How the Fabelmans screenwriter brought Spielberg's childhood to life

Screenwriter and playwright Tony Kushner has mostly worked solo throughout his career — notably on his Pulitzer Prize-winning post-AIDS play in two parts Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

But for almost two decades he has also worked alongside Steven Spielberg on screenplays, clocking up successes such as Munich (2005), Lincoln (2012) and West Side Story (2021). Now Kushner is collaborating with Spielberg once more, on the director’s most personal work yet.

The Fabelmans, which goes on general release in the UK next week, is a fictionalised account of the director’s own childhood.

At the Golden Globes last week it scooped up five awards including best motion picture, best director for Spielberg and best screenplay, and it’s tipped to do just as well at the Oscars in March. It stars There Will Be Blood star Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Judd Hirsch and features a truly exhilarating turn by Oscar-winner Michelle Williams, deserved winner of the Golden Globe for best actress.

“He’s given me tons of notes,” Kushner tells me when I ask about his working method with Spielberg, “but really incredibly specific and clear.

"I mean, he’s been a great dramaturg… and then, of course, [a great] director, [but] this was new, because it was just sort of decided that we would co-write the screenplay, or we were going to try to do that.

"I’d never co-written anything with anybody, and he hadn’t really either. So we thought, well, if we start this, and it’s just too weird, we’ll stop. But it was great, we did it. Three days a week, four hours a day on Zoom.”

Despite the very personal nature of The Fabelmans, Kushner is adamant that Spielberg was very gracious and open-minded with Kushner’s interpretation of his story.
“I interviewed him in the spring of 2020, and then in the summer.

"I took all the notes that I had and turned them into, like, an 80-page novella. That was an attempt to kind of fictionalise, which was also very important for me, because he had given me permission, in a way, to take his memories and play around with them, to try and adhere to them, but rearrange the sequences. And my job was to find a single narrative that would weave [together] all of these different memories.”

Kushner was born in Manhattan in 1956, but his family later moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana in the American Deep South.

Like Spielberg, there was music in Kushner’s family background; his mother, Sylvia (née Deutscher), was a bassoonist, while father William David Kushner was a clarinettist and conductor.

“We both had mothers who were musicians,” says Kushner. “Mine was a successful artist until she found the conflict between family and professional career unmanageable, and she never stopped being a professional musician.

"But when we moved to Louisiana, her career opportunities became limited. And then she had more time on her hands. [So] she started acting and she was a really good actress, and that’s when I first saw my first plays, with her in the middle.”

I ask if growing up in such a non-Jewish community had anything to do with his ability to write Jewish characters so vividly and seemingly effortlessly. “I think that there was a very deep connection that we made during the course of Munich, our first film together.

“Our feelings about Judaism, about being Jewish, about being Jewish Americans, about Israel and the conflict. And there was a controversy about Munich when it first opened, which was difficult for both of us, [so] there was further bonding there.”

The film, about the attack on Israeli Olympians at the 1972 Olympics, was criticised because some Jewish organisations felt it created a moral equivalency between slain Olympians and the Palestinians assassinated by the Israeli secret service, Mossad.

In The Fabelmans, Sam — the young Spielberg’s alter ego who is played by Gabriel LaBelle — relocates with his family to a predominately WASP-ish environment, and is subjected to antisemitic hate at school. How easy was it for Kushner to harness his own experiences to write those scenes?

“My sister and I were actually bullied by two kids in elementary school and I gave the name of one of our bullies, Chad, to the really disturbed kid in The Fabelmans. [But] it’s tricky.

"Anytime you write about antisemitism, it’s certainly going to be the case that there’s some antisemitic horror happening somewhere in the world, because it’s always happening.

!I mean, we wrote this during lockdown and during the Trump era, which certainly opened the doors for a lot of this, for the sort of recrudescence of this particular form of monstrosity to enter the discourse again, and also for acts of violence and antisemitic abuse from day one.”

Kushner goes on to recount an anecdote that had, only days before, horrified an audience at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

“My mother was dying in 1990, and in hospital in Louisiana, in Lake Charles. This very, very nice young woman, who was one of the nurses, sort of shyly came to my sister and I when we were standing in the hallway and said, ‘I understand that you’re Jewish?’

"And we said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘I hope this isn’t gonna offend you, but can I see your horns?’ I don’t think she was saying that we were devils, but there is this medieval thing… I assumed that had died out in the Middle Ages and it hadn’t.”

While Kushner certainly seems to be having a whale of a time working with one of his film heroes, it must be very strange for him to be giving all these interviews where he is mostly discussing another man’s history.

I wonder how he feels about his experiences working with someone as hugely respected as Spielberg.

“I’ll be honest, I’ve been on set with Steven for all our movies, and did an enormous amount of work on West Side Story, sort of screaming and yelling and working incredibly hard.

"And, you know, it wasn’t easy sometimes to read [a review saying] ‘Spielberg has reset cool as a fight over a gun’ and how wonderful that is. And it’s like — well, wait a minute. I did that.

"That’s in the screenplay; it was my idea. I’ve always been a part of being a member of a successful collaboration, and you have to say, OK, that’s gonna happen. I mean, I’m gonna get credit among people who really love my writing for certain lines in The Fabelmans that he wrote.

“Like, Lincoln is so talky,” he continues, “and it’s so clearly a filmed script that I got a lot of credit for that, and I felt very sort of full of myself. West Side Story, I felt like I was disappeared a little bit, I didn’t get a nomination, etc. So then, when we said, ‘This is gonna be Steven filming a movie about Steven by Steven’, I’m going to just vanish. And that’s not easy. I’m not a person with no ego.”

He chuckles. “And then on the other hand, I feel like Steven is a genius — a word that people use so indiscriminately, but I only ever use it very, very selectively. [But] I really think that guy is a genius, and [while] I’m very good, I think, at what I do, I’m not that.”

As our time comes to a close, I am reminded of the film’s truly extraordinary last scene: Sam Fabelman, who is now finally working in Hollywood, gets to meet one of his film heroes, the director John Ford. In the film Ford is played by none other than legendary filmmaker David Lynch.

“Steven told me the story, the scene is pretty much exactly [as he told it],” Kushner says. “It’s the only scene in the entire movie where the dialogue is exactly as he remembers it… and I mean, it’s exactly that. When we first started talking about the structure of the film, I was nervous about saying this because I thought he would fight me about it… and I said, ‘I think

"I know what the ending of this movie is.’ He said, ‘I think I know too.’ And then he said, ‘You go first’, and he said, ‘It’s the John Ford scene’, as if it’s exactly what I was gonna say. Because he told me that story years ago.

“We couldn’t figure out who to cast as John Ford.
“My husband [the American journalist and author Mark Harris], also had the idea of putting

"Rita Moreno in West Side Story and cast our friend Lynn Cohen as Golda Meir in Munich…

"So Mark had an idea. We were looking at all these different actors and he said, ‘What about David Lynch?’

“That day of filming was wild. I mean, everybody on the set was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re watching Steven Spielberg directing Gabriel LaBelle playing Steven Spielberg, in a scene with David Lynch playing John Ford. This is the most meta thing we’ve ever seen.’”

‘The Fabelmans’ is in cinemas from January 27