‘The Fabelmans’: Steven Spielberg Includes Easter Eggs From Indiana Jones, E.T., and His Other Iconic Films
Steven Spielberg has already contributed so much to cinema, and he’s not quite done. His new masterpiece, The Fabelmans, is set to be one of his most personal projects yet.
The idea for The Fabelmans has been incubating in Spielberg’s mind for decades. Now, he’s finally bringing the movie to life, and it is so special to him that he got emotional on set a few times. The film also contains easter eggs that harken back to Spielberg’s other hits, like E.T. and Indiana Jones.
‘The Fabelmans’ is special to Steven Spielberg
According to the Hollywood Reporter, The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg’s first story about his own life. The filmmaker has told hundreds of tales set in real and imagined worlds, but he has never actually put himself in front of the camera. In The Fabelmans, Spielberg tells a fictionalized version of his childhood. He told the outlet that The Fabelmans is “the first coming-of-age story I’ve ever told.”
Over the course of the film, Spielberg tells audiences about how his parents’ marriage ended and how Spielberg went from seeing them as larger-than-life figures to real people. The young Spielberg uses film and storytelling to deal with grief and the pain of antisemitic bullying. It is a story that has taken Spielberg a long time to tell, and he understands it is a privilege to tell it.
In a way, Spielberg’s past successes have given him the fame and prestige he needed to tell The Fabelmans story. Maybe that’s why he chose to honor some of those past successes in scenes he put in The Fabelmans.
Spielberg paid homage to his previous hits through easter eggs in ‘The Fabelmans’
Steven Spielberg and his writing partner told the Hollywood Reporter that they put easter eggs in The Fabelmans. There are scenes of kids riding their bikes, much like a pivotal scene in Spielberg’s E.T., and shots of characters hiding in closets. However, Spielberg didn’t want this to be a movie full of easter eggs that only his fans would get. It works for everyone, even those who have never seen a Spielberg movie.
According to ScreenAnarchy, Spielberg succeeded. Its review of the movie after the Toronto Film Festival tells the story of an enthralled audience watching a movie that is somehow universally relatable, despite being so specific to Spielberg’s own life. It is not chock full of easter egg moments for fans to analyze and dissect, but there are some.
Mostly, The Fabelmans is Spielberg finally showing audiences all of himself instead of just bits and pieces. It was no easy feat. Spielberg would get so emotional on set that he had to take breaks.
Spielberg got emotional on the set of ‘The Fabelmans’
Right before getting to work on The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s father died at 102. That couldn’t have helped Spielberg’s emotional state as he worked on a project about his childhood. Spielberg broke down a few times on set and had to take a break to get his emotions under control.
Every aspect of The Fabelmans was emotional to Spielberg. Not only did he have to film a movie about his childhood, but he had to make casting decisions about who would play the roles of his recently deceased parents. That alone was difficult. While having a Zoom conversation with Paul Dano about the role, Spielberg felt himself tearing up. “There was something so evocative of my dad. Ten minutes after the Zoom, I was choking. I was holding back my emotion,” he told the Hollywood Reporter.
