LOS ANGELES — Family ties take center stage in several movies this season, whether in the actor's interior process or in the actual story on the screen. For Adam Sandler, drawing heavily on his own father helped him play a longtime NBA scout in "Hustle." Paul Dano drew on what he'd learned about his director's father — Arnold Spielberg — to play him in "The Fabelmans."
"I played sports growing up. My father coached all my teams," says Sandler. "In the movie, my name is Stanley; my dad's name was Stanley, we kind of did that for my pop. What I think I used the most in the movie [from my dad], day-to-day, was my love for Juancho [Hernangomez]," he says of the Spanish baller who plays Bo Cruz, the phenom Stanley discovers playing basketball on a public court. "And, basically, [I] was playing his dad, like the way my dad would just raise me, coach, lessons ... never talked about himself, never talked about, 'Hey, it's 4 in the morning. I'm tired, too.' "
Dano leaned in to someone else's family — Steven Spielberg's, whose film recalls his own early years as a budding filmmaker along with his parents' divorce.
