The Fabelmans: a great director hides in Steven Spielberg’s film, did you recognize him?


In “The Fabelmans”, several great directors are mentioned or embodied, such as Cecil B. DeMille or John Ford. But did you recognize the filmmaker who plays him?

WARNING – The article below contains some spoilers for the plot of ‘The Fabelmans’, as it revisits one of its final scenes. Please move on if you haven’t seen it. Or do not know the anecdote on which it is based.

Released this Wednesday, March 22 in our theaters, a few weeks before the 95th Oscar ceremony, of which he is one of the favorites, The Fabelmans is undoubtedly the most personal of the films directed by Steven Spielberg. Because he directly confronts his childhood, of which he used several elements according to his films.

This is particularly the case for the divorce of his parents, which links feature films such as ET, Rencontres du trois type, Hook, Munich, Minority Report, La Guerre des mondes or Jurassic Park, around the notion of parenthood or the figure of the absent or failing father.

But also of his love of cinema, which gave birth to his vocation and served as a refuge from the harsh reality he refused to face. And this is how The Fabelmans opens and ends with the meeting between Sammy (Steven Spielberg’s alter ego played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord then Gabriel LaBelle) with a great director from Hollywood’s golden age.

Universal Pictures International France

And Steven Spielberg discovered cinema…

First Cecil B. DeMille, whom he does not meet personally. But the discovery of Under the biggest marquee in the world, for his first cinema session, changed his life (and ours at the same time), giving birth to a passion in him that was to make him one of the greatest directors of the History of the 7th Art. After trying to reproduce what he had seen on the screen.

A few years later, when he was taking his first steps in the industry, Sammy Fabelman met John Ford, a director famous for his westerns (The Fantastic Ride, The Prisoner of the Desert, The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance) but to whom we also owe classics such as The Grapes of Wrath or My Valley Was Green. Coming from the memories of Steven Spielberg, this somewhat lunar scene really took place, and the filmmaker reproduces it in his new opus.

And the director is embodied by another director, who is not immediately recognizable: David Lynch. This is not the first time that the latter has appeared on screen but, apart from John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky, he is used to directing himself. His presence in The Fabelmans is all the more eventful, beyond the figure he embodies. And we owe it as much to the husband of co-screenwriter Tony Kushner as to Laura Dern.

“We speak [de The Fabelmans] since we did Munich, and when we really started to bring it to life, Steven and I agreed on this point: it had to be the end of the film”Tony Kushner tells The Film Stage. “When we get to the casting phase, we often ask ourselves, ‘Who is going to be able to play this person?’ Sometimes we already know that, but most of the time, of the four films we made together [Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story et The Fabelmans, ndlr]it was not yet determined.

It will never happen because he will never agree to do it, but it should be David Lynch

“We thought we’d find someone. We started thinking about a lot of wonderful actors who look a bit like [à John Ford] but were a bit too young – nothing was really exciting. My husband is the one who, when I came home saying, ‘Steven Spielberg asked me to rewrite West Side Story, what am I going to do?’, said, ‘Yeah. And above all, what are you going to do with Doc?’ The only West Side Story character that any of us didn’t particularly like.”

“I didn’t know and he said ‘Turn Doc into a Puerto Rican woman and ask Rita Moreno to play it.’ It was he who had already suggested hiring Lee Pace in Lincoln and Lynn Cohen in Munich. He has a real eye for it (Laughs) (…) I had a candidate for Ford that I was passionate about, but I didn’t really know what we were going to do. Mark then said to me: ‘I have an idea.’ He went up to his office asking me for a few minutes, then he came back down.”


Universal Pictures International France

David Lynch as John Ford

“I think he wanted to make sure it physically stuck. And he said to me, ‘I have a great idea. But it’s never going to happen because he’s never going to agree to do it, but it should be David Lynch.’ I said to myself ‘My God!’ and I called Steven who said ‘My God…but he never will.’ Then he thought of Laura Dern. He called her and then she called David. And it happened.”

And that’s how David Lynch found himself in the shoes of John Ford for a day. “It was a crazy day on set”says Tony Kushner. “It was the most meta and complicated thing: Steven Spielberg directs Gabriel LaBelle who plays Steven Spielberg who meets John Ford played by David Lynch.” Seen from this angle, the scene is all the more dizzying. And it concludes The Fabelmans in the best possible way, right down to its perfect final plan.



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