The new film of the American director. The Fabelmans, is a touching ode to childhood, his family, cinema… The route of a talented artist.
Steven Spielberg has already mentioned his parents, his Jewishness and his childhood, here and there in his films, starting with: The third kind of dating To: Schindler’s list. But none of his works were as distinctly autobiographical as The Fabelmans, a declaration of love for cinema and his family, a trend he has been cultivating for nearly twenty-five years. The story is about Sammy Fabelman, an American kid who finds his passion for movies growing as his parents’ marriage falls apart. Decoding an exciting learning story with roots deeply rooted in the filmmaker’s past.
In the video: the trailer The Fabelmans
The birth of his title
In 1952, little Stephen saw his first movie in the cinema. Under the world’s largest block. At just 6 years old, he is terrorized by Cecil B. The central scene of DeMille’s feature film, the train crash. Back home, he decides to recreate the sequence in his electric train and films a makeshift remake of this disaster scene with his father’s camera. This first reconstruction started his passion and already formed a side of his cinema, turned towards the spectacular. Also, the director naturally makes it the starting point for the title of Sammy Fabelman, the young hero of his film, and an extension of it, even in his last name. If German, Spill means “game” or “game”, fable means “fable”.
His first “engine»
A troubled child, Spielberg takes refuge in images and behind his lens at the slightest opportunity. After discovering The man who shot Liberty Valance in darkrooms he canned his first homemade western with his scouting buddies and learned the D system by hiking with walkers. He continues Escape to nowhere, a short film to pay tribute to his World War II soldier father. the beginnings ofWe have to save soldier Ryan… In his youth, he made a good fifteen amateur adventure films, without which the idea;Indiana Jones or from Jurassic Park might never have sprouted in his mind. He edits each of these films the old-fashioned way, cutting and pasting each sequence by hand. A craft he sometimes says he regrets and pays tribute to The Fabelmans, which, moreover, also reproduces all these first founding shoots.
An inspiring family
Fabelman’s parents were largely inspired by the filmmaker’s parents. Leah, his mother, whom he often compares to Peter Pan, was a pianist, lively, irresponsible and the owner of a house monkey, just like her double, played by Michelle Williams. Like Paul Dano’s character, his father was an engineer at IBM. hardworking, has taken a stand and is very much in love with his mother. Their divorce had a great impact on the director, who in many of his films (ET, Sun Empire, AI artificial intelligence…), tells the children’s feeling of abandonment. But, regardless of the marks left on Spielberg, his father, mother and three sisters were also his first actors; he was constantly directing them in small short films and filming family gatherings. All of these archives were also made available to his cast prior to filming. However, these films are charged with a difficult past, which he recalls in the film. it was while flipping through one of them that he discovered his mother’s relationship with his father’s best friend. A secret that will blow up the hearth.
Discovering the stars
Learning history requires The Fabelmans also returns to the first emotions of love, school integration or loss of innocence. Like his film “Alter Ego”, Steven Spielberg thus admits that he was bullied by two anti-Semitic students who, by his own admission, did not ruin his school. Long before he was directing Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Hanks, he also discovered the aura of actors, the courtesy of certain faces, thanks to a film he made for his high school in which one of the athletes grabbed all the light. The result on the screen was so disturbing that the main stakeholder started crying and ran away after the screening. A true story brought to the screen again.
Film class
In the film, young Sammy moves to Los Angeles with his father and signs his first contract with a series studio. Papa Schultz. Pure fiction because it’s backwards Colombo and the fantasy series Night gallery that Stephen really cut his teeth. On the other hand, her brief encounter with cult director John Ford Liberty Valance and: The heroic charge It was very similar to the movie. Barely drunk from a date with one of his achievements, the American film legend, cigar in hand and eye patch in place, welcomes his admirer between two doors and asks him to point to the horizon line on the pictures. After the boy is done, the maestro gives him the key to the look of a good filmmaker. “When the horizon opens, it’s interesting. When it’s down, it’s interesting. When it’s in the middle, it’s terribly boring. It’s even more fun to point out that it’s David Lynch, another giant of cinema, who has assembled the myth here.
His manifesto
“You will live with your art, but it will break your heart, leave you alone, make you an exile.” A little history doesn’t say if this line, uttered by Sammy’s uncle in the film, is inspired by real events, but it sounds like a creed from a filmmaker who has dedicated his life to embellishing our lives for fifty years. stories are as personal as they are universal.
Source: Le Figaro
