Steven Spielberg Joked ‘The Fabelmans’ Was a $40 Million Therapy Session
Steven Spielberg‘s feature The Fabelmans was welcomed with critical praise when it first hit theaters. The movie was inspired by Spielberg’s own childhood, and his love for cinema at a young age. Initially, however, Spielberg wondered if the movie would’ve only amounted to a therapy session.
Steven Spielberg was told ‘The Fabelmans’ would be therapeutic
Spielberg has made a variety of movies over the course of his career. And despite how different one film might be from the other, the filmmaker confided they all represented him.
“Every one of my movies is a personal movie,” Spielberg told CBS in a 2022 interview. “I don’t make films that I don’t consider to have something of myself left behind in them.”
But The Fabelmans wasn’t just personal for Spielberg. It was the director’s autobiography reflecting on his discovery of film, and how that shaped his childhood. The movie also gave insight into his parents’ lives, which Spielberg’s mother had been eager to see on the big screen.
“My mom was really kind of pushy about, ‘Steve, when are you gonna tell our story? When are you gonna tell my story?'” he said.
Given how much exposure Spielberg was giving to his past, he likened the feature to an expensive form of therapy.
“Well, it was cathartic for me, certainly,” Spielberg said. “I never took it for granted. I mean, it’s a tremendous privilege to — it’s like making a movie, you know, and realizing with this movie, what have I just done? Has this been $40 million of therapy?”
Has Steven Spielberg ever actually been to therapy?
Spielberg asserted that he’s only been to therapy one time in his life. But that was for a matter completely unrelated to seeking mental help.
“I went to my father’s psychiatrist to try to get a letter that I was crazy, so I wouldn’t have to fight in Vietnam,” Spielberg said to The New York Times. “That was the only time I ever went to an analyst. By the way, it turned out he was very pro-Vietnam and would never write me the letter, and I wasted two months, three days a week, while I was going to college.”
Similar with The Fabelmans, Spielberg found most of his other movies to be just as therapeutic. But over the years, he found his therapy in more than just his work. He found it with his wife Kate Capshaw and their family.
“So movies, and my relationship with Kate and my kids and my closest friends and with the stories I choose to tell, that has probably been as therapeutic as anything I could have done in Freudian or Jungian therapy,” he said.
How Steven Spielberg chose the actors to represent his life
For The Fablemans, Michelle Williams and Paul Dano played Spielberg’s mother and father respectively. Young actor Gabriel LaBelle would end up playing Spielberg himself. But the filmmaker would take a different approach casting this feature than he would casting other film projects.
“I’m trying to phrase this in a way that will make sense to you. When I tried to cast The Fabelmans like every other movie — with the best actors I could find that fit the role — I realized that wasn’t going to work, that there was going to have to be more about the familiar and less about the accomplished,” Spielberg said. “Meaning, I was looking for great actors, but I needed actors that had already, in other films, struck me as similes for my mom and dad, and obviously, with less objectivity, struck me as similar to myself. As much as we can ever judge ourselves to really go out and find somebody like us.”
According to Spielberg, this actually made the casting harder. But he was very pleased with the results in the end.
“I considered a lot of actors, but my eventual choice came down to actors that were great like Paul Dano and Michelle Williams. Two of the finest actors I’ve ever worked with,” he said.
