It wasn't closely.

What's the secret?

Thing.

Just got to find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life.

I don't want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.

Hello and welcome to the establishing shot, a podcast where we do deep dives and two directors and their filmographies.

I am your host Eli Price and we are here on episode 115 of the podcast.

We are.

It's, it's been a long time coming, but we're finally covering Spielberg's last film as of now at the Fablemen's.

So I'm excited to jump into that today.

But before I do, I want to welcome a first time guest.

We have Jeffrey Overstreet joining us for the first time.

Jeffrey, how's it going?

It's going very, very well and it's good timing to talk about this movie.

So thanks for thanks for having me on.

It's a pleasure.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, before we do that, I always love to get get people plugged into what my guests have going on.

Whatever projects you have out now or coming out soon or or old projects you want to plug.

But yeah, just if you want to give an overview of just who you are and what you do and work, people can find your work.

Well, there are many branches to.

What's going on with me right now?

The the branch that's probably most on my mind today is that school is about to start and I am an associate professor of English and writing at Seattle Pacific University.

So I have some syllabuses or, or syllabi depending on which version you choose to revise in the next few days to get ready for the classes that start in two weeks.

One of which will will be a film class called Film and faith, where we watch great films from all over the world over the last 50 years.

And then, and then we explore what's possible when we approach those films with questions about faith.

They aren't necessarily explicitly faith related films, but we watch all kinds of great stuff.

And I, I always look forward to that class.

So that that's very much on my mind right now.

But I am a teacher because I was a writer 1st and I grew up writing fiction and I have a series of fantasy novels called the Aurelia Thread that have been around for a while now.

They came out between those four books, came out between 2007 and 2011.

But that was the dream for me as a kid was to be a fantasy writer and following the footsteps of my my heroes like Tolkien and Lewis and Madeline L'engle and Richard Adams.

Yeah.

So that's a, that's another branch.

But film criticism is something I was already doing in high school.

I did for my college newspaper.

And soon after I graduated from college, I got a call from Christianity Today.

They had seen some things I was doing online.

And they said we don't want to do the typical Christian media thing of approaching movies as something families need to be afraid of.

We don't want to.

We don't want to treat movies with like lists of things that could be harmful.

We want to approach them respectfully with curiosity as works of art and find out, you know, anything that's true or anything that's beautiful.

We believe that's that's God's territory.

And that's what I believe as well.

So I got to write about movies and my love for movies of all kinds for Christianity Today for about 10 years and had a column there and got all kinds of wrathful, judgmental emails every week from from Christians who are afraid of culture and the world and who think movies are toxic.

So that was a very formative experience for me.

I moved on from there to write about film for Image Journal.

And then I have some websites where I I can write when I want to as much as I want to.

The main one is called Looking Closer, so go to lookingcloser.org.

That website is like a creaky old ship.

It's starting to fall apart.

I'm working on getting ready to relaunch it on a new platform, but you can still access many, many years of reviews and archives there.

I'm also on Sub stack now.

I have a site there called Give Me Some Light, which Shakespeare fans will know what that's from and and what that's about.

But I've been posting a lot there in the last couple of years.

But all of this is leading to the other thing that's been most on my mind next to school, and that is that I have a book coming in May.

This will be my second book about film.

The first one came out in 2007, was called Through a Screen Darkly, and it was very much my attempt after all of those angry emails from readers at Christianity Today, my attempt to kind of justify the ways of movies to readers, especially to Christian readers, to help them fear not, which is the most repeated refrain in all the Scriptures.

And so it seems important to pay attention to that one.

This book, Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema, is a memoir about how over the course of my life, there has always been a movie or several helping me sort of sort out what I really believe about God, about human nature, about the world.

And it's it's sort of a, a discernment process over the course of the book.

I'm weighing the things I've heard in church as a small child and then thinking about the the film Pinocchio or thinking about the film The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

And then on into adolescence with films like Moonrise Kingdom, Watership Down, The Black Stallion, Dead Poet Society, Do the right thing, on into adulthood to movies like Patterson and the Tree of Life.

And even in fact, the last film in the book that the last film I discussed in the book is Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Oh, yeah.

Not necessarily films that would spring to mind if you're thinking about faith formation, but but that's how it worked for me and that's how it has worked for me over the course of my life.

So it's about how movies helped me sort of separate true faith from the distortions that have crept into Christianity and helped me find what I really believe and, and what I need to leave behind.

So we've been, we've been hearing the word deconstruction a lot these days in terms of faith.

So I guess it is sort of a deconstruction story, but it's not just about leaving something, it's about discovering something.

It's AI was warned that movies would ruin my faith, and in fact, movies strengthened by faith.

So Lost and Found at the Cathedral Cinema is coming out in May and we're doing the the last copy edits on the typeset file this week.

Just today I received the introduction written by Matt Zoeller Sites, the editor at rogerebert.com.

So I'm very excited to get to share that with the world here in several months.

Yeah, that's exciting that that sounds very similar to like my experience with just what movie, what films have done for me.

And even like some of the ones you've named are a bit like a Patterson's My Favorite Jim Jarmusch movie.

Yeah.

Yeah, Tree of Life is my favorite Malik and I love, I even love Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

It was one of my favorite movies that year, so.

Yeah, yeah.

In fact, that came out the year of the Fablemans.

Yeah, Yeah, that's true.

I think the Fableman's ended up at #5 on my list that year and Marcel was #1.

There you go.

But it's good we're talking about the Fableman's because it's a similar kind of thing, right?

It's a movie about how how movies shaped somebody and how how how creativity and art making became the way that that person processes what they're what they've experienced.

So.

Yeah, yeah.

And I even think reminded of this, there's a really good George Miller quote that I don't have in front of me, so I'm not going to be able to actually give the quote.

But he's he talks about how cinema has become the new cathedral.

Basically, it's become the new church that people go to, to have communal experiences that are transcendent.

And it's a it's a good quote.

I wish I had the actual quote in front of me.

I'll have to send it to you later when I can find it.

Yeah, that that idea goes goes way back.

I think it would had been around even before the filmmaker Ingmar Ingmar Bergman talked about how even though he didn't, does not or did not identify as a Christian or, or as a as a as a person of faith, he was much more a skeptic.

But he he, he too wrote that art lost much of its resonance and power when it formally divorced itself from religion.

And he he was pointing to like the great cathedrals of the world.

I mean, we don't see any architecture like that in the world.

Anything is extravagant and complex and beautiful.

And then those things still draw people from all over the world all the time.

And when it just became about self-expression, he says we lost something.

And so he said, I always aspire, even as a skeptic, I aspire to contribute something to the cathedral.

He understands that he wants to be a part of something bigger than himself.

And like, like you with the George Miller quote, I don't have it right on the tip of my tongue or I would try to quote it, But it's it's, it's along those lines.

It'll be in my book.

You can find the whole thing there.

Great, great.

And I'll, I'm sure, do you have like a, a pre-order or a place where like people can find it whenever it comes out?

Sure.

And I'll make sure I'll link that in the episode description.

Yeah, Yeah, I can give that to you.

Basically go to go to the website for Broadleaf Books, that's who's publishing it.

Cool.

And they have a pre-order link there.

Of course you can find pre-orders on on other sites.

I'm not a big fan of what probably springs to your mind is the most obvious site to go to, right.

But you know, if you need to go that route, you can go that route.

Yeah, that's it, Won't it won't be too hard to find at this point.

Cool.

Well, Speaking of the Fablemans that we mentioned a minute ago, I, I do love to hear about my guests kind of first memories of the director we're discussing.

And so, yeah, what do you remember the first Spielberg movie you saw or the first time you realized, you know, that Spielberg was a director or sometimes it one comes before the other, but for people.

But what's what's your experience with Spielberg?

It's a complicated question with me because I was so aware of him before I was allowed to watch him.

I was five years old looking or sitting next to my dad at the breakfast counter looking through the newspaper, and the ad for Jaws was there.

And I agree, it's one of my earliest memories.

I remember seeing the picture, you know, that iconic image of, of the monster rising from the deep and the woman swimming across the top of the frame and the space between them and just that tension.

I needed a way to resolve that at five years old.

And so the very first book, I'm going to put that in quotes that I made as a kid, was a picture book of a sea monster chasing a swimmer.

And as you turn the pages, the sea monster gets closer and closer and closer, and the jaws are open and the teeth are enormous.

And then on the last page, the swimmer somehow inexplicably draws a sword and turns and kills the beast and it sinks.

And I, that's how I resolved that tension.

So I mean, not to jump too far ahead too quickly, but you can imagine what I was thinking about when I saw The Fablemans for the first time.

And he watches the train crash in that film and then is obsessed with making something as a way of facing his fears and working through them.

And so that's my first encounter with Spielberg, even though I wouldn't see Jaws for probably 10 years, I was probably, I, I probably saw it when I was old enough to get babysitting jobs.

That was a big, a big turn for me when it came to my exposure to movies because I would end up in houses where they actually had home video and I could watch what they had in their collection.

I'm pretty sure that's when I saw Jaws for the first time.

But the big one, I, I, I remember ads for close Encounters.

Strangely, it didn't really grab me, probably because by that point I was obsessed with Star Wars.

But I remember the poster for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and since George Lucas was involved and I was obsessed with Star Wars, I was very interested in that.

Han Solo was my favorite Star Wars character, so I was very interested in Harrison Ford, right?

So I still have in my office at work that big poster that says from the makers of Star Wars and Jaws, and that original beautiful poster of Indiana Jones.

But I was not allowed to see it.

I was 11 years old.

I had not been allowed to go see The Empire Strikes Back because people in our church had said it was, that there was an occult influence in it.

And then I might end up becoming a Buddhist or a Hindu or something if I watched it.

All right.

Which is interesting because when I eventually saw it, I thought, wow, there's Christianity all over this thing.

But then Raiders, I was, I was reading everything I could get my hands on about it because if I couldn't see the movie, sort of like the same thing with resolving the tension with the sea monster.

I needed to know what it was about and how the conflict was going to be resolved.

So I remember ordering a a Raiders Lost Ark storybook through my elementary school's book order program and saw lots of images from the film there.

Read the story until I'd memorized it.

Read the novelization of the film, which is actually, I think, more explicit than the film itself.

There's actually a sex scene in the novelization of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But the most important thing I remember is that my 5th grade teacher had the soundtrack, had the score on vinyl and would play it during our lunch breaks.

And I was already a big fan of the Star Wars music and I knew the name John Williams.

So I would always ask her, please play this again, please play this again.

And she would let me borrow the record.

