A reflective Steven Spielberg spoke about what advice he would give to young filmmakers when he received the honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday, and decided not to follow the example of his childhood hero John Ford.
“I’m not going to say, ‘Get out of my office.’ That’s a big difference between me and John Ford,” Spielberg said at a Berlinale press conference as he recounted that meeting with the legendary director at age 16, which was filmed almost verbatim at the climax of his last film, The Fabelman family.
But as much as this office meeting with Ford represented a meeting with a dark and formidable Hollywood titan, Spielberg insisted he continued to admire his films. “John Ford was a force of nature. And for many, many years I was really scared by what he said and embarrassed by what he said and embarrassed by what he said. And 20 years later, I realized that what he actually did was give me a huge gift,” he recalls Ford’s advice, based on drawings on his office wall, about composing a photo with a camera.
“This scene in The Fabelman family well, word for word to the best of my recollection, what actually happened to me. He said no more and no less than the words he spoke in this movie,” added Spielberg. As Berlin gives him a Lifetime Achievement Award, the prestigious festival will be on display The Fabelman family on Tuesday evening.
During the press for the Berlinale, Spielberg talked about his latest and most personal film, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age saga that was psychologically exhausting for the director: “It was very difficult for me because I was telling a story with very funny parts, but with many parts, which were very traumatic and even in recreating those scenes it was very difficult to relive them.’
Large part of the The Fabelman family focuses on Spielberg’s early passion for filmmaking and how he was supported and encouraged in this creative journey by his parents. But the director recalled that at the age of 9, his parents told him in real life that he couldn’t accompany them to a local movie theater in New Jersey to see Ford’s classic Western The searchers because his subject was too violent.
So Spielberg remembered taking some change from a family savings jar and going to see The searchers alone at the movies. “I probably didn’t understand the movie even at 9. When I watched the movie a few times after that, I understood it better. But I know what it feels like to be abandoned and then to realize it’s a movie, I could use my mom and dad to help explain it to me.”
The Fabelman family, as it recalls Spielberg’s childhood, it also captures the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, with Michelle Williams playing a version of his mother named Mitzi, Paul Dano as a character named Burt, based on his father, and Gabriel LaBelle as the family son, Sammy .
At the beginning of the movie when Burt and Mitzi take Sammy to the movies for the first time at age 5 to see a little too scary for him The Greatest Show on Earththey ignite in the boy a fascination for movies and cameras, toys and tools, which Sammy will train in his own family.
Spielberg told Berlin media that even at the age of 75, he still has the childhood fascination and zest for making movies. “Whatever grabbed me as a little kid, it’s the same feeling I’ve retained all these decades later. And I feel like every time right now I get that same level of excitement when I find a book or a script or come up with an original idea that I think might make a good movie.
At the same time, by making and releasing West Side Story and The Fabelman family in quick succession – and doing so amid the pandemic and having been isolated for a time at home with his family – Spielberg, known as a workaholic, has expressed concern that he does not currently have a major film project lined up.
“I’ve never had a chance to think about what I’m going to do when these two films are over. And I’m sitting here in front of you saying I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I have no idea. It feels kind of nice and it’s also kind of horrible,” insisted Spielberg as he tried to settle into his next director’s chair on set.
“I need to work and I love to work, and that’s the biggest question I’m going to try to figure out for the rest of the year,” Spielberg added, even as he works to produce an HBO miniseries based on Stanley Kubrick’s Unrealized Screenplay for Napoleon.