Tony Kushner Talks Monkeying Around With Steven Spielberg’s Family Story In ‘The Fabelmans’

The Fabelmans reunites legendary director Steven Spielberg with acclaimed writer Tony Kushner, but it is the first time they have penned something together.

The fictionalized version of the filmmaker’s early and formative years is hotly tipped as a major player this award season. Dedicated to Spielberg’s late parents, Arnold and Leah, The Fabelmans cast boasts Paul Dano, Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, and Judd Hirsch in a scene-stealing turn.

I spoke to Kushner about where the journey into the past began, the wild ride that led them to places they never expected, and a monkey called Bernie.

Simon Thompson: What were your immediate thoughts when this first came up as an idea? The Fabelmans is one of many times you have worked with Steven Spielberg on something grounded in reality.

Tony Kushner: I have the four movies we’ve made together, but this is the first I have written with him. This was the only one that he didn’t come to me with. It was a late-night shoot on the first day of filming Munich in Malta, and we were about to blow up a hotel room. We were waiting for the explosives people to say that everything was ready, and we were just talking. We didn’t really know each other, and we’d only been working together at that point for two or three months. I said, ‘What do you think was the beginning of filmmaking for you? What do you remember about the days when you were deciding that is something I want to do?’ He told me a little about his early filmmaking as a kid and then told me this story at the heart of The Fabelmans, which was the camping trip. He also told me about the discovery he made in the camping trip footage he shot, and I was blown away by that story. I said, ‘Someday, you’ll have to make a movie out of that. It’s an amazing story.’ When he told me the story, he also told me the story of his parent’s divorce, the triangle at the center of that, and I found that it was this kind of an amazing love story. Over the years, we talked about different projects, and we always knew what our next project was. Right after Munich, he asked me to do Lincoln, and it was during Lincoln that he asked me to do this one script that we have, but we didn’t make, and we won’t make, but also West Side Story. Over the years, I hoped we would get to this, but I didn’t know that we ever would. Then a couple of years before West Side Story, his mother died, which was a big blow for him and his family. While we’re making West Side Story, his father, who was 102, was beginning to decline, and Steven was bracing himself for that happening. That led him to start to think about doing this, and during the rehearsal periods for West Side Story, he asked me if we could get together and talk about some of his memories, so I started taking notes. When the pandemic began, as his father was approaching his final days, we had more of those conversations, and I said, ‘I’m going to take all these notes and try to write them into some form of an outline. It turned out to be this 81-page, single-spaced proof.

Thompson: I heard it was pretty dense.

Kushner: Yeah. I had to think through like how to connect these things. With the inimitable depth of familiarity and subjective understanding that Steven brought to this material, it’s also good to have somebody who is standing on the outside looking in. From the day that I heard that story in Malta 20 years ago, I felt there was real meaning in this, and the more Steven talked to me about his life, the more a couple of themes began to emerge that I thought were powerful, profound and resonant and of real value. It’s a question of how we tell the stories we tell ourselves, the tools that we employ to try and make a world that is so menacing and unmanageable into a more habitable place and in our control. Those stories will invariably turn on us at some point because the world doesn’t become controlled and safe. Safety is always, on some level, an illusion, so at some point in your growth into adulthood, you’re going to realize that you haven’t made the world into a paradise for yourself. Also, the very thing you’ve used that has the power to organize reality for you also has the power independent of you and will lead you right over the cliff. It will take you to scary places, and this is worth exploring.

Thompson: When you were working together, did this go where you expected it would go, or did the journey and the narratives take you somewhere completely different?

Kushner: That’s a good question. This feels to me, and it felt like this to Steven as well, that this is what we had in mind when we started. This is the best version of what we thought we were going to set out to do, but there are a lot of surprises. The structure of it is very surprising to him and me. It’s a structure where a very intimate story needs to be told in an epic, episodic way. It covers three states in 13 years, so it’s got this kind of scope. It’s not Aristotelian and isn’t compressed and claustrophobic in the way many stories need to be to tell something small. It takes you on a journey, and you feel the length of it in your bones. We didn’t realize that when we were first working on it. When we were getting close to the end of the first draft, we thought there was something odd about this. As you say, it takes you in many different directions, and it was clear it would intertwine but also separate stories. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man and this terrible, painful marriage breakup, and these things were feeding on each other. In the moment with the campfire, they cross in a very violent and dramatic way, and we certainly had to work to ensure that we were servicing both sides of it and that they were connected all the way through.