And eventually she approached my parents and said, your son is obsessed with this movie.

Can I show it to him?

I don't think.

I think he needs to see it.

So I'm sure this wouldn't be allowed today, but my 5th grade teacher had me over to her apartment to watch a home video to watch Avhs of Raiders of the Lost Ark on a very small TV.

And that was how I saw it for the first time.

And Spielberg came to rival very, very quickly Lucas for me, and then very quickly surpassed Lucas for me as the name that would most get my attention when it came to movies.

And I think it stayed that way probably all the way up through high school, when just about the time I was graduating, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out.

Yeah.

So.

So my childhood and adolescence both are kind of framed by Indiana Jones movies.

But that was also around the time that Empire of the Sun came out.

A much more adult film, if you know what I mean.

A much more mature story, a much darker story, one that does not have a conclusion that is designed to satisfy an audience.

It's a conclusion that challenges us and sobers us and maybe breaks our hearts.

I remember seeing that with friends who were Spielberg fans and they came away complaining about how well that wasn't fun.

But I came away with just, my head was spinning.

I was moved.

I felt a little more grown up after seeing Empire of the Sun.

Like.

Christian Bell's character.

Yeah, yeah.

I felt like I'd been told, told a truth that had been kept from me in some way.

Yeah.

And I see echoes or I see reflections of or hear echoes of that film all through the Fablemans as well, for reasons we can get to later.

But yeah, that my, my middle school and height, well, elementary, middle and high school are all punctuated with the arrival of Spielberg films.

And while I don't have any chapters on Spielberg in the book that's coming out, I talked about him a lot in the previous book.

But I could do a whole book on growing up with Spielberg and how these films, how these films influenced me and gave me new vocabularies for thinking about complicated things.

Yeah, yeah.

That's very cool.

And yeah.

And I think that your story with Spielberg, out of all the guests I've had, is the most appropriate probably for the Fablemans.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, just that that kind of growing up with those films paralleled with, you know, the the Spielberg stand in and Sammy Fableman kind of growing up making, making these particular films he was making and, and those being how he he processed to the different stages of his life.

But but yeah, but I love that.

Before we get to Sammy Fableman, I do like to start back at the beginning.

And this has been, this has been the sort of story that Spielberg's wanted to tell since he started making movies, really in 1978, during the production of 1941, he had already commissioned a script about his youth.

It was going to be called Growing Up.

It was officially announced back then.

But then he ended up making ET and that kind of went by the wayside.

I don't know if he ever got like a script written for that, but it was like public knowledge.

And then there was this long-awaited I'll be home script from his sister and that never.

I don't I still don't think that's ever been made either.

But it was a a similar thing about their childhood.

And he just, I think for a long time he was scared for a lot of reasons to make this sort of movie that was so very autobiographical in a more literal way than all of his other movies, which you could argue are all autobiographical in one way or another.

Very much so, yeah.

But yeah, I mean, he was scared to do it for a long time.

I think scared because probably the things he would have to face making it and probably probably a little bit worried about how his parents would be scrutinized in a way.

So.

So jump forward to 2005.

On this first day of shooting Munich, Tony Kushner, who that's the first movie they worked together on.

Tony Kushner asked him if he remembered the first time he wanted to be a filmmaker.

And Spielberg went on to tell him the story of the camping trip that we see in the movie.

And you know how he discovered what was going on with his mom and and their dad's best friend through that that camping trip editing.

And Kushner immediately suggested that he make a movie out of that.

Spielberg said maybe one day.

And so that was the that was kind of the launching point of of what we get in the Fableman's they Kushner was Kushner was honestly like probably the biggest proponent.

He kept bringing it back up with Spielberg through their relationship over the years.

And even after, after they made Lincoln together, Kushner wrote a sort of short story based on anecdotes Spielberg had told us, told him about this event and others.

And.

Again, it was kind of like a Spielberg's interested but doesn't quite want to pull the trigger on that yet.

It really wasn't until that documentary in 2017 called Spielberg came out that he he really started feeling like he could do it.

Him and his family opened up a lot in that movie to the public.

And I have this quote from Spielberg.

He said, quote, right after my mother's, right after we were having lunch at her restaurant when suddenly she took my hands in hers and said, Steve, why don't you make a movie of our story?

I give you, I gave you such good material.

And and then his mom shortly died after that at the age of 97.

And so, yeah, that was, I think that after that was the moment where Spielberg really started to work toward this more seriously.

Sometimes, sometimes an artist needs needs to live more life before they're ready to tell tell a certain story.

I mean, if I had tried to write Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema 10 years ago, it would have been a very, very different book.

And I'm sure if I'd waited another 10 years, it would become a very different book.

But I think all of the films he's made-up to this point have influenced the way he tells this story.

Because I, I would, I would guess that he would say that he has discovered more and more about himself by telling these other stories.

I mean, that's just, that's the nature of art.

We don't usually get good art out of somebody who already knows what they're making.

We get the best art from people who are following questions and notions and intuitions and making discoveries along the way.

Right.

I remember people coming to me after my first novel and saying, it's so clear to me that this was, you know, this was your way of working through the trauma of the failure of your first marriage when you were so young in college.

And I'm, and I was just like, what are you talking about?

This is a fantasy story.

I wasn't thinking about that.

But then I would go back and look at it and go, wow, I can really see myself sort of growing up and working through a lot of anger and working through a lot of grief and working through this sense of what am I going to do with my life.

And, and now when I talk about those books, I'm like, yeah, I was clearly working through the shock and the loss and the pain of that.

So I'll bet even a film like West Side Story or The BFG, when he sort of revisits children's stories for the first time in a while, I'm sure, I'm sure those were processes of growing up a little bit more for him and and gaining more perspective on these things.

Yeah, yeah.

And this, this and West Side Story were both like long time passion products.

Yeah.

And you know, I, I think I'm at the end of West Side Story.

You know, my final thought take away was just, you know, it's never too late, you know, to pursue that that dream you might have.

Yeah.

It's so it's just, you know, it's just kind of like in a almost cliche way, inspirational to see someone as old as Spielberg is kind of taking on these passion projects, you know, and it makes me wonder and get excited for whatever this UFO project he's working on could be, you know, is it the one?

Is it the, is it the sort of movie he's always wanted to make?

But maybe he didn't pull the trigger on with stuff like close Encounters and ET, you know, maybe held back something and those that he now wants to get out of his system so.

Yeah, and then there's the remake of Bullet, which he's been talking about forever, too.

And you know, when you're thinking about the Fable lens and you're thinking about the portrayal of his father as a man of science and innovation and machines, you can see right away, looking back through his catalog, how important technology is to his success and to his innovation, but also his his obsession with machines as subjects themselves in front of a camera.

And that takes you back to duel, right?

The first, the first that he made that or I guess it's a short.

It was a feature.

I'm trying to remember.

I haven't seen Duel in a long time.

Yeah.

It was a it was a TV movie that he.

Right.

That he that he shot some extra stuff for for like a little European theater tour.

So.

Yeah.

But it was feature length from from the get go.

It's it's it's it's a movie about about vehicles as much as people.

Yeah.

It'll be interesting to see how a remake of that from someone his age might be different from what it would have been if he'd made it as a much younger film maker.

Yeah, and and what I appreciate about Spielberg too is that I know if he did finally make that bullet film it, you know, it would be partially out of kind of AI guess like a reminiscence on something he loved as a kid.

But he also he doesn't let that take over is something that I've always appreciated of about him.

Is he he has the nostalgia, but he also like has the the take of a modern take on things.

You know, when you think about movies like the Post, that is like a old period movie and he's he's you know, he kind of has a lot of nostalgia for 70s film in that movie, but it's a very modern movie in a lot of ways too.

And so I would be interested to see, interesting to see his take on something like Bullet because of stuff like that.

Yeah.

But yeah, you know, with this one, he and Kushner really started working on it during the COVID lockdown.

And it kind of came out of this conversation he had with his wife and kids that kind of kind of going back to, you know, what you were saying a minute ago of like, this is a movie he had to wait this long to make because I asked him something that he about a story he regretted not telling yet.

And this is all of these life stories are what came to mind.

So yeah, he he poured his heart out to Kushner.

We got we got some bullet going on outside.

Yeah, it's as if it's as if we summoned the drag racers here on the street outside my house.

But yeah, yeah, he poured his heart out to Kushner.

Kushner drafted an 81 page version of this.

And you know, then really so August, in August of 2020, his father died at the age of 103.

And then October, I mean, within a few weeks of his father dying, they begin writing the script for this movie together.

Spielberg and Kushner via video conference.

They worked on it for about two months, a few days a week and together.

And Kushner said this, he said, quote, I had never written so fast, but I kept to that pace so that Steven wouldn't flinch, UN quote.

And, you know, he was worried about him pulling punches and, you know, worried about him not, you know, not giving him what he needed to really make this his real actual story.

But yeah, they that's, you know, that's the beginning of this movie.

It's it's not, it's actually the first Spielberg riding credit since I want to say I can't, I can't remember if he has writing credit on Poltergeist.

So, but it seems like he might have had a writing credit on Poltergeist, which he did not direct, depending on who you talk to.

But he did the last movie he wrote himself, I think was close Encounters that he wrote and directed himself.

So yeah, it's been a it's been a long while since Spielberg had wrote and directed a movie.

Yeah.

I mean, you, you he kind of would have to for this one.

I mean, it's it's his story.

It would be strange if he didn't have writing credit on it.

But but as far as other crew goes, it's kind of a lot of his his common players.

Janusz Kaminsky was the director of photography that he brought.

In fact, last week I said that West Side Story was the last movie Michael Kahn edited, but he did bring him out of retirement for this to to work a little bit on it.

Sarah Brochure was the main editor on this.

But I think Michael Kahn did do some work as well.

You know, this this being just an important film, not just for him, but for, you know, his his common collaborators that he's had for so many years and that if worked with him that have known his parents when they've, you know, come to visit him on set and stuff.

And you know, this meant a lot to them as well.

Guys like John Williams, who was kind of semi retired at the time.

I think I think John Williams was like 90 years old at this point.

Yeah.

Rick Carter, Production designer is has been his probably most common production designer over the years.

So a lot of guys that he's just worked with for a long time on this film.

If you're interested in specifics on John Williams involvement in this, in this particular film, there's a wonderful first book of its kind, a new biography of John Williams called John Williams, A Composer's Life by Tim Grieving, who writes about film music for NPR, The New York Times.

I mean it when when a when a great publication needs the best writing on film music, they call Tim.

