Steven Spielberg was "really, really happy" to win the Best Director Golden Globe for 'The Fabelmans' on Tuesday (10.01.23).
Steven Spielberg won Best Director
The 76-year-old filmmaker triumphed in a hotly-contested category ahead of James Cameron ('Avatar: The Way of Water'), Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan ('Everything Everywhere All at Once'), Baz Luhrmann ('Elvis'), and Martin McDonagh ('The Banshees of Inisherin') thanks to his work on the personal movie, a semi-autobiographical tale of his own childhood.
He told the audience at The Beverly Hilton hotel in California: “I’m really, really happy about this.
"I’ve been hiding from this story since I was 17 years old. I put a lot of things in my way of this story.
He continued, “I told this story in parts and parcels all through my career. ‘E.T.’ Has a lot to do with this story. ‘Close Encounters’ has a lot to do with this story. But I never had the courage to hit this story head-on until Tony Kushner [and I] were working on ‘Munich’ a long time ago, [and he] started telling me about all these stories about [his] life.
"And we started a conversation. And the conversation lasted all through ‘Munich,’ all through ‘Lincoln’ and ‘West Side Story.’ And my wife Kate was always saying, ‘You have to tell this.’ "
The director explained the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown made him "ready" to tell the story.
He continued: "And during COVID, I didn’t know if any of us were going to have the chance to tell any of our stories again in March, April, May of 2020.
"Everything I’ve done up to this point has made me ready to finally be honest about the fact that it’s not easy to be a kid.
"The fact that everybody sees me as a success story… But nobody really knows who we are until we’re courageous enough to tell everyone who we are. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out when I could tell that story and I figured out when I turned 74 years old. I said, ‘You better do it now.’ And I’m really, really happy I did.”
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