Unlike the exhilarating flights of fancy and historical epics that Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams have dreamed together — from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Lincoln — The Fabelmans was an intimate journal about Spielberg’s own childhood. And Williams felt every emotion within its frames.
“I think it’s the most personal score John’s ever written for any of our collaborations,” Spielberg says.
Williams notes his work was made possible only because of how deeply vulnerable the director allowed himself to be with the film. “It was incredibly generous of him to want to share, particularly the pain in his adolescent years of the divorce,” says Williams, 91. “I found it amazing that he would want to reveal such personal aspects of his life so close to the bone and the soul.”