I'm lucky enough to to know him because I once posted maybe I should say I once confessed my that I'm a fanboy for the very controversial musical score for the fantasy film Ladyhawk from the mid 80s.

A lot of people don't like that score.

It has a lot of guitar solos and synthesizers for a fantasy movie.

I love it and I remember when I made that comment I got a note from Tim Greiving saying so glad to find another fan of of this score.

As a matter of fact, I'm writing the liner notes for a deluxe version of that score that's coming out soon or that soundtrack.

And that's how we met.

And we've we've kept in touch over the years.

And so he's been telling me about the, the, the lifelong dream of this tribute to John Williams.

And because he he planned it so carefully and went about everything with such expertise and professionalism and respect, John Williams actually came around to agreeing to be a part of the project.

And he has many, many hours of interviews with John Williams for this book.

And there is a big section, there's a section on the Fablemans, which it's interesting.

Tim Grieving is not a big fan of that score and and he's sort of stirred up some controversy by some of the things he said about why the music, why John Williams music for that film really frustrates him.

He thinks there should have been a lot more of it.

He's really surprised by how sparing the score is in that film.

But then he shares interesting perspectives from both Spielberg and John Williams about why that is.

And that's he blogged about it on Substack recently.

So you can look that up and it's inspiring a lot of reactions and responses.

But it I was thinking a lot about that as I revisited the film today, noticing just how much more Spielberg is allowing silences and how much more he's relying on the music of the time.

Right.

So that's a it.

It's kind of an anomaly in Spielberg's body of work that way.

Yeah, yes.

I mean, he usually has Spielberg is kind of notorious for the score being almost another character or, or, you know, giving your your emotional cues in the best ways, you know, most of the time.

But yeah, this one, there's a lot of pieces that his mother would play kind of worked throughout the film.

Probably the biggest the biggest example of that is during that kind of intercut montage of Sammy editing the camping trip and his parents in the in the living room.

It's her playing this Bach Bach concerto that she would play all the time.

So there's a lot of that in the movie.

That's not, you know, John Williams score.

And in fact, I think I want, I want to say the first time Spielberg mentions that the first time John Williams score even comes in is when Mitzi Fableman is dancing in front of the car at the camping trip, which is a long ways into the movie.

Yeah, yeah, it works for me because it feels like in this film he wants us to be paying attention to the things that would incline him towards certain kinds of images, certain kinds of stories, certain kinds of sounds.

And by the reverence with which he attends to those performances at the piano.

What I'm hearing and what I'm seeing is young Spielberg developing a relationship with that kind of music.

And then you hear the piano score for ET.

Right.

And the longing in the piano score there, the longing in the choral pieces, the class, the classical choral pieces and Empire of the Sun.

And it it may just make so much sense.

Yeah.

So I think it works for this film.

Yeah, I, I, I think it does too.

It's not something that I was like cued in strongly to while I was watching the movie, but kind of hearing that sort of stuff and thinking about it in hindsight, you know, I, I appreciate that this late in his career, you know, he's trying new things, trying new ways of using music and, and his movie.

And it's not, I would say as far as John Williams scores goes, it's it's a fine score.

I think it, you know, it does its job sparingly and it doesn't really it's, you know, it's never going to be on the level of like AET or Jurassic Park or or even Empire of the Sun as you just mentioned.

But, but as far as there's not very many John Williams scores that are bad, I don't know if there are actually any that are bad.

There, there are some that work better than others, but I think I think this is just one of those that it's not distracting and it does its job.

And to me that's, that's fine.

As far as the score goes, I'm I'm happy if I don't notice the score too much, but just enough so.

Another thing that comes to my mind when I think about Spielberg and music that I couldn't stop thinking about as I watched this film.

I don't know if you've ever seen this.

I think it's easy to find on YouTube, but I wish I could remember what year it was.

Spielberg appeared on Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton, and they were sort of going over his career up to that point.

And so this is the two of them.

James Lipton, who Will Ferrell has famously spoofed on Saturday Night Live, sitting across from Spielberg and what?

And he'll he'll name a movie and get Spielberg talking about it.

And they got to close Encounters of the Third kind and got into talking about the story.

And then Lipton kind of very abruptly turned the conversation and said, and I'm not going to again, I'm not quoting.

I'm this is all from memory, right?

But basically said, so your dad was a scientist who worked on the first personal computers and your mother was a a concert pianist.

And so your home was was very divided, it seems like, between science and art.

And Spielberg was like, yeah, yeah, that's that's very, very true.

And talked a little bit about that.

And then Lipton says, and here in close Encounters, when the aliens come and everyone's waiting to see what's going to happen.

And moviegoers have been conditioned to believe that something terrible is going to happen, that this mysterious other from outside has come and the world is in trouble.

But then the scientists reach out to the aliens with music on computers, and the aliens answer back music on computers.

And it begins a conversation that grows in harmony until everyone is is celebrating and everyone is laughing with joy.

And Spielberg's like, yeah, yeah, that's that's what happens there.

And then Lipton says, and it's amazing to watch Spielberg's face as Lipton says this.

So for you, a picture of hope is the reconciliation of science and art is music played through machines.

What you, what you have done there is you have presented for us the longing you have had since childhood for the reunion, the reconciliation of your father and your mother.

And by that point, you can see tears in Spielberg's eyes.

And he says, I get emotional just talking about this.

He says, I have never thought about that before.

And that has stuck with me as one of the greatest examples I've ever seen of art knowing more than the artist of of art drawing things out of the artists that are very much belong to the artist, but often without the artist even knowing what they've tapped into.

Right.

And I just think it's such a profound thing.

And to have to have that conversation logged now in his history.

And now he makes the movie.

And I wonder, you know, if that was on his mind as he is showing us this, this young man who clearly is an avatar of, of his younger self, longing for harmony between his mother and father, but also being merciful in his portrayal of that, that tension.

I I, I think about that a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

And it is as you, as you were getting to the the, you know, the thing that Lipton said.

I was like, oh, I have seen this before.

And it is a very like magical moment of spill it dawning on Spielberg.

You know what he's what he's created and, you know, wrestling with that in real time, really, really cool moment.

And, you know, it is something that, you know, in this movie.

I I think it's it's strange that, you know, because at the end of their life, his mother and father were reconciled.

You know, you can see it in that 2017 documentary.

They're they're kind and playful with each other.

In fact, Spielberg talks about how his father had remarried and after, I can't remember the guy's real name, but it's the the Uncle Benny character that his mom eventually married, that best friend of his father.

And when he died, his mom and his father and stepmother actually became really good friends again and kept that through the rest of their life.

And Spielberg even mentioned that line that Burt Fableman says at the very end, towards the very end of the movie, about how, you know, why that picture got to him so deeply.

He kind of says something to the effect of, you know, this.

I can't let this be the end.

And Spielberg mentioned how important that line was to him because of the, you know, that it really actually wasn't the end of their relationship together.

That's great.

Yeah.

And you know, I loved that.

It's it's one of those movies where, you know, a lot of times you can get a lot out of a movie just watching the movie.

And you can with this one.

But you also get a whole lot out of just watching Spielberg talk about the stories behind it and giving more context to these stories and and why they were important.

So.

Yeah.

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Back to the show.

What did you think about the kind of main actors in the in the cast?

What?

What were some standouts for you?

I mean, I think, I think Gabriel LaBelle is such a perfect choice for Sammy.

I mean, it's the, I say young, there's a younger Sammy in this, of course, sure.

But most of the time, most of the, the film, LaBelle is the lead.

And I, I think it's a perfect choice because it should not be the performer we can't take our eyes off of.

It should not be the performer who commands the screen every time he's on the screen.

It should be someone who is watchful and our attention goes to whatever he is looking at or whomever he is looking at.

And LaBelle is really good at being quiet when he needs to be having outbursts on occasion, typically awkward outbursts that let you know that he's much better at communicating through images than he is speaking.

But he there's just enough of a resemblance to a young Spielberg that I think it works.

And yet he's he's very flexible too.

He does the physical comedy well when he's in awkward interactions at at school with the bullies, or when he's on the sets of his early sort of experimental films.

But he's a Christian girlfriend.

So I think it's just, I think that's just perfect casting works much better than seeing the same actor play Lorne Michaels a few years later in the movie about Saturday Night Live.

Although I didn't think he was bad in that.

I just thought that was a much, that film didn't work very well.

Paul Dano was a very surprising choice when I heard about the casting for the film.

But I could see right away why he cast Dano, because Dano can convince you of the intensity of the passion for technology and for science and wanting to be the best at something.

And there's that wonderful conversation about how maybe the problem here, I think it's.

Yeah, it's Sammy's sister who observes.

It's got to be difficult for our mother to be married to a genius, knowing that she will never do anything that is as successful or as important as him.

And maybe she needs a kindred spirit or a soulmate or a love that is someone with whom she feels on equal ground and important and and loved.

I know again, botching the the lines.

But yeah, that made a lot of sense to me.

And yet it would have been easy.

And maybe earlier in his life, we would have gotten a different version of the father.

It would have been easy to make him seem very self absorbed and and for us to get an illustration of someone where the the lines, the caricature has been shaped with with anger.

And I don't think I don't think that's the case.

I think we see that in other Spielberg films earlier where the father figure can be very complicated and even off putting.

Even in close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the protagonist is a father, the audience often comes away from that going What a selfish character.

Yeah.

And I think rightfully so here.

There's just so much mercy in in the portrayal and in the performance.

I think it needed that soft touch that that Dano does so well.

It's funny to be saying that considering the the rage monster he played in There Will Be Blood.

But yeah, there's a real sensitivity here.

Michelle Williams is just so good in so many movies.

It's taken me a while to warm up to that performance, and I think it's because I think it's my problem.

I don't think it's hers.

I think it's because I often find myself sort of backing away when I'm around theater kids.

Sure.

Because they're so flamboyant and so expressive and so overconfident in themselves a lot of the time.

And I'm an introvert and I'm insecure and I'm uncertain.

OK, so now we have a small plane going over my house, which never happens.

I don't know.

Maybe this is a maybe we're supposed to talk about Empire of the Sun again.

I don't know, maybe.

But it's it's gone now.

But there's a flamboyance and an almost overconfidence to Michelle Williams performance here that the first couple of times I was like, boy, she's really going for that Oscar.

And the more time I've spent with the film, the more I've come to feel like, no, I think this is probably just a very honest, authentic portrayal of what his mother was like.

Yeah.

