WASHINGTON: Taking home the medal for ‘The Fabelmans,’ Steven Spielberg was awarded the best director at the 2023 Golden Globes on Tuesday night.
Spielberg expressed his feelings after accepting the award for his autobiographical drama, he said, “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 was quoted as saying in a Variety report, “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 ‘Fabelmans’ co-writer 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.’ 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.”
Spielberg added, “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.”
According to Variety, James Cameron for ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, Baz Luhrmann for ‘Elvis’, and Martin McDonagh for ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ are on the all-male list of nominees in the best director category.
‘The Fabelmans’, a semi-autobiographical tale about a cinema-obsessed youngster growing up in Arizona and Northern California, has received five nominations. Michelle Williams, who plays a fictionalised version of Spielberg’s mother in the film, also received a nomination.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which at the time had no Black member slack) diversity and other accountability issues led to a boycott of the 2022 ceremony by artistes, media and creatives. As a result, the ceremony didn’t appear on television. (ANI)