Screenwriter Tony Kushner on getting inside Steven Spielberg’s head with The Fabelmans

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Steven Spielberg does not have a therapist. He has Tony Kushner. Recently, the film-maker has taken to calling the multiple award-winning playwright exactly that. “It’s not something I love,” Kushner says. His career has already taken one surprise turn, a titan of the stage — his breakthrough play the trailblazing Angels in America — becoming Spielberg’s regular screenwriter. Their partnership has yielded a notable new movie: The Fabelmans, a metafictional coming-of-age tale based on the childhood of Spielberg himself.

The writer has spent a lot of time in actual therapy. (Spielberg has not.) An “inveterate Freudian”, Kushner is keen to draw a line between cute PR angle and fact. “Joking aside, it would be appalling to spend millions making a movie purely to work through your past. You should just go to an analyst,” he says.

On a flying visit to London, Kushner is in a genial mood, the conversation free range. While discussing the new film, any one answer may also reference medieval thought about the end of the world, the British Labour party, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, or the cultural place of Marvel movies (about which he is unexpectedly warm). A gifted dramatist, Kushner is also a roving scholar. His first collaboration with Spielberg came on the 2005 historical thriller Munich, hired in part, he says, for his knowledge of Israeli-Palestinian politics. In 2012, the pair made the admired biopic Lincoln. Kushner’s research was exhaustive. “For five seconds, I could have passed for the real thing at an academic conference.”

Steven Spielberg, holding notes, talks to three men on the set of ‘Munich’ in 2005
Steven Spielberg, holding notes, on the set of ‘Munich’ in 2005 © Alamy

Now his specialism is Spielberg himself. But both men, he says, were determined the film would be about more than just Spielberg: bigger than a scrapbook yarn for film buffs. And so, for one, it portrays how loving marriages fail. The adult Fabelmans are Jewish-American parents in the 1960s, fated to break up as Spielberg’s did. It also maps a path to adulthood for children of divorce. In the case of the couple’s fictionalised son Sammy, that means obsessively pursuing a calling that provides a sense of emotional control: directing films. “But of course, the fickle nature of art is that the better you get at it, the truer it becomes,” says Kushner. “And in truth, the world isn’t controllable.”

By design, the movie ends before Jaws, ET or Schindler’s List. But in that body of work, Kushner suggests there lies a lesson about the underrating of what — “for all the baggage of the word” — he calls Spielberg’s genius.

In 1991, Kushner premiered Angels in America. An epic, surreal panorama of gay history and the ravages of Aids set in 1980s Manhattan, it featured a namecheck for his future colleague. “Very Steven Spielberg,” a character notes at the arrival of a literal angel. If anyone took it as dismissive shorthand, Kushner says they had that wrong.

A female angel in black leather with massive extended wings straddles a man
A National Theatre production of ‘Angels in America’ on Broadway in 2018 © Sara Krulwich/Eyevine

The best comparison for Spielberg, he says, is Charles Dickens. “Because Oscar Wilde says awful things about Dickens’ sentimentality, but then you actually read Dickens. And there’s searing pathos. Outrage. Hallucinatory images. It redefines language. And it’s the same with Steven. People condescend to him with this idea he makes reassuring pabulum. It’s a great mistake.”

In a detail that might have been scripted itself, The Fabelmans was seeded the first night the pair were on a set together. Shooting Munich in Malta, Spielberg told Kushner a story about a youthful family camping trip. The writer was convinced it was the stuff of a movie, and said so. “Not that I was going to write it. Back then I thought Munich was just an odd blip in my playwriting career,” he says. 

As it turned out, work on The Fabelmans — which includes that campfire anecdote — would start while readying a third collaboration, their remake of West Side Story. It was now 2019. The mood was unhappy.

A teenage boy crouches as he films a young woman in a white shirt sitting by a campfire in the daylight with an old-fashioned camera
Keeley Karsten as Natalie, Sophia Kopera as Lisa, Michelle Williams as Mitzi and Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy in ‘The Fabelmans’ © Merie Weismiller Wallace/Amblin Entertainment

“We were having terrible arguments. Because musicals are hard, and I knew certain things about them Steven just didn’t.” (Among Kushner’s most successful plays is the musical Caroline, or Change, his own semi-autobiography, set in 1960s Louisiana.) Kushner says he sometimes followed a row with an angry 4,000-word email. “I had no real power, so instead I made noise.” 