And then you think about other female leads, other other characters in Spielberg's film history, and you start to realize how many of them were probably influenced by his mother, especially Willie in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Kate Capshaw's performance there, I started noticing right away a strong resemblance between the personality of Mitzi, a Sammy's mother in this film and the demeanor and laughter and nervous energy of that character in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

And so again, the problem is probably me.

It's probably a very strong performance based on the the likeness of Sammy's mother or of of Spielberg's mother.

Yeah.

And maybe you can see why the character of Sammy at at one point actually, or actually, no, it's yeah, it's Sammy.

But it's also the sisters who are at times telling Mom to kind of chill.

Yeah, you're right.

Why do you have to be the center of attention all the time?

Right.

So yeah, yeah.

And so I know too.

Spielberg cast her off of this TV miniseries Fosse Verdun, which I've I've never seen.

I've seen pieces of it.

I have not stuck with it through the whole thing, but.

Yeah, but there, you know, he, the way he described it was, it was just, there wasn't any one particular thing.

It was just a feeling he got from from her that reminded her him of his mother in some way.

And you know, you with Spielberg, you just got to go.

Yeah, sure.

You whatever your intuition is, go with it, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But she, she, I know she watched a ton of his mother's like footage of his mother over the years.

You know he kind.

Of really is drumming on a lot of her strengths.

I mean, right.

I think the first time I ever really noticed Michelle Williams, I remember her being on television.

But there's a little movie called The Station Agent.

That was also my introduction to Peter Dinklage as a serious actor.

It's become one of my favorite films.

It was also my introduction to Bobby Cannavale, who has been everywhere since then.

And Patricia Clarkson.

Is that the name I'm looking for?

The other The other actress, yeah.

But Michelle Williams plays just like a local librarian who strangely gets like, a crush on awkward visitor from out of town, played by Peter Dinklage.

And they end up having some very tender scenes together.

And I remember thinking there there is a a warmth and a glow and a curiosity and a just sort of unselfconsciousness to this actresses performances.

And then she would go on to play Marilyn Monroe and do these huge, incredibly intense, dramatic things like Blue Valentine.

Yeah.

So she has such incredible range.

She does.

I actually just watched the the Kelly Reichert film Wendy and Lucy and she's you know, she's so reserved in that and it made me think too, I've never seen Wendy and Lucy, which was a older Reichert film, but just I it might have been that same year as 20/22 she played she was in showing up where another Reichert film where she's so, so reserved.

I love that film and I love that performance.

Another, another performance that gets to the complicated truths of what it's like to be an artist when you're surrounded by more more dominant personalities, family crises, and trying to stay true to your calling.

It's one of my favorite films about art making that I've ever seen.

And yeah, I'm much more reserved.

Subtle, understated performance, but so good.

Yeah, maybe a good companion movie with this.

Yeah, sure.

They're different in a lot of ways, but touch on a lot of the same sorts of themes of family and art for sure.

Well, and Judd Hirsch in, in, in in both films, right?

I didn't realize that but.

Yeah, yeah, he plays.

He plays the uncle in the Fablemans.

He's the the one who kind of barges into the family and and preaches to Sammy Fableman about what it is to be an artist and how artist is going to how art making is going to tear, tear you in two and then in showing up, he's the father.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Again, very brusque, very abrasive, tends to make life more complicated for people.

Yeah, he's really good at playing that character.

I may be misremembering this, but I seem to remember reading the Michelle Williams asked him wanted him for showing up because they were working together on the Spielberg film.

I'll have to go back and check that.

Don't quote me on that, but I seem to remember there being some kind of connection there.

Yeah, that would make sense that that happens a lot.

But yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, she's she has, you know, Michelle Williams even talked about she didn't just watch, you know, footage of his mom.

She like obsessively watched footage of Leah, Leah Spielberg laughing because she loved her laugh.

And so a lot of the a lot of the her laughs in this movie are her really doing her best trying to imitate Spielberg's mother.

So yeah, I think she's really good in this.

It's, you know, knowing Michelle Williams range helps with kind of pushing down that thought that, oh, she's just trying to overdo it because, you know, that she doesn't have to to give a good performance.

So there must be something there that she's tapping into, trying to tap into that's not just like over performing.

I'm going for an Oscar sort of thing.

Right, Right.

Yeah.

But yeah, going back to Gabriel LaBelle too, I just wanted to say Spielberg, Spielberg on their Zoom calls, the thing that stood out to Spielberg the most was that Gabriel LaBelle would, like, dominate their calls, just like berating him with questions.

And Spielberg was like, his curiosity was so huge and it reminded me so much of myself.

And, you know, it's it was it's very abnormal for someone else to dominate a phone call with me.

And, you know, he was like, that's that's how I knew that I had cast the right person.

You know, he's Gabriel Bell saying stuff like, what can I do this your walk?

You, you do this Like, you know, he named like the sort of walk he does.

And spoilers like, yeah, yeah, I guess you can do that because he was trying to tell him, I don't want you to imitate me.

I want you to like, you know, find the character yourself.

And so Gabriel's like saying, what can I do your walk?

And he's like, can I do your smile?

You have this kind of this kind of silly smile.

You do.

And Spiller was like, well, what's silly about my spot smile?

And Gala Bell's like, well, you kind of have this like dead upper lip when you smile.

He's like, yeah, so I thought that was great of just.

And you can see it comes out in the movie that that kind of curiosity that he that he has comes through.

And Sammy, I think as you watch the movie, yeah, there's there's a lot of great performances.

I think Seth Rogen is really good in this movie.

Spielberg, Spielberg saw him as a dramatic actor when he cast them and didn't really have anybody else in mind.

And Rogen has always been a guy that has that in him, even if it's not, you know, what he's most known for.

I think not.

Not all the comedic actors do, but he does.

I mean, the great comic actors tend to have these deep wells of trauma, share grief.

Not all of them.

I mean, I think I've heard some wonderful conversations about Steve Carell and how he seems to be unusual this way when it comes to leading leading men in comedies.

That he doesn't have any dark secrets or devastating losses in his past that he's drawing on or reacting to or trying to turn from.

Again, forgive the background noise.

I live next to a fire station and things can get really.

There's.

Always me around here.

I'm trying to make a connection to a Spielberg film here, but these don't sound anything like the spaceships in close Encounters.

They don't.

There's not enough notes, there needs to be 5.

But I I feel like this movie open probably opened some doors for Rogan because if you look at what he's done since then, it's there's always an edge of comedy to what he's doing.

But he's had some pretty prominent roles since then, including like right now in that series Call Is it called the studio that he's.

Yeah, I've been wanting to to catch up with that.

Yeah, yeah.

What did you think about David Lynch as?

Oh boy, I'm so glad we can talk about this now because when I reviewed this and when I did my own podcast for for subscribers on my sub stack, the film was still in theaters and I so wanted people to be surprised by this.

And I feel like there's been enough time now we don't have to worry about that so much because every it's been so, you know, widely talked about and we're.

A spoiler podcast, so.

But strikes me as maybe the single most daring casting choice in Spielberg's whole career because Lynch is a big personality.

And the way he talks, nobody talks like him.

And I think it's such a credit to to Spielberg and to Lynch's respect for him that Lynch gives a real performance there.

I mean, you can tell it's him.

You could tell it's his voice.

Oh, yeah.

But he, he really adopts some sort of abrasiveness that's not typical for David Lynch.

There's the way he's smoking, There's just the body language.

It's a, it's a, it's a great performance.

It's also really a tribute to to Spielberg's respect for Lynch that he cast him in this role.

And as I wrote on Letterbox right after I saw the film for the first time, there's something about that scene and maybe I should frame it a little bit more.

But we're we're near the end of the film.

Sammy is already becoming an accomplished young filmmaker, but he's looking for a way in.

He gets ushered into unexpectedly and abruptly ushered into the office of the great John Ford and sort of on the spot, sort of like what it must have been like for LaBelle to talk to.

Spielberg has to really live up to the moment and not screw this up.

And John Ford is a really brusque, abrasive personality in that exchange.

But what I'm seeing as I'm watching this, I'm it's 1979 and I am watching Kermit the Frog standing in front of Orson Welles at the end of The Muppet Movie.

Because you've got this performer who has come to Hollywood with a banjo and a whole bunch of dreams and not a whole lot of networking connections to work.

And suddenly, out of the blue, he finds himself in front of the man who pulls the strings, the man who can open doors.

And it's the the big bearded guy behind the desk with a cigar.

And that guy looks at him and says, what do you got?

And he gives him what he can.

And while it doesn't turn out exactly the same way, you can tell that that is a, a turning point.

He's kind of been handed a golden ticket from someone who probably dismisses 19 out of 20 people he sees.

And I, I, I, I would, if, if I ever got to interview Spielberg and I haven't given up, I, I would ask if, if that scene had any influence on this one.

Because the, just the spirit of the scene and the role that it plays at the, at the conclusion of this film felt so familiar.

And yet, from what I can tell, it's based on something that really happened too.

Yeah, I mean, he, if he, you know, from interviews I've seen with him, for one thing, this he's told the story for a long time and and it it's there's different versions of this story.

The one we get in the movie is probably one of the more comical versions of it.

And you know, in the in the special features for this, he he says, no, that's this is exactly, you know how it happened, you know, almost word for word.

And but he's told it so many different ways.

You're like, well, you know, we'll we know how memory works.

But but he yeah, apparently he was in this office.

It wasn't in, it wasn't in Hollywood like that.

It was it was in some offices, but it really was the Hogan's Heroes guy, the Bernie fine that he was like, well, you shouldn't be talking to me, you should be over here and pushes him in there.

He says, he says he really came in with lipstick, you know, on his on his face and you know, did the whole horizon thing.

The horizon thing has always been a part of the story.

It's such a such a great line and such a profound one because we can see the influence of that line in so many iconic scenes throughout Spielberg's career, right?

So it's easy to believe.

Yeah.

And you know, I, I loved David Lynch in this.

I've kind of, I steeped myself in Lynch earlier this year after he passed.

I kind of used that just as an excuse to catch up with all my blind spots.

And so I was watching Inland Empire and.

I.

Finally got around to Twin Peaks, the return, and.

Man.

And watch some of his shorts even.

And so I, I've just been steeped in him.

And so it was just just a breath of fresh air for me watching re watching this and getting to see Lynch come in and just this incredible artist.

He didn't want to take the role at first because he was like, I'm not an actor.

I'm not like on the level of John Ford and, you know, very modest, but, you know, I think a lot of people would disagree that he is on that master level, so.

Yeah, no, he is as influential for young film makers today and even accomplished film makers today as Ford was for Spielberg's generation, I think.