Thompson: In The Fabelmans, you have these movies within it that Sammy, the fictionalized version of Steven, makes. They felt almost like sorbets in between courses of this cinematic meal. What was it like creating those movies within movies, rewriting a movie that Steven, in some cases, actually made? It’s meta, but it works.

Kushner: I would only disagree in one sense. They are a lot of fun to watch. He showed me the movies; they exist, not Ditch Day but the others, and they’re clearly the work of an incredibly inventive, wonderful, talented kid. In Escape To Nowhere, he does some things with a camera that eerily foreshadows what you see in Saving Private Ryan. I had to point those out to him because he was dismissive of it. He looks at them now and thinks that they’re kind of silly, but he loves and is proud of the things like how he made it look like the guns are firing or the catapult that he invented that would make it look like bullets are hitting the dusty ground. There are some serious thematic things going on. At a very early age, this is somebody who began to draw from his own life, from deep inside of himself, and put it into these existing forms and makes something new out of them. I was blown away watching them. The vertical motion of the narrative is the whole story is continued through those movies. I love the way they were filmed. We wrote the screenplay descriptions of them together. They’re based very much on his films, although we didn’t feel we had to stay with them blow-by-blow. We wanted to ensure that it didn’t do anything he couldn’t have done back then. Everything we filmed for those movies we filmed with the real movie cameras and then also on 8mm cameras so that Steven could decide what you would watch Sammy filming and then what you would see as the film he shot. All of that comes together in that extraordinary sequence in the empty house that Burt has built for the family, and Sammy is filming the marriage ending. The next scene is devastating, where they tell the kids what’s happening.

Thompson: Let’s talk about the monkey. Is it a real part of the story? Is it a metaphor or a McGuffin?

Kushner: I met Steven’s father several times but never met his mother. He was telling you more and more about her. My mother was a professional musician, a Bassoonist, and she gave up a very good career. She was first bassoon in New York City Opera and Sadler’s Wells, she recorded Stravinsky, and then we all moved to Louisiana, and she had to give up her career, so there was that connection between Steven and me. The more he told me about Leah and showed me photos and film footage, she just sounded like the most amazing character, like my mother. It was that generation right before modern feminism cohered into the activist movement that it became, so they were on the cusp of feeling like they should be liberating themselves. Still, there wasn’t a movement to support that yet. He would tell me these things about her, how they got to Northern California and all that stuff, and he said that she went through a real depression and Steven said, ‘I think that was after she got the monkey,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, she went out one day, and she bought a monkey, and we lived with it for a couple of years.’ I was like, ‘How come you never mentioned that before?’ I asked him what the monkey’s name was, and he said it was Bernie. You can’t make this stuff up. I mean, she buys a monkey and names it after her husband’s best friend with whom she’s madly in love. I just thought, ‘Okay, that’s absolutely going in.’ I mentioned that to Steven, and he was like, ‘Oh yeah. That’s interesting.’ After the divorce, Arnold married a woman named Bernice. As they say, Freud would yawn. You can’t make these things up.

Thompson: It’s so fantastical that it feels like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie.

Kushner: It was a very moving thing to me how deeply joined all of these stories that he was sharing were, even if we didn’t know yet how they joined up. The phone call by his dead maternal grandfather to his mother in the movie? That’s real. The big themes that run through the film and give it its deep internal structure are also there in Steven’s life, and even that was all a long time ago, as it lives now in his memory. His memory organizes his past in the same way it organizes his movies, so maybe it’s not so surprising.

The Fabelmans is in select theaters before going wide on Wednesday, November 23, 2022.