Amid the rising Covid death toll I thought now is the time to tell my story: Steven Spielberg

This is your most personal experience work based on your childhood passion for movie making and reflects how it can illuminate things around us as seen through young Sammy Fabelman. Can you talk a little about making this film and what the power of movies in life is meant to you?

I thought it to be a lot easier than it turned out to be because I certainly knew all materials and all characters my entire life. Yet I found it to be a very daunting experience because I was attempting in a semi-autobiographical way to recreate huge recollections not only in my life but in the lives of my siblings and parents who are no longer with us. I felt a huge responsibility. It started to build when Tony Kushner (Producer) and I sat together and started working on this. Tony was always there as a counselor to get it out of me. I realised that there was no static distance between me and my experiences. I was not able to put a camera between myself and real things happening to me. I’ve always used the camera between myself and reality to protect myself. I couldn’t do it while telling this story.  The cast knew it was emotionally very difficult, not all of it but some of it was.

Talk a little bit about casting Gabriel in the role of Sammy with a breakout performance.

I was looking for a very good-looking and sexy person from Canada. Sammy is from Vancouver. Once again none of this is really easy because we don’t often see ourselves as our friends and families see us. As a kid growing up I have a lot of reasons why I was always at the corner. I was shy and also insecure while growing up. I needed to find someone that would not bring too much self-awareness to Sammy and could perform well enough to convince that there was (some) self-awareness. In Gabriel I saw the realism and the authenticity of the actor. He understands how to speak someone else’s words but also feels like he is making up the words as he speaks.

Would you share your personal experiences with your audience?

I have been very sad at times and I have been seeing divorces and such stuff traumatising the family. I thought I had to tell the story of my parent’s divorce when I was a teen. I wrote some pages about it and then I was carried away because there was something between me, and reality. So I put an alien between me and the reality of the divorce. I just wanted to tell a completely honest story with my recollections. I am not saying that all my recollections are hundred percent accurate but as best as I can recollect. I wanted to tell a story that most reflected my experiences growing up with my sisters who were here and their experiences growing up with me, my parents, and my Uncle Benny.

Also because of Covid none of us were working and were basically at home. My job as a director was social and involved meeting people and interacting with them. All my writer friends were working during Covid. But all my kids came back and all of us were under one roof and watching gloomy news about the pandemic and how it would affect us. The death toll was rising and I began to think how it would affect humanity. At that time I thought that now is the time for me to tell a story that I always wanted to tell, a story about coming of age in this very unique family, with a very unique mother and father. I felt this may be the best time with all the time that I had at my hands.  This was something I got to get out of me and I was also in my early 70s.

What is the one movie or movie-maker that really made you fall in love with movies? John Ford figures so prominently in the film.

Well, it was actually Walt Disney because you have to know the filmmaker. The first thing I followed as a kid was just movies by Walt Disney because that was the only exposure I had.  Afterwards,  it was Cecil B. DeMille. The first movie I ever saw was his The Greatest Show on Earth with that great train wreck scene. I actually recreated that train wreck just the way Sammy does on 8-millimeter film because I had to look at that over and over again to get it out of my system. So that was actually the first filmmaker that I was in love with.

But of course, it’s well known how much I love John Ford and I am not going to say too much about what is absolutely authentic and what is a little bit you know is invented based on an authentic recollection but I can say that John Ford happened to me word by word, nothing more nothing less.