Yeah, I think so.

In a very different way.

I mean, it's hard to make many connections between a John Ford film and a David Lynch film unless you're watching something like maybe The Straight Story.

Sure, but but also it was so late in his career and he does have that reputation and he could speak with that kind of authority and just bring that gravitas to it.

I I thought it was just a, just a stroke of genius.

I was so delighted when I saw that it was him.

It was actually Tony Kushner's husband, Mark Harris that suggested him, which is wild to me.

Why would he think of Lynch?

You know, I would love to know what made him think we should put Lynch in in for that role.

But I'm so glad they followed that path and and got made it happen because it's.

It's great.

Yeah.

And the and the end of the film really needs something that stands up with the best scenes in the film.

And it's it had to have been a complicated thing to write because the peaks of the film have been about the family.

Right.

You can feel that the the film is a little bit in danger of going off the rails the more it gets involved with the bullying situation and the I'm going to be used Christian in quotes Christian girlfriend.

I'm not sure or what church she's going to but it's it's wild.

Yeah.

But there the film's in danger there of kind of becoming a bunch of just amusing anecdotes at that point, the the more we sort of stray from the central family story.

So to make that to give that scene such prominence at the end, I'm sure was a storytelling, a screen writing challenge.

But it really does work sort of as a transition that now, you know, now he's on his own.

And again, I think we might even feel there a little bit that his dad had passed that sense of there.

There's a sense of freedom, not not celebrating that well now all that's behind me, but celebrating that my feet are under me and I'm on my way now I'm in the door.

And that, I think was that works as a kind of a closing note that, I mean, that's not the end of the story for Spielberg.

In a sense, it's the beginning.

These are the things that prepared him for Jaws and and close Encounters and Poltergeist and Raiders, etcetera.

Right.

We've said very little about so many of them so far.

ET, Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, But and then Hook, which has so much autobiographical stuff in Hook, a movie I don't even like very much.

The same.

But yeah, definitely, it's definitely all there.

Maybe, you know, maybe there could be another I I don't think he would make it, but but you, you know, there's a whole second-half to the story that that's right, that that's, you know, back to the line about the horizon that's on the horizon at the end there.

Yeah, yeah.

And I, I know there's a lot of great film makers, but I'm just like, I don't know if anyone could or should make a film other than Spielberg about, you know, the rest of his life.

But yeah, I I do love.

So, you know, talking about like the ends there, the end.

And kind of like his dad passing the that last scene between Sammy and Bert, you know, where it kind of jumps ahead a year and they're they're in the apartment.

They actually shot that on the day of Arnold Spielberg's first.

It's I'm kind of probably not pronounced this correctly.

It's a yarzite.

It's like a it's a Jewish word for the anniversary of a loved one's death, a he, I guess a Hebrew term.

But so, you know, that's something that is very important.

It was it had been one year since his father died when they shot that that scene.

And Spielberg, Kushner said that Spielberg told him it was his Qadish, which is a Jewish prayer of mourning shooting that scene.

And I thought that was really special.

And I think I think too, it's shows how it's just another example.

Spielberg processing through films.

It's him looking back on this critical moment between him and his dad, where his dad finally, you know, with some reserve, obviously, but finally, you know, kind of gives his blessing in in the in the best way he could to his choice in filmmaking.

And he's shooting that on the anniversary of his father's death.

And what an incredible opportunity as an artist to be able to process that in that way and celebrate, I think in a way to his father in that way and, and what his father meant to him.

I just, I just loved that.

I thought that was very cool.

And there's, I mean, I've experienced this again, the, the, I've been thinking a lot about this film with my experience with, with the book I'm writing.

And my father passed in November, and there are a lot of family stories in the book.

And I felt a lot more pressure and conflict about writing a lot of those stories before he passed.

And it wasn't because I was afraid of what he would think.

It wasn't because I felt like I was misrepresenting him or, you know, that I needed to avoid some kind of controversy.

It was more that the story isn't over yet, You know, that his story wasn't over yet.

And so I was writing these reflections on him in childhood, but what happens late in the story changes the way you tell the early parts of the story.

Yeah.

So he passed in November as I was writing the last chapters.

And that really did influence my final revisions of things because, you know, once the story is told, you can step back from the whole thing and reflect.

And it hasn't been very long.

I'm sure I will be reflecting for many years to come and making new and new discoveries.

But seems like the timing was a little bit similar here.

And I wonder if that closure gave him a sense of permission to say, now, now the story is told and there's not going to be any surprise twists at this point.

And I can step back and, and as a storyteller, give it the shape that I see in it at this point.

Yeah.

You know, that's, I love that.

That's a great perspective and makes a lot of sense to me.

And it makes me think too, you know, how he actually had more time to process his mom and you know how he portrays her.

And I think the I think the incredible thing about this movie and how he, he and Kushner wrote it, I love that he got someone like Kushner to write it with him.

And he talked about he Kushner is the only one he could have because he just the way he and Kushner Kushner communicate, he feels like he can, you know, pour his heart out.

He he doesn't have to hold anything back with Kushner, which is which makes for great writing, you know, But I love that he doesn't like sugarcoat his parents, really.

He shows kind of like the good and bad of both of them.

And, you know, he shows all the great parts of his mom and how, how full of life she was and, you know, how inspirational she was and how loving she was and supportive.

But he also shows that she could make some, you know, really bad choices that came out of that personality as a parent.

And and the, you know, the this the selfishness that she had with her choice that, you know, it was something that he understood and probably has come to understand better now than he did when he was 16 of why she made that decision.

And I think that conversation in the kitchen is a lot of him kind of processing how much he understands her now that that tension of like what she needed and what her family needed.

Yeah.

So I just love that he didn't he didn't try to.

You could very much end up with this kind of like Angelica mother figure right in a autobiographical movie.

But he doesn't do that.

And I I respect.

That take take for example, the scene where he comes, he hears screams coming from the house and he he goes in and his mother has has a has brought home a monkey.

Yeah.

In the context of the story, that's a it's a big jump.

But we've seen how impulsive she is by that point, right?

We also know how frustrated she is and how badly she needs to laugh.

She is missing the troublemaker in her life at that point, but being separated from from Bernie.

And of course, Spielberg fans are looking at that scene going Marion has a monkey and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that monkey is a troublemaker.

And that monkey, in a story that Spielberg told several decades earlier, is the enemy.

That monkey works for the Nazis.

That monkey is a spy and a traitor trying to break up something.

And in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg the storyteller, Spielberg the judge, mental God gets to gets to judge the monkey.

Yeah, in this film, he's much more, you know, he's he's older, much more mature, much more understanding.

But we get a very empathetic picture of why the mother brings the monkey home.

And but I had to laugh at that because of how how much it revealed who he was then and who he is now.

But also there, there are winks like that.

I don't know if they're all deliberate, but it feels like there are so many deliberate winks all the way through the film.

They're sort of like, do you see how that?

Do you see where that came from now?

Yeah, you you think about like, you know, riding the bikes down the road with his scout friends and you think about ET.

Yep, or the the grocery carts running across the street in front of the car during the tornado and you think of close Encounters.

Right.

Him sitting in front of a flickering screen with tears in his eyes and you think of Tom Cruise and Minority Report.

I even was thinking about, you know, Spielberg does not have blue eyes, but the the kid he cast to play the young Kim has these bright blue eyes and there's that image of those.

The close up of those eyes made me think of AI.

Yeah, AI and Elliot and ETI.

Don't remember if Elliot has blue eyes, but yeah, yeah, definitely.

There's a lot of AI in here which reminds me now that it comes up, I think he has a Co writing credit on that.

The.

Original screenplay was was heavily Kubrick.

Right, but he does have.

The right thing, he messed with it a little bit.

I'll have to go back and check that.

I think he has the sole writing credit on that now that you say that.

OK.

Because he, he didn't really want, because it was Kubrick's, he didn't want anyone else to, to mess with it.

He wanted to risk, you know, do the best job he could to make it how he thinks to honor Kubrick.

So yeah, he I think he does have the sole credit on that one.

So that is probably the last one since close Encounters than that.

And but even that was like, yeah, he has the sole credit, but a lot of it was already from Kubrick, so.

The the the aggressive girlfriend in the aggressive Christian girlfriend in the families.

I can't help but wonder if we aren't supposed to think of Amy Adams character in Catch Me If You Can as the rather aggressive, rather horny young woman.

Yeah, throwing herself at Leonardo DiCaprio.

Yeah, there's a lot of talking about website and how the planes in Empire of the Sun sort of play the role of movies here representing the dreams and hopes of this young man in the concentration camp.

I don't know very many people who would put Empire of the Sun in their in their Spielberg top five, but but I I would it, it stays with me as one of the most personal, it feels to me like one of the most personal films for him.

And again about separation from your mother and father, and what it feels like to have your world falling apart as a kid.

And to to have to grow up before you're supposed to have to grow up.

Yeah.

You know, there's a lot of that in the Empire of the Sun and and Spielberg's life personally.

Yeah.

And you took a lot of liberties with the source material in that one.

It's if you go and read.

I did read it.

It's a very different, that's a very different writer.

I'm not surprised he hasn't gone back and done any more of Ballard's works.

But.

It's it, it's definitely all over it and really like the, you know, it makes me think about just the way he shoots movies.

He really kind of pulls out all of this, all the stops in this one, all the shots that he's done over the years, you know, all the different sorts of close-ups that he's, he's kind of perfected the, the low, those low angle close-ups, the, the push insurance and the, you know, he, he's, he does this thing in this movie that I haven't seen in a while that I used to.

I feel like in like the his he's 90s run, he was doing this a lot where he'll have a character kind of walk up into their close up on on on screen and he does that with the one of the bully kids does it while they're playing volleyball.

And this one, and I was like, there's that there's that shot that I haven't seen him forever.

You know, part of that is just I've been watching Spielberg movies for two years straight and analyzing them so hot.

You know, that's not necessarily something most people would probably recognize as like, oh, he's, he's doing shots that he hasn't done in forever, really.

But there's that meta element of the whole thing too, where as he, as we watch Sammy practicing editing, the scene itself is edited brilliantly.

So you're, you're constantly thinking about we are seeing the result that we are seeing what he can do now as we watch him edit a scene about him learning to edit.

And so I can't help but wonder if we aren't getting a little bit of a comment on what sort of the, the cliche that he is best known for, which is that, that that emotional zoom, right?

I don't know if you remember the Joe Dante film, the burbs on early Tom Hanks comedy, but that film in the mid 80s was already spoofing the Spielberg zoom.

