s family has caused many viewers to draw parallels to his other films, including his own collaborators. 

Production designer Rick Carter recalled the scene where Spielberg’s mother brings home a monkey in an attempt to add some life to the family’s new California home. It made Carter understand how Spielberg’s affection for his mother seeped into “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in a scene where a monkey saves Indiana Jones’ life. 

“Now you see the code and that the monkey actually goes back to his mother,” he said. “It’s not A-to-B clear, it’s the intuitive, associative quality that’s on display in ‘The Fabelmans,’ and has been played out in front of us for 40 years.”

Laura Dern Convinced David Lynch to Play John Ford

“The Fabelmans” ends on a memorable note, when Sammy Fabelman is invited into John Ford’s office for some life advice. The scene is a recreation of an encounter that a young Spielberg had with Ford. Finding the right actor to play the legendary director was no easy task, so Spielberg turned to another legendary director and cast David Lynch.

In an interview with IndieWire, Kushner recalled Spielberg’s excitement when Kushner’s husband suggested Lynch for the role. But neither of the two men thought Lynch could be persuaded to take the job, until Laura Dern stepped in. Once she reached out to her “Wild at Heart” director, he said yes fairly quickly. 

“I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ And I called Steven and Steven said, ‘Oh my God… but he’ll never do it,’” Kushner said. “And then he thought: Laura Dern. So he called Laura Dern and Laura Dern called David. And it happened.”

Sammy Fabelman’s “Hogan’s Heroes” Interview Was a Full Circle Moment for Editor Michael Kahn

Towards the end of the film, Sammy Fabelman tries to jumpstart his filmmaking career by interviewing for a job as a production assistant on “Hogan’s Heroes.” Like everything in the movie, the scene actually happened to a young Steven Spielberg. But that was news to Michael Kahn, who had been an editor on the hit sitcom before beginning to work with Spielberg on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Kahn told IndieWire that he had no idea that Spielberg interviewed for the job until he began editing the film. 

“I didn’t even know he was going to shoot the ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ scene,” Kahn said. “I was so surprised when I saw it. I think it was very nice. When we had our first meeting [for ‘Close Encounters’], he knew I had done ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ but I didn’t know that he applied for a job on it.”

Sammy Fabelman’s War Movie Foreshadows “Lincoln”

One benefit of recreating Spielberg’s earliest films is that sharp-eyed observers can look for images that he eventually re-used in his Hollywood movies. Rick Carter told IndieWire that one of the final shots of Sammy Fabelman’s WWII film “Escape to Eternity,” in which a general looks out at a sea of dead bodies, shows up again in “Lincoln” when Daniel Day-Lewis surveys the wreckage of a civil war battlefield. 

Carter said that he could see Spielberg working through his parents’ divorce in both scenees. He singled out the shot from “The Fabelmans” as evidence that Sammy is also using that character to convey something about what he’s feeling about his father and the secret that he’s becoming aware of.