TIFF 2022 | Steven Spielberg debuts 'The Fabelmans', his memoir film

Steven Spielberg premiered his much-anticipated The Fabelmans to thunderous applause on the Toronto International Film Festival, debuting his most autobiographical movie and one the 75-year-old filmmaker mentioned he is been constructing towards his complete life.

- Advertisement -

- Advertisement -

- Advertisement -

The Fabelmans, which Spielberg wrote with Tony Kushner, attracts extensively from the director’s personal childhood — from his mother and father, performed by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano within the movie, and from his early formation as a filmmaker. The movie opens with a timid younger boy outdoors a cinema going to see his first film ( The Greatest Show on Earth). His mom encourages him: “Movies are desires, doll.”

“It’s something obviously I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Spielberg said on stage after the screening late Saturday. “I did not actually know once I was going to get round to this. It is just not as a result of I made a decision to retire and that is my swan music. Don’t consider any of that.”

Spielberg said he first talked about what would become The Fabelmans with Kushner during the making of Lincoln. The playwright, Spielberg said, played the role of the therapist as Spielberg unloaded his memories. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that the director resolved to tell, for the first time, his own story.

“As things got worse and worse, I felt if I was going to leave anything behind, what was the thing that I really need to resolve and unpack?” said Spielberg.

Spielberg, whose three sisters were in the audience, later added: “This film is for me a way of bringing my mom and dad back. And it also brought my sisters — Annie and Sue and Nancy — closer to me than I ever thought possible. And that was worth making the film for.”

Universal Pictures will release The Fabelmans on November 11 in New York and Los Angeles before releasing on other Us theatres on November 23. Its world premiere at TIFF — which happened to immediately follow Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery at the Princess of Wales Theatre — was a major event and an unusual one. It was Spielberg’s first film at TIFF, and he said while introducing the film that it was his first time in a film festival’s official lineup.

The two-and-a-half-hour film was immediately received as a grand and personal opus for Spielberg, all but certain to play a staring role at the Academy Awards. Aside from Williams, who is pregnant with her third child, and Dano, the cast includes Seth Rogen as a close family friend, a brief standout performance from Judd Hirsch, Jeannie Berlin and newcomer Gabriel LaBelle who plays Sammy Fabelman, the fictionalized young Spielberg.

“Steven was generous about letting us into his life,” said Dano, who said he had access to Spielberg’s old photographs, home movies and lengthy conversations over Zoom with the director. “The goal was to capture a life lived.”

While there are vividly drawn moments of movies transporting Sammy, The Fabelmans may surprise some for how complexly it weaves filmmaking and family life. Cinema in Spielberg’s film is both a transformative power and something dangerous; a way to express genuine emotion and to hide from it. Kushner, a frequently collaborator with Spielberg, said the film demonstrates how “film is an unreliable friend.”

“It will take you to into a place of safety and right through safety is something unexpected and scary,” mentioned Kushner. “It occurs time and again within the film.”

The Fabelmans is populated by early experiments with 8-millimetre cameras, little films made with relations and more and more bold brief movies. All mirror Spielberg’s personal first forays into filmmaking, although there are some variations.

“I made all of the behind-the-scenes stuff on this film significantly better than the precise movies I made once I was Sammy’s age,” Spielberg said with a smile. “It was a fantastic do-over.”