Interview: Tony Kushner

An in-depth conversation with the screenwriter of The Fabelmans.

Tony Kushner’s screenwriting credits include Lincoln, Munich, West Side Story, and The Fabelmans. In other words, Kushner has become Spielberg’s go to screenwriter.

In this Film Stage interview, Kushner goes into detail about his working relationship with the famous director and Kushner’s evolution as both playwright and screenwriter.

The Film Stage: Steven Spielberg is, in certain ways, the preeminent American filmmaker, someone seemingly everybody needs to have an opinion on. You’ve now written four films for him, and this latest — not for nothing — is his most intensely personal. How did your relationship with Spielberg’s work change as your relationship with him developed?

Tony Kushner: If anybody wants to know what my opinion of Steven was before I started working with him you don’t really have to look any further than the end of Millennium Approaches — the first half of Angels in America — which has the penultimate line “God almighty… very Steven Spielberg.” And that’s always been the line since I wrote the play in 1988. His movies had an enormous impact on me and I always thought he was a really rare and era-defining artist.

I was a medieval studies major when I was in college and was fascinated — you can see this is a big source of Angels in America — with millennia approaching, the medieval notion that the arrival of the millennium would be the arrival of the kingdom of God and the beginning of the end of the world and the day of wrath and the beginning of the kingdom of Heaven. And as we actually approached the millennium — which is when I started work on Angels in America — I was thinking about that a lot. So it sort of blew my mind when I saw Close Encounters, which remains — I think, probably of all of Steven’s films — my favorite. I love many of his films but I’m really astounded by Close Encounters, even now. And the Spielberg Look: looking up into the Heavens. There are byzantine mosaics where people have the exact same expression: it’s a look of both openness and wonder and also terror. That ambivalent thing in those movies informed me a lot.

I felt this when I saw Jaws for the first time; I felt this when I saw Jurassic Park for the first time. There are these moments in his movies of real visual poetry, of a kind of condensation of imagery. The dinosaur breathing onto the glass and fogging it up: these things that just go, “Oh, that’s cool, but also that means a lot. There’s something really complicated and dense going on here.” Politically complicated and dense as well. And certainly psychologically: these everything-is-fine, happy middle-class families, except nothing is fine and everything’s really fucked-up and they’re all kind of bursting at the seams with excess but, also, they’re all starving. It’s a really powerful vision of the nuclear family and the family dynamic.

I felt all that, and when he first started asking me to work with him on Munich… I think my second or third date with my husband [Mark Harris] was to see Saving Private Ryan and we were talking about parts of the movie. I’ve always loved movies, but I didn’t really think about them on a technical level — the specificity about technique. And Mark said — he had seen it once before — ”you should go back and watch it again,” which I did. “Look at the Normandy Invasion: there are, like, 800 things going on. You could stop this movie in any crowded movie theater at any moment and ask the slowest person ‘what’s going on here’ and they could tell you what’s the main thing you’re supposed to be focused on and four things that are also happening.”

When we were filming Lincoln — one of the big debating sequences in the house — I was in video village and Steven said “Come here, come here.” I kept saying “which one is that one? Which side is he on?” It’s a lot to keep track of — center democrats, left democrats, left republicans, right republicans. At one point I said, “This is breaking down into chaos. They’re all yelling at each other.” And he said this great thing: “Anybody can film chaos; I want to film chaos that means something.” I’ve always looked at movies now and thought one of the things that differentiates the filmmakers who are really great from the ones who are not so great — one of the things — is that in sequences meant to produce in you a feeling of being overwhelmed by action, by violence, whatever, they’re the ones that do this by just making something that’s so perplexing and baffling that you just surrender control. And it doesn’t have much of an effect; it’s unpleasant.

And then there are people like Steven who can do it. I’m spatially challenged — I can’t keep up with what’s going on on the screen — but on some level I am keeping up with it. And I know this actually makes sense; this thing is happening. It keeps you involved and hooked in a profound way. It makes it much more rattling and active and rich an experience. I love that stuff. It’s evolved in lots of different ways since your original question. I’ve talked for two hours.

No, this is all good.

We’ve become very good friends. Each project that we’ve done is so different from the other, so each one involves huge [collaboration]. It was a pleasure for me, in West Side Story, that I’d actually done a Broadway musical and that I’d really studied musicals and I knew Sondheim and Arthur Lawrence. I could finally bring my theater pedigree, and I brought Jeanine Tesori — with whom I did my Broadway musical — into the production because I knew she knew more about Broadway musicals than anybody on the planet. Steven had a little bit of catching up to do; because he’s Steven he caught up in, like, three seconds. It was a shock how from the first day of filming to, like, the third day of filming when he seemed to have spent his life making musicals. But that was fun, explaining what the purpose of the rehearsals were going to be.

With Lincoln I had five years of working on the script and reading a lot about Lincoln, so I became a little bit of a dilettante authority on him, and that was fun to bring to the table. Over and over, working with him, things happens while we’re working on the script, while we’re on set, in the editing room where he’s doing something and I have no idea where the idea came from or how he arrived at this. And you sort of sit back and think “Holy shit, this guy is a genius. This is a level of mastery of an art form that’s very, very, very rare.” I just feel like it’s an incredible blessing to be part of that.

Imagine writing a screenplay with Steven Spielberg, but that is precisely what Kushner did on The Fabelmans. To learn what that was like and more, read the rest of the interview here.

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