The cinema maestro was only 16 when his life changed after he filmed his mother flirting with his father’s best friend. Six decades on, The Fabelmans director gets personal
By Jonathan Dean
Steven Spielberg
WHEN STEVEN SPIELBERG was 16 he found out that his mother was having an affair. He was on a camping trip with his three younger sisters, his father Arnold, his mother Leah and Bernie, Arnold’s best friend. As passionate about film-making as a teenager as he is now, Spielberg recorded everything on his Super 8. His camera caught a flirtatious moment between Leah and Bernie. It was the moment that changed his life.
“What was strange,” he recalls, “was I saw everything with my naked eye, but only believed it when I saw a frame around it later, on my editing machine.”
Spielberg’s mother would soon marry Bernie while Arnold, remarkably, took the blame for the divorce to protect Leah’s standing with her children—a noble act that led to many years of estrangement from his son. It’s a theme recurrent in so many Spielberg movies.
“I realised the power of cinema young,” he says. “That early film I made changed my relationship with my parents, especially my mother. That was how I found out about her affair. After that I no longer looked at her as a parent. I saw her as a human with all the vulnerabilities I saw in myself. I wish I could have had another ten years looking at my mum as my mum, but that secret brought us together. I was as close to my mother as I’ve been to anyone.”
Spielberg is at home in Los Angeles. Spectacles, grey cardigan, blue checked shirt—he is calm and simmering with stories. At 76 he is one of the grandfathers of modern cinema, along with his old friends Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, with whom he has knocked about since his twenties. I look around the room. A monochrome vase, a wooden table stacked with books. Very little gives away how Hollywood this man is until he pops out a fat cigar—at ten in the morning. Pick your five favourites by him (for me? Jaws, ET, Saving Private Ryan, AI, Minority Report) and you could name a different five tomorrow.
Now, for his 33rd film, he has made The Fabelmans. Nominated for seven Oscars, it is about his childhood. Why The Fabelmans? He says all his films are like an Aesop’s fable with a moral, and what joy it is to watch his formative years unspool. The names are changed, but it’s all true. The young Spielberg in the film is called Sammy. Like Sammy, Spielberg shot a war film with mates. He cajoled his sisters into experimental horror at home—“I was a Grim
