BELOW THE LINE

BEHIND-THE-SCENES FACTS ABOUT 10

FABELMANS

SXSW 2023 FILM FESTIVAL

9 DAYS OF SCREENINGS

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

A SECOND PLUNGE INTO PANDORA

Below the line (BTL) refers to any production costs not included in the above-theline portion of the budget. It also refers to technical crew roles: workers who do not provide input, guidance, creative development, or leadership on the project.

Tony Kushner

has worked with Steven Spielberg a whopping four times on four completely different movies: 2005’s thorny political thriller “Munich;” 2012’s historical biography “Lincoln;” 2021’s epic musical “West Side Story;” and most recently, 2022’s autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” the story of how Steven Spielberg became Steven Spielberg. Only one other screenwriter, David Koepp, has collaborated with the filmmaker as often (and they had a fifth project in pre-production that fell apart at the eleventh hour). Kushner and Spielberg’s ongoing collaboration is perhaps the most important of either artist’s career.

So sitting down with Kushner to talk about “The Fabelmans” and his journey with Spielberg, it was easy to feel intimidated. (One rarely gets to talk to a Pulitzer Prize winner.) But Kushner was warm and open about their collaboration and its difficulties – including where they might be headed next.

WHEN YOU DID “MUNICH”, DID YOU THINK THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEGINNING OF A BEAUTIFUL RELATIONSHIP WITH MR. SPIELBERG?

No, not at all. I really loved working with him on “Munich.” It was so much unlike what became our way of working because I wrote the screenplay fairly quickly and then I took a little bit longer than he liked for rewriting it. But nothing compared to the years that went by getting ready to write “Lincoln” and then revising “Lincoln.” And it was a huge production. But we finished filming “Munich” in October and released it in December, which still seems kind of impossible to me.

REALLY?

Well, he edits as he goes along and he’s really edited a lot of it in his head while he is filming it. Every film that I’ve done with him — I think in every film he’s made — he has a rough cut, or close to a rough cut, by the last day of filming. But with “Munich” that happened and then two months later we were out in the world. And that was shocking.

And I had just published an anthology of essays that I edited with a friend of mine Alisa Solomon, about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And it literally had come out days before I met with Kathy and I said, “I’ve just published 58 progressive Jewish American responses to the conflict. Would you like a copy of it?” And she said, “Sure.” I sent her two, one for her and Steven. And then Steven called and said, “I read the book, I’d like to talk to you about this movie I’m making.” But I didn’t think… I had no idea that it would start this thing.

WELL, WHAT IS IT LIKE WORKING WITH HIM AS A WRITER?

BECAUSE HE SO INFREQUENTLY WRITES. I think he’s a wonderful writer. I love “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I think it’s still probably my favorite of his films. And because when I work with him and I’m this screenwriter myself, we go over the script over and over and over and over again. We read parts of it out loud to each other and he makes suggestions. I also know from his direction that he loves language. He has a really good ear for it. He really loves the sound of it. He’ll often say like, “Man for All Seasons,” because it is a movie that he adores because he loves Robert Bolt’s screenplay. He loves the speeches, he loves

YOU WEREN’T WRITING “LINCOLN” WITH ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN THE ROOM WITH YOU. WERE YOU PUSHING FOR IT TO BE MORE DRAMATIC, AND WAS HE PUSHING FOR IT TO BE MORE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL?

No, I mean, we both had decided that making this work dramatically as a story apart from its rootedness in his life, that making it work as a story that could mean something to people who didn’t know that it was directed by Steven Spielberg or didn’t know who he was, but that it would have meaning on its own and not meaning to him or his sisters or the people who knew his parents. It had to earn its place in the script as part of a story. I think this is why it’s good that he was working with another writer because I think I did provide a degree of objectivity. It wasn’t my life, so I didn’t cherish these things. I mean, I cherished them because they were great dramatic material, but not because it had some sort of beautiful deep feeling because I had lived through them.

And one of the reasons that I think that I glommed onto this idea of making a movie centered around the central event of “The Fabelmans,” of the camping trip and the footage and everything, is I was really moved … I’m a writer and I think a lot about art and I come from a family of artists, and I think a lot about the ways in which when you’re young, you use art, either the creating of it or the consuming of it, to make the world comprehensible to yourself, hence safer or apparently safer to yourself. And that if you’re an artist and that’s where you’re originally being led by that artist saying to you, you can make the world a more habitable, less menacing place.

EVERY ONE OF THESE MOVIES IS SO DIFFERENT. AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT [SPIELBERG AND KUSHNER’S ABANDONED] “THE KIDNAPPING OF EDGARDO MORTARA” WAS GOING TO BE, BUT I’M ASSUMING THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY DIFFERENT AS WELL. WITH EACH NEW COLLABORATION, DO YOU REDEFINE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM AND THE NATURE OF YOUR COLLABORATION?

Well, to some extent, yeah. Because each one has its own thing. And there were things about “Lincoln” that were problematic and hard. In a way with “Munich,” it was sort of very much him and me, and we had this great cast. But Daniel came in very much as a creative partner. And that was an interesting experience for me and for him. Everybody’s in awe of Daniel. I mean, the first thing on the set was he did that giant monologue word perfect. David Strathairn was sitting next to him and came off the set looking ashen. And I said, “Are you okay?” And he said, “I’ve been staring up at

Olympus.” He said, “I’ve never seen anything like that.” Daniel is awe-inspiring. And Steven was like, “Oh my God, oh my God.” And Sally Field. But it had its own complexities and political complexities and historical complexities.

HAVE YOU STARTED TALKING ABOUT THE NEXT ONE?

Yep.

OKAY.

Just a couple of weeks ago. When we finished “The Fabelmans,” we realized it was the first time — well, certainly since the day that he asked me if I would look at “Lincoln” — that we hadn’t been working on a project. We always had the next thing lined up. We finished “The Fabelmans” and said, “Okay, what are we doing next?” And so for a while now, we’ve been having meetings and throwing ideas back and forth. And for one reason or another nothing has really felt right. And then about two weeks ago, I was doing a speech in Toledo, Ohio, and he called me and said, “I’ve got an idea. I’ve just listened to something that I want you to listen to.” And I listened and I called him back and I said, “Oh my God.”