Michelle Williams, Paul Dano and Gabriel LaBelle on playing (well, almost) Steven Spielberg and his parents

Clockwise from here: Family ties; Director Steven Spielberg sharing the tricks of the trade with Gabriel LaBelle — as his alter ego Sammy; Michelle Williams as the vivacious Mitzi; Paul Dano as dad Burt.

THE FABELMANS, STEVEN SPIELBERG’S most intensely personal film to date, isn’t called ‘The Spielbergs’ for a reason. But there’s little question who the role models for the film’s central trio — Michelle Williams’ Mitzi, Paul Dano’s Burt, and Gabriel LaBelle’s Sammy Fabelman — were. Namely Spielberg’s mother and father, Leah and Arnold (inspiration for much parental discord in his movies), and the director himself as a young bairn just discovering the joys, and welcome distractions, of cinema.

THE FATHER

As the put-upon Burt, receding into the shadows of a marriage on the wane and not quite able to comprehend his son’s newfound love for filmmaking, Paul Dano provides everything you could want from a Dano performance, without the yelling: delicate, compassionate, wistful, pained. But when Dano first met Spielberg, he had no idea what the movie was, or which role he was up for... “I hadn’t been that nervous for a meeting in a long time, out of respect and admiration for Steven. On our last night of filming I told him that it would still take me a few years to process because it’s quite something. It was nerve-racking to shoot because you don’t want to disappoint that person, not just because he’s Steven, but because it is so personal.