Tony Kushner And Michelle Williams Dish On ‘The Fabelmans’

Tony Kushner, screenwriter of The Fabelmans, a fictionalized version of the life of filmmaker Steven Spielberg, and Michelle Williams, who portrays Spielberg’s mother, recently spoke in New York about the process of making the film.

Interviewed by Annette Insdorf at 92NY, Kushner said he and Spielberg wrote the script for the film—Spielberg’s last screenwriting credit was for the 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence—over Zoom, starting in the summer of 2020 and working on it three days a week for four hours each day for two months. He said there were ultimately 11 drafts of the script.

Kushner, who also worked with Spielberg on Munich, Lincoln and West Side Story, called The Fabelmans screenwriting experience “The most fun I’ve ever had writing anything. I loved it.”

Williams said she was “so moved” by the character of Spielberg’s mother, whom she portrays in the film, when she read the script.

A mother herself of three children, Williams suggested “a good mother is a woman who makes choices, who’s in turn with herself so she can answer her own questions, acts on the answers she receives when she listens to her heart. She searches her soul, and when she finds an answer to she moves in that direction.”

Spielberg’s mother—who both in the film and in real life divorces his father to marry one of his father’s business colleagues—“made a choice,” Williams added. “She liberated herself. It liberated each one of her children. They are happy and they are free.”

Williams also said she had a “really had time leaving” The Fabelmans.

“I cried so hard when we wrapped our last scene”

Kushner also said he had written a treatment about something that happened to Spielberg shortly after the film ends, when he was 18.

He said he thought this would make a “pretty great movie,” but that he didn’t think it would happen.

The Fabelmans has been nominated for seven Academy Awards. Kushner and Spielberg have been nominated as producers in the best picture category and for best original screenplay, while Williams has been nominated for best actress in a leading role.