‘The Fabelmans’: Steven Spielberg Revealed the Real-Life First Time He Ever Saw a Movie
Director Steven Spielberg tapped into his most personal film yet with The Fabelmans. It chronicled a fictionalized version of his life from childhood through some of his years as a young adult. Spielberg reflected on the first time that he ever saw a movie, which was covered in The Fabelmans. However, he provided a little bit more details regarding what was going through his mind at the time.
‘The Fabelmans’ is a reflection of Steven Spielberg’s life
Spielberg co-wrote The Fabelmans along with Tony Kushner. They collaborated to create a story based on the legendary filmmaker’s upbringing, but through the eyes of the fictional character, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). He learns his love for filmmaking, but it also leads him to discover some painful family secrets that will change his life forever.
The opening scene finds his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), and father, Burt (Paul Dano), taking him to the movie theater for the very first time. They took him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 drama called The Greatest Show on Earth. It’s a brief scene, but it ultimately sets up the remainder of the film for the pure wonder that the young boy developed for the art of cinema.
Steven Spielberg expanded on ‘The Fabelman’s opening scene seeing his first movie
According to an interview with NPR, Spielberg confirmed that the opening scene of The Fabelmans is fairly accurate. However, the film doesn’t entirely allow the audience into the filmmaker’s mind to hear exactly how the young boy felt about the experience.
“I had never been to a motion picture,” Spielberg said. “And … I actually thought they were saying to me, ‘We’re taking you to a circus.'”
However, he admitted that he felt somewhat cheated when he first entered the theater. Spielberg thought that there would be a big tent and circus animals, but was confronted with a silver screen instead. Nevertheless, he became “enchanted” when images started to grace the silver screen.
“I didn’t understand the story, didn’t understand what they were saying, but the imagery was amazing,” Spielberg said. But, the fear he felt after the famous train sequence initially haunted him. “I really think it helped assuage the fear … the idea of using a camera to film it. That’s how my obsession with creating imagery … led to storytelling.”
He was ‘afraid of everything’ growing up
Spielberg admitted that The Fabelmans was right when it came to his childhood fears. He was easily frightened, but filmmaking became the way that he confronted those fears.
“There was nothing that didn’t scare me,” Spielberg admitted. “I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of this … scary, naked tree out the window that looked like it had tentacles, with these horrible branches and it looked like arms and long fingers and long fingernails. And the tree terrified me.”
Spielberg continued: “Later, as an adult, when I wrote Poltergeist, I created a tree out the window that actually comes to life and grabs a kid and starts to suck them into one of its sappy knotholes. And that was a direct steal from that tree out my window that scared me.”