So that if something dramatic happened in the cul-de-sac that is the location for that film, if anything dramatic happened there, there would be like 12 zooms on the different neighbors faces, all of them reacting to the thing to the point that it just became absurd.

And then at one point I remember there was even a slow zoom on a dog who just is not paying any attention at all.

And we were all just laughing because we knew what that was at that point.

But then you watch this and you see, first of all, I think it's a it's a budget thing, right?

He at, at in those early films, he can't create these massive panoramic dramas.

So he's got to convince you of the drama by the expressions of the people watching and those scenes where we see him paying such close attention to his mother's face as he's starting to realize there's something going on here that I am only now discovering.

And he keeps going back over and over and over, frame by frame, to look at her eyes, to look at her face and try to read those expressions when she's falling into, you know, Bernie's arms or she's falling or she's on the tree and she's laughing and feeling carefree.

Yeah, there are so many moments where he's zooming in because he's trying to understand something, and I almost wonder if that isn't kind of a yeah, well, here's where that came from, too.

Right.

Yeah.

And even like, I think because of that later in the film when you get you get him filming the new house they have in California, you know, with Burt the dad running around and showing him everything, which Spielberg, by the way, I think all or most of those kind of eight, 8mm and 16mm a shot.

Spielberg shot most of those himself, which is which is cool.

But even in that, as you're saying that it made me think he is making sure to film his mom and those because the dad's like, wait, why'd you go away?

And he's gone over to his mom outside the the window.

And it makes me wonder like, is he, you know, is he going and trying to capture what his mom is thinking so that he can go back and look later and try to understand his mom better?

And, you know, there's that that moment where his dad carries her through and she's laughing, but then her eye, she makes eye contact with the camera and that just distant depressed look in her eye.

Really like that look made me emotional and tear up even more than the the announcement scene that follows.

Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's incredible.

It's.

Well, and that makes sense too.

I mean, most directors would make that scene, the scene of the the announcement, be the emotional peak of the movie.

But for him, it's not uncharacteristically.

It's not about making us emotional at that point.

It's about how the only way he could process it was to detach.

And so you see that sort of fantasy image of him filming the announcement when he's really just sitting on the stairs and he you realize that some of what he does so well, some of his strength comes from PTSD, comes from trauma, unable to cope with what's in front of him.

Just like the little boy watching the train crash at the beginning of the film, he detaches and thinks about how he can gain control over the situation by filming it, to use his mother's words from earlier in the film.

And I I think that's a much more interesting storytelling choice.

It's a much more personal and revealing thing.

Rather than just to go for the audience's emotion, give the audience a chance to learn something by observation themselves, and that way the emotions the audience feels are very much their own.

We are.

Being told what to feel.

And I think too, there's a lot in this movie of showing that like the his films, once he's made them, they're not really for him anymore.

It seems like every time he's showing a film before an audience, he's disengaged.

He's thinking about something else.

He's you know, and the the war film, he's watching his mom and Benny, because he's made that discovery at that point at the ditch day film, he's like, you know, he's just down.

He's he's been dumped.

He's not thinking about what he filmed anymore, but when you the way Spielberg films it, he makes sure to hone in on the audience, not so much on the screen showing the movie, but the audience faces as they watch it.

I think about the war film, it, it kind of slowly pushes in closer and closer to his mom's face and, and what the move, what the movie is doing for her in that moment is just as moving for you as an audience member as the film itself.

Or, you know, the excitement of the students watching the ditch day film, seeing their reaction is, is just as important as, you know, whatever, however good the film looks, you know, on the screen.

It's and that's something that Spielberg has always been, he's always had audience on his mind.

So I thought that was another kind of like self, self referential thing with the way he shot those scenes.

Was just that idea that he he's always cared what the audience thoughts, not in the not in the way that like it fundamentally changes his films, but in the fact that he does want the audience to be entertained to to think, wow, that's a cool shot to to be moved or you know, you know, he has this run of very political movies in the 2000s and and twenty 10s that he does want to portray important things through his movies.

He he always has the his audience and mind in in a good way, in the best way possible for an artist like Spielberg.

So that was something that stood out to me.

And the beach scene in particular, and the movie he makes there and then shows is also, He's also hoping that the audience is going to notice how he's sort of playfully engaging the the legacy of Leni Riefenstahl and the Nazi propaganda movies that she made, sort of celebrating the Aryan ideal.

Here he's being abused and and persecuted by racists by anti-Semitism in the school.

And what does he do when he is asked to film an event that is going to let the bullies shine?

He gives them such reverent attention that it's funny when you watch it and it makes them uncomfortable.

It makes makes the bully uncomfortable, but it does sort of make us think about those the the power of film to do harm by glorifying a certain kind of person at the expense of others.

Right.

I think, I'm not sure I think that that branch of or that that that thread of the movie's tapestry might not be its strongest thread.

It sort of raises sort of teases us with questions and issues that it then doesn't really have the time at that point to dig very deeply into.

But it's an acknowledgement that that's been an important part of his experience as well in Hollywood.

And so much, I mean, not as much as the Coen brothers, I would say, but there, there has been a thread throughout his filmmaking about Jews in America and about racism, about about hatred, about prejudice.

So there, yeah, he probably couldn't make many deliberate connections to Schindler's List in this film, but that's.

Yeah.

That's a nod in that direction and by that point we are thinking about how everything he's done has been a way of facing fears.

Yeah, yeah.

The the the way a tank comes over a hill in Saving Private Ryan has such aesthetic parallels to the T Rex breaking out of its boundaries in Jurassic Park and attacking.

It's like all these are all doing the same thing.

In a way, they are all addressing these these things that are too big for him to process, too scary for him to understand, and so he has to try to make sense of them in film.

It's interesting that those those films came out at the same time.

Yeah.

He was, I think we see a lot of the emotional evidence of what he was going through making Schindler's List showing up in Jurassic Park.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think, I think another thing jumping off of that is, you know, at this point in his career, it's it's one of those things where, you know, I always wonder what people like Spielberg, how they kind of process their celebrity.

I guess, you know, you're, you're constantly hearing people call you a master and a genius.

And, you know, how do you deal with that?

But there there has to be a point where someone like Spielberg realizes that he is going, whether he wants to be modest about her or not, he is going to be considered one of the greatest of all time.

You know, there's no denying that for him.

And so I think part of what he's doing in this movie is kind of trying to wrestle with with I have this gift.

I don't always know how to wield it in the right way.

And it has this power over people.

You know, you think about when he shows the the footage, the that he cut out of the camping trip to his mother and you know, you have the camera just sits on her face and slowly pushes in and you if you watch her expressions, you can see that he's showing her something.

Maybe she didn't even fully understand about herself.

And that's a that's a very powerful thing to be able to show something to someone that they didn't even realize fully about themselves.

And it's it's the same thing with the bully.

He'd his mom is mature, so she can she she understands and can express it.

The bully doesn't even know what he's upset about, but it's but it's wielded this power over him.

And so he, I think he is in a way wrestling with that.

What?

What is it?

Acknowledging.

Acknowledging that there have been times when he has used it, maybe almost vengefully.

Yeah, yeah.

That would probably take you back to the early Indiana Jones movies and the Controvert.

They've never been big, raging controversies, but there have been debates about cultural stereotypes.

And just how is it healthy to make a movie where you just line up a whole bunch of Nazis and have somebody shoot a bullet through 12 of them at a time?

You know, that's that That's cathartic.

But is it?

Is it helpful?

And the much older Spielberg now seems to be acknowledging that the bullies are humans, too.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

And I and I think he's, he does in this movie, really.

And he, I think he says it in the special features.

Nobody in this movie is a villain, you know, and, and that that comes through to me, even the boys, which are the closest thing to that in the end, you know, he shows their humanity with the one crying and the other, you know, running away scared, you know, from the from the low.

I think Logan is the big guy.

And so, yeah.

And I think it's just part of he's softened up a whole lot over the years as as you kind of do, as you grow older and, you know, have families and, you know, you really do soften up.

You know, I'm, I'm way softer now in my 30s than I was, you know, a decade ago in my 20s and able to process things emotionally and see people with a lot more compassion than I was, you know, back then.

And.

I hope you know that's not normal.

There are too many men in this world, and especially in this country, who are not growing up like that, who are not.

That's a good.

Cultivating empathy, not not cultivating compassion and just getting more and more hardened and vengeful and and bitter as they realize this ideal of masculinity they've been sold is is or even admired.

Yeah, and I think Spielberg's done a lot in the past like decade to really try to push against that that sort of thing.

You know, you think really like when you think about the tree of Bridge of Spies, Lincoln and the Post, you know, those are I think I think I've talked with Elijah Davidson on Bridge of Spies episode about how, you know, those are really films where he's holding up these ideals of people and saying these are the sorts of values we should be holding as people.

These are the sorts of values that we should be standing up for.

Not all this other, you know, oh crap that people stand up for and, and, you know, push.

But these ideals of freedom and of compassion for others and of, you know, doing the right thing because it's the right thing, not because it's going to get you somewhere in life, you know?

Yeah, and making, making the focus of the films.

Not always a white male hero saving the day, or even necessarily a white male hero learning to empathize.

I mean when he made Oh Wow the name of it just sailed out of my head.

The historical film about slavery.

Amistad.

Amistad, thank you.

That's the one I don't have here in my home video collection because I've never really liked that movie very much.

But part of the part of the problem with it for me was that here was this movie about racism in American history and it mostly it gave the big glorious moments to a white male characters.

But that you can see the change even by Lincoln.

I remember so many, so many not particularly thoughtful critics reacting to that film being like, why did they give Lincoln to such a such a weak voice?

You know, Lincoln was a strong hero.

You know, he was our iconic leader.

I'm like, yeah.

And historically, Daniel Day, I mean, Daniel Day Lewis does his homework, Spielberg does his homework that is based on the few recordings we have and testimonies we have about Lincoln's voice.

You can see there that he's he's making choices to tell the tell the truth.

And and even in that challenge, all right, our unhealthy ideals.

But there's a line, There's a key line in this movie where where somebody, I think it's one of his high school classmates, says, well, maybe it's one of his sisters.

When are you going to make a movie about the girls?

Yeah, it's after his war film.

Showing his.

Sisters ask that.

And asks that in the movie that is in a way doing that by making his mother really the heart of the film.

He's doing that more than he ever has before.

Because you could argue that the BFG shifts in that direction as well.

The post to in a lot of ways.

I'm sorry.

The post as well in a lot of the post.

Yes, yes, of course.

