site Daniel Day-Lewis’s iconic oil baron Daniel Plainview. At the time, it was beyond even what I could imagine the craft could be. He seemed surprised by my saying this, and I could tell he felt I aged him—“Now I’m getting old. I remember when those came out and I was a youngish person—I was like the young guy. And now I’m talking to somebody who that was formative for in a different way.” When he ponders how he would first introduce his kids to seeing movies in a theater, he says with some hesitation, “Of course, we want to share with our kids the things we love. I think that’s one exciting part of parenting. There are many, but at the same time… our daughter’s only four. I don’t know if she knows what mommy and daddy do yet: And I don’t think we’re in any rush for her to understand that either.” The Fabelmans opens with Burt explaining film projection to his son in great technical detail to make Sammy’s first movie theater ex-
perience and “the giant people on the screen” less horrifying. “Pho- tographs move past the light really fast at 24 photos in every second,” Burt says. “In your brain, each photograph stays for about a fifteenth of a second. That’s called persistence of vision.” Burt’s technical ex- citement as a computer engineer doesn’t seem to calm his son, so Mit- zi—Michelle Williams, who plays the character inspired by Spielberg’s mother, Leah—chimes in to save the day, “Movies are dreams, doll, that you’ll never forget.” “I read a bunch of period engineering manuals,” shares Dano, “and about what was expected of a man at that time [the early 1950s]. The same words kept popping up—‘Decency, integrity, tenacity, per- severance.’ There was a very clear post-War ideal. There’s also a logic because, as an engineer, he’s a highly rational man. I think he’s some- body who tries to keep going forward even though he is stuck. I always
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