After one “particularly ugly moment”, Spielberg extended an olive branch. In the wake of Munich, making a film about his early life became a “running joke” between writer and director. But the 2017 death of Spielberg’s mother Leah Adler gave it new gravity in his mind. Kushner was now invited to brainstorm. “Frankly, we just both wanted to not talk about West Side Story.”

Outside work, Kushner and Spielberg are friends without, the writer has said, holidaying together. Professionally, there may always be tensions between Brechtian playwright and Hollywood film-maker. But if Kushner brings the union a brilliance for wrestling history into drama, Spielberg has a secret weapon. “We’ve lasted because he listens.”

A man with grey hair in a mauve suit jacket walks down a street next to a man in a blakc jacket
Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner in New York in 2018 © Alamy

Likewise Kushner. With West Side Story complete, The Fabelmans took shape in a bloc of interviews. Most were conducted on Zoom. By now it was 2020. Covid cleared Kushner’s schedule. (His adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s revenge fantasy The Visit ran for barely a month at London’s National Theatre before the first UK lockdown.) That August, in the midst of recalling life with his parents, Spielberg was orphaned. His father, Arnold, died at 103. Work continued. With Kushner licensed to dramatise what he was being told, writing software let Spielberg watch his words as they appeared on screen.

At 66, Kushner is the younger man by a decade. Their early lives still often rhyme. Both are the grandsons of Jewish immigrants to the US, born into what were by then middle-class families. Childhood displacements followed. The Spielbergs moved from New Jersey to Arizona, then northern California; the Kushners left New York for Louisiana. Kushner’s mother, Sylvia, was a professional bassoonist; Leah Adler a concert pianist. “It was an era when society had just started to tell women: ‘Well, perhaps aspiring to be more than only a wife and mother is not completely evil.’ But they both still had to make difficult decisions.”

For many Americans, the 1960s remained a time of repression. Kushner would not come out as gay until 1981. Change, however, goes both ways. In The Fabelmans, the young Jewish hero experiences racial hostility, but only fleetingly. “We keep it in the proper perspective,” Kushner says. When he and Spielberg were young, the Holocaust had been uncovered recently enough for anti-Semitism to have withered from view. “At that point, we assumed forever. Apparently not.” 

Instead, the film comes out at a time when the grim babblings of Kanye West are just the most lurid examples of a surge in attacks on Jews in the US. “So watching the movie now, it can feel more front and centre.” Kushner adds a further thought: “I will also say having sympathy for the Palestinian cause is not the same as anti-Semitism.” 

A man in a colourful Hawaiian shirt smiles as he looks into a monitor
Steven Spielberg directing ‘The Fabelmans’

Kushner is more openly political than Spielberg and has long criticised Israel in particular. Today, he says the “real Zion” — the holiest of places — is “the 14th amendment of the US constitution: equal protection under the law, separation of church and state”. 

Another difference? As related in The Fabelmans, Spielberg chose to see life through a lens. But unless Kushner too now wants to pick up a camera — at this he violently shakes his head — his greatest inspiration remains a bare stage. Despite the screenplays, he still defines himself as a playwright. “I savour the unsuccessful illusion of theatre. A reality that is manifestly not real,” he says. Movies, he adds, overwhelm your senses and pull you into them. “But with theatre, you’re always confronted with the fact there’s this other thing called reality. And we construct that too. Which is every play’s most valuable lesson.”

Kushner can’t resist a therapeutic riff: “And my parents didn’t split up, so maybe I have less need for control.”

Unlike therapists, journalists always keep the subject talking. For a film lover, I say, The Fabelmans is double-edged. A celebration and prime example of intelligent, mainstream, American cinema, it is also one that, in 2023, feels like an elegy for it.

Tony Kushner wearing dark clothes, standing against a wall and smiling, his profile to the camera
Tony Kushner in London, 2022 © Rick Pushinsky

“Well, we’re in a genuine crisis. I mean, filming kinetic representations of human life with a scripted narrative will endure,” Kushner says. “But it does feel like real change is afoot.” He wonders aloud about a deeper transformation beyond the hump of streaming. Generation Z, he says, excites him with its “radical, clumsy, exhilarating” challenge to old orders. “And perhaps they’re also challenging the whole idea of the grand, flawless narrative. I’m a writer, and all writers want to write the perfect mousetrap. But maybe this new generation don’t want to be the mouse. Personally, I find that weirdly thrilling.”

‘The Fabelmans’ is in UK cinemas from January 27 and US cinemas now

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