“I always say if I prepare something it’s gonna jinx it so I never prepare anything, and I’m really, really happy about this,” Spielberg told the crowd. “There are five people happier about this: my sister Ann, my sister Nancy, my dad Arnold, my mom Leah. She is up there kvelling about this right now!” Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is an autobiographical film about his childhood and his parents’ divorce and how they inspired him to pursue movie-making, and getting to that point wasn’t easy. “I’ve been hiding from this story since I was 17 years old,” he said. “I put a lot of things in the way of this story. I told this story in parts and parcels throughout my career,” he explained, citing E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as examples. Universal Pictures “I never had the courage to hit this story head on until Tony Kusher when we were working on Munich,” he said, adding that he and Kushner kept working through it “all through Munich, all through Lincoln, all through West Side Story.” The iconic auteur said that the COVID-19 pandemic inspired him and his wife to finally tell his true, honest story, in part because it gave him time to develop the screenplay—while simultaneously reminding him that time is of the essence when life isn’t guaranteed. He thanked stars Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Judd Hirsch and Gabriel LaBelle, who he called a “much better person playing me in the movie than me in real life.” Universal Pictures “Everything I’ve done up to this point has made me ready to be honest about the fact that it’s not easy to be a kid,” Spielberg noted. “Everybody sees me as a success story, but nobody really knows who we are until we are courageous enough to tell everybody who we are.” “I figured it out when I was about 74,” he said. “And I was like, ‘You better do it now!’” Next, see every 2023 Golden Globe winner.