So you can see him, him, you know, responding to those critiques over the years.

Yeah.

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There are there any other like standout images that you think of that we haven't talked about yet?

From the Fablemans.

Yeah.

Excuse me?

I mean, it's easy to get preoccupied with the images that remind you of other images.

Sure.

From a hit from his body of work.

But I want to, I kind of want to move on from that because it's not all that there are the the scene where he is, that we referenced earlier where he is, he is discovering the the affair.

The way the camera moves around him as he's editing it, excuse me, it moves not just around him, but in a spiral in a way that sort of mimics the reels and the way he the way he's working with the film.

I think that's really powerful.

Excuse me, how?

We're talking about editing, but also the scene where she's dancing.

Yeah.

And they turn on the car headlights.

But then we're seeing the movie itself that he made.

And that's when we discover that he's cropped it so that you see the flames of the campfire in front of her.

And that is an incredible image.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

Oh, it's fine.

I'd like to pretend that I'm just being moved by the by the memory, but I'm not.

My voice is starting to go.

I'll say that again.

The the image of his mother dancing.

We see the lights of the of the car gleaming through her dress.

We get the daughter panicking about that.

I think that's wonderful.

But then what?

Later, when we see what he was shooting and you realize that the the flame of the campfire is in the at the bottom of the frame.

So you've got the fire in the foreground and you've got her in the center, and then you've got the lights of the car behind her and the flame becomes almost symbolic.

There are so many points in this movie.

When I think of Malik's The Tree of Life, I talk about that more than any other Malik film.

It's not my favorite Malik film, but it is the most ambitious visually and innovative visually, and I can see the influence of that all over this film, especially in the treatment of the mother.

I kept thinking of the moment in the Tree of Life when you see Jessica Chastain's character playing basically Malik's mother dancing under the tree in their front yard and levitating.

Yeah.

And I mean that that must be one of the inspirations for this, how he shoots this scene.

But then you've got that flame in the foreground.

And it reminds me of the flame that is the first thing we see in the Tree of Life.

This, this sort of mysterious supernatural flame that may be representing the Holy Spirit or the spark of creation or the soul of his mother.

I don't know.

But that, that's a really powerful image, I think.

And it's such an iconic image, such a such a familiar image to have to see the beacon.

Oh boy, here we go with another siren to see the beacon of a film projector gleaming out over an audience.

And we are looking at the audience's faces.

I've seen that in so many movies, from Amelie to the long The Long Day Closes to even the Muppet Movie.

But in this one, he does a little bit of showing off.

He takes even that very familiar thing and does it in a way we've never seen before.

The way that the camera was just sweeping over this vast audience.

And we're we're seeing just how much power the images on the screen that we cannot see have over them.

That one sticks with me from this film, even though it's a even though it's a kind of shot that has become rather cliche for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about you?

Yeah, I, you know, as you were saying that, I, I do think there's a bit of like there are several moments where, you know, I go back to his mom in the closet watching that where he's kind of shooting at this angle where the, you know, the projector is kind of gleaming past his mom, you know, in the frame.

And you get those kind of those light flares, you know, in the camera.

There's more to that than just it looks cool, which most of the time when you see that in a movie, it's like, oh, this is just a cool shot.

But in that one, you know, the the projection of the camera, you know, of the of that film that that, that he's projecting and showing his mom is invading the frame there with his mom.

In a way, that's what it's doing in her that you see on her face.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that's very powerful.

And probably with someone like Spielberg, probably pretty purposeful in a lot of ways.

And yeah.

The specificity of a lot of the family interactions reminds me of something in Spielberg, and I would say to some extent even in Malik's films that I really missed.

That is very much a 70s thing.

And it is that chaos of a family situation is the paying attention to every little detail so that it seems as rough and complicated and prone to accidents as possible.

When I think about the family interactions and close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's just bedlam in that house.

It's someone who has lived that kind of family situation.

And as he's gotten older, his movies, as much as I love them, have become more and more movies made by somebody who has watched a lot of movies.

And so this is what a family looks like in a movie.

Why I think of War of the Worlds and how little that movie affected me because the movie was the movie's character for the family at the heart of the film was such a movie family.

I didn't believe in them at all.

I'm not moved by that final image of the reunion between father and son at all, because I don't believe that's a father and a son in this film.

Something as simple as taking the tablecloths at the dinner table and these disposable tablecloths and folding them over the plates and the plastic utensils and bundling it all up and taking it to the trash.

That grumpy grandma makes.

Me believe, yeah, that that suspends my disbelief because it's got to be it's got to be from experience.

But sometimes it's even something simpler than that.

And I think maybe the the allusion to one of his previous films that hit me hardest.

Watching it again today was the scene of the grandmother dying in the in the hospital and how the film how the how the the differences in personalities come through there.

You've got the dad looking at the machine, looking at the heart monitor.

You've got the mom lying on top of her mother and feeling and emoting and speaking and listening.

And you've got Sammy on the side, and he is looking at the pulse in his grandmother's neck.

And as the camera zoomed in on that, my mind went to the tremor, the impact tremor of the T Rex in Jurassic Park.

Yeah.

This is how you know death is coming.

Look at that ripple on the water.

Look at that.

Look at that twitch in the neck.

And who, who is the person who knows first when grandmother has passed, Right?

It's an amazing way.

It's an amazing example of showing and not telling.

It's not the dialogue that lets us know what's going on there.

It's it's, it's what.

It's what he chooses to give his his camera to.

Yeah.

And it's, it's a, it's him like kind of giving us this like these moments of how he sees the world, you know, and because he is such an intuitive director, you know, his, he's, he's talked about over and over again.

He's in most of his element when he can show up on a set and just feel, feel the space and fill his actors within the space.

And that's how he gets always gets his best to his best stuff.

And, you know, another moment like that is after he's been punched in the nose by the bullies and he's, you know, the dad comes home and mom's freaking out.

He's dad is freaking out a little bit.

And they're they're arguing with each other at that point in the film.

And there's this quick, subtle moment where you see Sammy seeing everything in the mirror.

He sees himself sitting there with his bloody nose, and he sees his parents kind of over him arguing.

And you can tell in that moment, Sammy is almost processing, oh, this would look good in a film one day, you know?

And that's how he sees the world.

And, you know, we get that impressionistic image of him in the mirror when they're announcing the divorce that we've talked about.

They're all these moments that are kind of like giving us eyes how Steven Spielberg processes and sees the world.

And I think that's really cool too.

Yeah.

And I, I mean, I've, I've felt some of that in trying to, trying to capture in writing some of the events of my own childhood recently.

There is a fundamental loneliness at the at the heart of that that says if your brain is working that way, part of what you want is for other people to be there with you in that moment.

Even if you have to wait 20 years for it to happen.

You are looking for a way to express this is what I am feeling.

This is what I am going through.

So how can I, even now, as it's happening, find a way to testify truthfully in a way that people will believe me?

Right.

That's why the moment I remember most from Hook of all of the fantasy, of all the flying, of all the Captain Hook stuff, what I remember first and foremost whenever I think of that film is a moment when Robin Williams turns in anger and lashes out at one of his children.

I think it's one of the scariest moments in all of Spielberg's films because that is an emotional truth that he somebody, I'm assuming his father at some point, lashed out at him like that.

And it it feels like a punch in the face when you see it in that film.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

And yeah.

Did you have any any final thoughts as we kind of wrap up final takeaways on the film that you wanted?

To I mean, I think it's kind of AI don't want, I shouldn't throw the word miracle around, but I, I think it's, it's, we are very, very blessed to use a word that's also kind of overused, but blessed that we got this.

And it's, it's as good as it is because in some ways I don't think he's as strong a filmmaker as he used to be.

He's grown and changed.

And I do think spending so much time in filmmaking and watching other films and living in Hollywood and he can't help it.

Privilege changes you.

I think it's harder for him to find those moments of emotional authenticity than it used to be.

I miss the Spielberg that had to make a movie struggling with limitations.

I think Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most incredible things ever made.

Because it makes me believe in the most outrageous things.

And one of the ways it does that is it's abrasiveness.

It's it's, it's roughness.

You can feel the dust and the dirt in that movie in a way that you can't even just a few years later with Last Crusade.

Yeah, absolutely.

The more powerful he became, the more resources that became available to him, the harder I think it is for him to make us feel like our feet are on the ground.

He gets some of that back in Jurassic Park in them in that T Rex sequence when we can really feel the weight of the dinosaur in a way that we haven't in any of the sequels since.

In my opinion, I still think what he achieves in the balance of practical effects and animation in Jurassic Park is unmatched since then in digital animation, Peter Jackson does does some pretty amazing things and innovates in a ways in The Lord of the Rings, but that scene always gets me in a way that no other CGI creature has.

Again though, he was pushing against limitations there to find out what was possible, and I think the best work he does going forward will be in those moments when he finds ways to push against something.

Yeah.

So the Fablemans, it's it's weakest moments for me have to do with a quality of imagery, whereas things just feel a little too slick, sometimes a little too easy.

And it's best parts happen when he's really attending to the performances and not bringing all of the tools to bear.

I, I look back at movies like Minority Report and and wish that it had that gritty quality.

It's a sci-fi film.

It's a futuristic film.

It's not going to feel gritty in some ways.

It's going to feel streamlined and artificial and slick.

But that puts a distance between me in the film in a way that again, I go back to Raiders or even Temple of Doom, a movie I have all kinds of problems with.

But I am on that rope bridge across that chasm at the end of Temple of Doom.

I am feeling the heat of the fires in the temple.

I am feeling the humidity of the jungle in that film.

And so here again, I think it's a it's a testament to what Lars von Trier made a whole documentary about, which is a film called The Five Obstructions, which is that the the greatest creativity comes about under pressure, or as the great Wendell Berry would say, the it's the impeded stream that is the one that sings.

It's creativity that is trying to that is wrestling something is the creativity that that gives us the best work and the best revelation because the the artist is discovering things along the way.

And so this film is such an interesting mix of his strengths and his weaknesses.

But I'm so glad, lad, to get back to where I started with this, this rambling conclusion here.

I'm, I'm just so pleased that it's as good as it is coming so late in his career that he's still, that he's clearly having these emotional epiphanies and, and interpretations of his early life with an old man's wisdom, with a lot of love and a lot of compassion.

But that he was really pushing himself as a filmmaker to do new things here that he hadn't done before.

And, and that is why at times, I think it's some of his finest work.

It'll be really interesting if he remakes Bullet to see if he imposes limitations on himself so that we can feel those tires spinning in the dirt.

Yeah, or.

