Tony Kushner loved writing The Fabelmans with Steven Spielberg

Tony Kushner loved writing The Fabelmans with Steven Spielberg

Tony Kushner says that co-writing 'The Fabelmans' with Steven Spielberg was the most enjoyable experience of his career.

The 66-year-old screenwriter has worked with the iconic director to pen the script for the semi-autobiographical project that is loosely based on Spielberg's upbringing and has relished the process.

Tony told Collider: "I mean, it is literally co-written. We sat on a Zoom three days a week, four hours a day from October to December in 2020, and we wrote the first draft.

"I had written an 81-page sort of gathering up of all of his memories that he had told me, and trying to string them together as a narrative, with characters and with specific characters and stuff, as a way of just starting. Then we took that, and we boiled that down into an outline, for what looked like it could be a feature-length film.

"And then at one point, Steven said, 'Let's start writing', and we used a collaboration software that enabled us. I typed, but he could see my typing. We started a blank page, and we wrote the whole thing.

"Yeah, there were a couple of places where I would take it and try something, and send it back to him, or whatever, but it is a co-written screenplay."

Tony – who has penned the script for Spielberg flicks 'Lincoln' and 'West Side Story' – added: "I've never had more fun writing anything in my entire life. I loved it. I wasn't really surprised.

"I think 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' is one of the greatest movies of all time, and he wrote it, and you could tell that he wrote it. It's his own very original imagination."