Steven Spielberg won the Golden Globe for best director for “The Fabelmans,” a story based on his own early life that the director said he’d been too intimidated to take on for decades.
“I’m really, really happy about this,” he said of his third Golden Globe win out of 20 nominations. “But I think there’s five people happier than I am.”
They are, Spielberg continued, his sisters and his late parents, especially his mother Leah, who is “up there kvelling about this right now.”
The story of a young boy who dreamed of making movies, and the difficulties that caused at times in his family, “The Fabelmans” was long on his mind, but never quite the next thing on his to-do list.
“I’ve been hiding from this story since I was 17 years old,” Spielberg said. “I put a lot of things in my way of the story. I told this story in parts and parcels throughout my career.
” ‘E.T.’ has a lot to do with this story,” he said. ” ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ has a lot to do with this story. But I never had the courage to take this story head on.”
Years ago, though, screenwriter Tony Kushner, while working on Spielberg’s “Munich,” asked him about his early life, and why he hadn’t told that story yet. They talked more as they collaborated on “Lincoln” and then “West Side Story.”
“Nobody really knows who we are until we’re finally courageous enough to tell everybody who we are,” Spielberg said. “When I turned 74, I said, ‘You better do it now.’”