Whatever he takes on next, whether his his next UFO movie is going to to have the kind of magic that that I think is close Encounters does in ways that no other film has achieved since.

Yeah, ET two in a lot of ways as well in that regard.

And he may not have John Williams going forward, right?

So it'll be interesting to see if he starts paring back or if he starts trying to find other tools to replace those things.

I'm kind of hoping he pulls back.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think I think with this one too, it's it's got it is his memories, you know, and so think of a lot of the quality of things are kind of have that memory Sheen to them that kind of tends toward that more slick look, you know, even talked about.

I cast, I cast Gabriel LaBelle, who's a little bit more good looking than I was back then.

And, you know, you you cast kind of good looking people to play the memories and you kind of kind of have this this fantastical sort of look that he and Kaminsky and their collaborations have have leaned into a lot over the course of his career is all through this that that fits well with the memory.

But but yeah, you know, the, the only, the only thing I could see the the quibble that might come up up with this one is, you know, the, you know, just the episodic nature, you know, may or may not work for for people.

It it works fine for me.

But and then the ending is a little bit not the not the final like see like sequence, but just like you end with you got the bully thing.

You got the thing with his mom.

You jump for it a year.

You have the thing with his dad.

It's a little bit like broken up and it feels a little bit removed from the the thread of the rest of the movie that that's there.

But but man, that closing shot, I love the little let's move, let's move the camera down to the horizon.

And that's something he came up with.

It's that intuition.

He came up up with that on the spot on the day like, hey, let's let's see if we can do this adjustment to kind of go along with the John Ford advice and it it kind of takes you out of the movie in a in the best way, you know, and and reminds you that you're.

Watching it makes you feel like you're sitting next to him because, you know, we're watching young Spielberg walk off to the horizon.

But then that that makes you self aware that we're watching a movie and that he's the one making the calls, and it's almost like he's next to you, sort of elbowing you.

Yeah, I actually thought that that made me feel closer to him.

Yeah, yeah.

Unexpectedly, as as meta as that moment is, yeah.

Absolutely, yeah.

I loved it.

It made me It made me like grin, you know, ear to ear watching that final shot.

I I think.

But yeah, you know, just my final thought is, is something that Spielberg has said a lot over the years that he talked about again with this movie.

He he likes to say that I've never been to a shrink and that storytelling and making movies as his therapy.

Yeah.

And, and really like it.

It was making me think of that.

You know, that might be a cliche thing to say for anyone but Spielberg, you know, and you know, there's a lot of artists that that would be true for.

But but just in this series, particularly going through all of his films, I find that to be such a a huge truth that you can see as a thread throughout his filmography.

And I think this is kind of, you know, the skeleton key to all of that this film is it unlocks so much about who he is and all the rest of his movies, going all the way back to duel and going going even all the way back to, you know, the really bad quality TV movie Something Evil that he made, you know?

The first time I saw it, the first 3 words I put on letter on my letterbox notes were the Rosetta Spielberg.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It really is the the the key to all of it, as you said.

Yeah, and, and you know, with that, you know, people often say, and I think it's true about this as well, that the most personal stories, the most specifically personal stories are often the most relatable.

And I think that rings true for this one too.

So I'm just glad, like you said, you know, my I think my final thought goes a lot in line with what you said.

I'm just glad we have this.

It's, I think it's, it was a very special movie for Spielberg.

And I think it's a very special movie for Spielberg fans too, that, you know, it's a gift to himself and a gift to his fans I think is what this movie is.

Do you, where do you kind of rate this in his filmography?

Is it?

Well, that's a good question and as I am an obsessive list maker.

Same.

I'm sure that I'm sure I have a letter boxed if anybody wants to track me down on the letterbox.

Yeah, I'll make sure to link it in the.

Letterbox.com/jover St.

J Overstreet, All lowercase.

I'm scrambling through my tags here.

Yeah, here, here it is.

OK, so I don't know how up to date this is, but let me see if it rings true for me.

I've got the Fablemans at #7 yeah, maybe even higher than I expected on my list.

And yeah, this is, this is the most up to date version of this.

I've got Raiders at #1 and that, that will always go unchallenged.

I think it's such a formative film for me.

And I've, I've been so dissatisfied with all of the Indiana Jones sequels since then, including Last Crusade.

I have a lot of problems with that.

I enjoy it a lot, but it doesn't feel like it takes place in the same world to me as Raiders.

The close Encounters, Empire of the Sun, ET and Jaws, those are my top five.

The Schindler's List, partly because of its cultural importance, its historical importance, and then the Fablemans.

And after that, that's where it starts to get murky for me.

But I would probably pick Lincoln, Catch Me If You Can and Munich.

Yeah, but ask me tomorrow when I might replace Munich with Saving Private Ryan.

I love seeing Munich that high.

Even the BFG which I really like.

Yeah, love seeing what about you that high Munich is Munich is.

I'll probably reflect on this and the epilogue episode, but I think Munich will end up being my biggest surprise of the series.

It was, I had never seen it before.

It was a blind spot and I thought it was incredible and was just taken aback by how relevant it still is today.

But yeah, that that one I have a little bit.

So I my hot take is that his last two movies are two of the best ones he's ever made in West Side Story in the Fablemans.

I my top, my top like probably 6:00 or 7:00 or 8:00 or so or probably could move any, you know, anywhere on any given day depending on how I feel.

I have Jaws at the top and it's always been my favorite Spielberg since I saw it.

I didn't.

So I did not grow up with the Indiana Jones movies.

I saw them I think when I was a kid, but I didn't really grow up watching them a whole lot or having them be a big part of my childhood.

So funnily enough, Last Crusade is my favorite Indiana Jones movie.

I know a lot of people that would say that.

I think emotionally it really connects with people, especially fathers and sons.

Yeah, it's also, it's also very, very funny in a, in a way that Raiders doesn't even try to be.

Yeah, but but yeah, I have.

So I have the Fableman's at six, right ahead of Last Crusade at seven.

Yeah, cool.

And then right above it is Jurassic Park and right above that I have West Side Story, which I was just I just loved on this rewatch, but.

Yeah, I need to see it again.

I was.

It blew my mind technically.

Yes.

The the story gave me trouble but.

But the story, I need to see it again.

Yeah.

And I and I talk about that on that episode whenever it's not out yet as we recording.

But my my big thing with that is I think it's more of a Romeo and Juliet story problem than it is a problem with the movie or, you know, Spielberg or, you know, any of that.

So yeah, I was able to work past that, those issues with this past viewing and loved it.

So ET and Schindler's List are are are at 2:00 and 3:00 or Schindler's List in ET for me.

So I don't know if I'll rearrange that before I do my epilogue episode.

I'm going to think real hard on my final rankings, but yeah, I only have, I only have one movie of Spielberg's that I think is just outright not a good movie and pretty much all the other.

You could probably guess which one it is if you if you had enough guesses, but.

I mean I, I I may have a different pick than you for what the bottom 3 would be, but but what's yours?

My my absolute bottom is 1941.

Oh wow.

That is the one I haven't seen.

For for a movie that's supposed to be a straight comedy, I don't I don't think I laughed maybe at all.

And watching it, it was fun to like the the technical side of things was a lot of fun in a in a lot of ways, you know, with miniatures and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, just doesn't work.

I also my my bottom three are that the terminal and always.

Oh wow.

OK.

And then if you if you were to count his, his section of the Twilight Zone movie, I would have that down there as well.

I haven't seen always in so long that I can't I I, I can't say anything about it confidently.

I just remember it didn't make much of an impression on me it looks.

Great.

But yeah.

It, it didn't make, I don't remember making it making me angry.

And I, I mean, I'll have to go listen to your episode on Ready Player One, but Ready Player 1 made me angry.

Yeah, it's, it's Ready Player 1 is, is the next one on at the bottom there.

Yeah, there's, it has a lot of issues.

Now, I will say this about Ready Player One.

It is a time where Spielberg is trying to like push into some technological limitations.

He's he's trying to do something and I respect that.

I just don't think it works, and it's not the technical side that doesn't work.

I think the CGI stuff is pretty impressively done.

It's the story that's just.

Yeah, it's the storytelling, and I will always hold a grudge about what he does to the Iron Giant in that movie.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the the glory of the Iron Giant, is it the arc of the story that leads us to a place?

Yeah, I am not a gun.

And anyway, that's, that's for the conversation for another time.

Yeah.

You know, given how much he's given us, I'm these are not serious grudges.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's, that's great to hear.

I don't really have anything else for us to discuss.

We've we've done it all, I think.

Well, I will look forward to talking with you in the future at some point.

Yeah, in a podcast or otherwise, about the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, because I'm sure you, you probably noticed this last week.

Steven Spielberg can't stop talking about it.

No, I did not notice that.

He interviewed Paul Thomas Anderson on stage, I guess for the.

DGA premiere.

Yeah, yeah, it's called 1 battle after another I think.

Yeah.

And he said he'd already seen it three times, and he thinks it's one of the greatest American films of the last.

I can't remember how long.

2025 years, yeah.

You know, funnily enough, Paul Thomas Anderson interviewed him about this movie.

Oh wow.

On the DGA.

The DGA has like the the director's cut, OK, They have a podcast form and I think they have the.

The I had forgotten all about that.

I remember now.

I remember reading that but I never saw the interviews so.

Yeah, yeah, excellent.

Well, yeah, I'll, I'll be looking forward to that.

I'm looking forward to that movie too.

So yeah, I'll, you know, make sure you go follow Jeffrey on Substack and on Letterboxed and be tuned in for his new book.

I'm going to make sure to put links to all that in the episode description so you can just open that up and click the links instead of trying to remember URLs.

Or for that matter, trying to remember that ridiculously long title that I gave the book.

But I will say it does have a couple of prominent mentions of the Fablemen's, even if it doesn't get a whole chapter.

But yeah.

Forward by Matt Zahler sites who was probably my definitely my main source for the Wes Anderson series.

Oh, man, yeah, he is a such a great writer and and such a great supporter of writers.

I'm I'm very, very grateful that he.

He was willing to participate in this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, make sure you go follow Jeffrey on all all of the things, click all the links that I put in the episode description.

But that's all we have for this week.

Next week, I'm not sure if I'll have a supplemental episode or if we'll go straight into the Spielberg epilogue, but but yeah, you'll find out so.

But that's all we have for this week for Jeffrey Overstreet.

I've been Eli Price and you've been listening to the establishing shot.

We will see you next time.

We were happy here for a little while.

But look, I think it was this way.

Better to be king for a night than smoke.

For a lifetime.