It’s lunchtime a couple of weeks before Christmas. Past the tree in the glitzy lobby of Claridge’s hotel in London ambles a man who, in his octagonal glasses, workman’s jacket, jeans and trainers, looks a little out of place. Once installed in his room, however, Tony Kushner is entirely in his element. Insights on art, history and politics pour out at the slightest prompting. He cites writers from Conor McPherson to Robert Lowell, gives a lightning-quick insight into Othello (too cruel a play, he says, for him to catch National Theatre’s new production on this trip) and, in the 50 minutes we talk, widens my vocabulary by three words (abreacting, recrudesce and armamentarium).
It’s not hard to see why Steven Spielberg has chosen him to write (or co-write) the scripts for four of his films: Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story and his latest, The Fabelmans. As well as mind-expanding company, Kushner is perhaps the US’s most important living playwright. His two-part, eight-hour Angels in America became a theatrical landmark on its Broadway debut in 1993. A 2017 revival underscored its punch and prescience.
The Fabelmans is more domestic and less mythic, though it has some themes – family, transgression, the unpredictable power of art – familiar from Kushner’s previous work. Co-written with Spielberg, it’s a warm, emotionally charged but also subtle film based on the director’s early life, telling the story of how he came to be a film-maker against the backdrop of his parents’ complicated marriage. The two men worked on the script in lockdown – to Kushner’s amazement, the first draft was completed in two months. West Side Story had taken a year to get to that point, and Lincoln four and a half. The Fabelmans “just came flowing forth”, Kushner says. “It was a lot of fun – and I never have fun writing.”
Kushner is 10 years younger than Spielberg, and his sprawling, intellectual plays might seem the antithesis of, say, ET. But the two men have plenty in common, too – they are Jewish, leftwing and both had mothers who were serious musicians. In The Fabelmans, Mitzi, played by Michelle Williams, pours her frustrations with family life into the piano. Kushner’s mother, Sylvia, was a professional bassoonist who recorded with Stravinsky, but whose career ended when she had her first child. The baby was born deaf, Kushner says, “and my parents couldn’t really handle that” – especially when Sylvia’s brother, a psychoanalyst, told her that her daughter’s deafness was “because you’re an absent mother”.
Sylvia gave up the bassoon and the family dealt with their subsequent drop in income by moving to Louisiana, where his father – previously a clarinettist – joined his own father’s lumber business. “I think for the rest of my mother’s life there was a secret relief, because I think it had been hard for her to be in this very male, very competitive environment,” Kushner says. “But I also think that she had a great sense of loss and a wounded professional pride.”
In The Fabelmans, Sammy, the movie-mad son, takes his cine camera on a family camping holiday and ends up capturing evidence of something that, as Kushner puts it, “was not actually hidden, but that everyone had a deep investment in not seeing”. This actually happened to Spielberg and his family – he originally told Kushner the story when they had just started filming Munich. The Fabelmans depicts this incident as a foundational one in which the certainties of hearth and home were turned upside down, setting Spielberg’s life on a new course. “There’s a really powerful dialectic in Steve’s movies, of a tension between safety and danger, and of home as a place that’s menaced from forces without and within,” Kushner notes – for instance in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Kushner’s favourite film, in which the father obsessively creates models of UFOs after an alien spacecraft flies over his truck.
The Fabelmans shows that film-making is a way of seizing control, of discharging intense emotions, or “abreacting the fears that are engendered by the dangers of the world”, as Kushner puts it. But the film also demonstrates that the way audiences – or even more so, subjects – will react is somewhat out of the artist’s hands. In another incident taken from Spielberg’s life, Sammy Fabelman films the high school track meet, and tries to ingrate himself with one of the jocks who bullies him by depicting him on screen as a golden Adonis. Yet the response is opposite to the one he had intended. In developing their skills, Kushner says, artists come to realise that: “You’re accessing powers that are greater than yourself and that you don’t have complete control over.” And it’s something that can end up upsetting, or even damaging, the artist’s closest friends and family.
This idea is fleshed out in a startling cameo by Judd Hirsch, who plays Sammy’s Uncle Boris, based on a real character in Spielberg’s life who had been an animal wrangler in Hollywood, and who was the young hopeful’s first contact with the film industry. He warns Sammy: “Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also it will tear your heart out. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion’s mouth. It’ll bite your head off.” Or, as Kushner says: “Film is an art and art is a power that, like water, seeks a level and the level is truth. It’s just going to lead you towards truth no matter how incommodious or uncomfortable or inconvenient truth may be.”
So has Kushner ever upset his own family with his writing? “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.” Neither of his parents had been happy when he disclosed his homosexuality to them in the early 80s: his father paid for him to see a psychoanalyst “because he thought I could talk myself out of being gay” and his mother was “very upset”, though she immediately warmed to Kushner’s first boyfriend. When Angels in America, which is located in the Aids crisis, looked as though it would be his breakthrough work, Kushner had some trepidation about his father’s reaction. “But he loved writing and writers, and it meant a lot to him that it looked like I was going to become a successful writer, and even though the play was clearly, you know …”
Super gay? Kushner laughs. “But even though it was obviously going to be announced to the world that I was gay,” he continues, “my father really loved the play. He couldn’t read any book that was badly written, it would upset him, and he really liked my writing, so he had an easy time with Angels.”
His mother, however, found it more difficult. She read and saw the first part of Angels in America, Millennium Approaches, in 1990, before dying of breast cancer. “It’s strange,” Kushner says. “The 50s in America was the time of using psychoanalysis to blame the mother for everything, and certainly homosexuality, and I think she felt that she had done something wrong. Or she felt that how could I love her and not want to be with women, that it was somehow a repudiation of her, and I think she felt humiliated by it. It’s sad, because I know she would have come around and she didn’t have time to.”
She was particularly upset by a scene in which the Mormon character, Joe Pitt, comes out to his mother on a payphone, which Kushner had done to her. “It was a completely different conversation than the one Joe Pitt has in Angels, but I think because the scene was on a payphone – and she was a brilliant woman – she misread the scene. She thought that the scene was saying that this woman failed her son, which isn’t at all what happened.”
He talks about a new book of letters from the poet Elizabeth Bishop, in which she writes to Robert Lowell saying that he didn’t have the right to use his first wife Jean Stafford’s stories about her relationship with her brother for his poems. “So there’s that kind of appropriation of other people’s stories and one wants to … I don’t think that being an artist means that you have no responsibility; you have many responsibilities. But there are also truths that have to be told and they may upset certain people.”
In its third act, The Fabelmans also depicts the antisemitism Spielberg experienced at high school in California, though Kushner emphasises that “it wasn’t a defining trauma”, and nor have been his own experiences of anti-Jewish prejudice. He remembers that the first time he came to do a play in London, “a person I was working with said: ‘Oh look, there’s a synagogue over there, if that makes you feel at home.’ OK, that’s not something you would get in America. There’s a way in which Jews have a kind of otherness for British people. But it’s clearly not the way they had an otherness in Germany, for instance, or in Russia or Poland.”
I ask what he thinks about the antisemitic hate speech recently uttered by Kanye West. “I’m working right now on a miniseries project about bipolar disorder. I’d never paid a huge amount of attention to Kanye West, but I started reading this account of him, and he sure sounds like somebody who has fallen into a long-lasting state of hypomania. There are a lot of bipolar people who are antisemites, so it doesn’t mean that he’s not a piece of shit, which he very clearly is, and fuck him and the horse he rode in on, it’s just … it’s a little bit sad because he’s clearly a person of enormous talent and intelligence, and he has serious mental illness.”
Antisemitism can manifest itself in different ways, Kushner says, and he is proud if The Fabelmans calls it out. “It’s always a great thing to say antisemitism is abhorrent, has a history of ignominy second to none, and if you play footsie with it, if you tolerate its existence, you’re going to be led into some terrible place, because fascism and authoritarianism are unbelievably dull movements every time they reorganise and recrudesce, and they will follow the same tropes over and over again. They don’t have a huge imaginative armamentarium, and antisemitism is always right there and it’s been there for centuries, so if anybody starts to sound like an antisemite, they’re done, repudiate them, it’s over, do not make common cause with them.
“So if you’re a Republican right now and this orange-covered mud devil has just had dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, who’s a Holocaust denier and also a rabid misogynist and homophobe, do not think: ‘OK, I’m going to stay connected to him because I can control him’ – that’s the Hitler mistake. You can’t! If you really put a psychotic in the machinery of power, you’re going to regret it, you’re going to destroy your world.”
• The Fabelmans is released in the UK on 27 January
