In the almost five decades since he launched a legendary Hollywood career, Steven Spielberg says he has made many personal movies. “They may not have been about my life or my own stories but I take very personally films like Lincoln or Schindler’s List,” he says. “They’re deeply personal in many other ways.”

But nothing has been as bone-deep – and prompted as many tears during its making – as The Fabelmans, a moving drama based on the 76-year-old director’s own complicated early family life and discovery of film-making as a way to feel less lonely growing up.

The movie, which is expected to be up for best picture and director at the Oscars, starts with Spielberg’s first visit to a cinema as a six-year-old in 1952.

Sammy Fabelman, a lightly fictionalised version of Spielberg played as a boy by Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord, goes to see the Cecil B. DeMille circus drama, The Greatest Show On Earth, with his passionate musician mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and analytical electrical engineer father Burt (Paul Dano). Rather than being enchanted, Sammy is horrified by a violent train derailment on screen.

“I remember as a kid I couldn’t go to sleep and I crawled into my parents’ bed like three nights in a row,” Spielberg says from Los Angeles via Zoom. “It was terrifying.”

Spielberg has never seemed to rest since he broke through with Jaws then followed up with Close Encounters, E.T. and three Indiana Jones movies in the 1970s and ’80s. He continued a triumphant run with Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and two Jurassic Park movies in the ’90s. Then, this century, the highlights have included A. I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, Munich, another Indiana Jones, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The Post and West Side Story.

The spark for stepping back to tell his own story, which also happens to be his first coming-of-age film, was a question that playwright-screenwriter Tony Kushner asked on the set of Munich late one night in 2005 – when did Spielberg decide to become a filmmaker?

“Tony became a very close friend of mine to the point of where we were exchanging childhood stories on a daily basis,” Spielberg says. “We’re both nostalgic guys and we both sometimes do live a lot in the past. Tony ... said: ‘You must tell this story’.”

Other films took priority until the pandemic forced Spielberg to do what many of us were doing – reflect.

“COVID gave me the time to just think,” he says. “Think about the fact that at one point early on, we were losing 50,000 people a week. And then at one point, we were losing 40,000 people a day.”

Spielberg realised there was one movie he really wanted to make.

“This story about myself, my mum, my dad and my sisters. COVID gave me the chance to really get serious about at least starting the writing process.”

Then came the death of his father, Arnold, in August 2020; his mother, Leah, died in 2017. It seems surprising for a man in his seventies but Spielberg felt like an orphan.

“My dad was 103 and my mum 97,” he says. “My god, great longevity! They lived great lives. But it doesn’t matter: you’re still left without parents.”

With half a script written with Kushner, the great director decided that it was time to get cracking on his family’s story. “I’m a very private person,” Spielberg says. “It took a lot of – I guess – private time for me to figure out: Do I want to expose this much publicly? I haven’t ever done that, nor did I have the need to do that until I realised both my parents weren’t going to ever be here again.”

Before shooting The Fabelmans, Spielberg told the cast that he had shed all his tears during the writing. But on set, he realised that was far from true.

“Sometimes it was the smallest thing,” he says, carving arcs in the air with his hands. “It was seeing Michelle, not on camera, doing something with her hands which is exactly what my mum used to do ...

“It could be the fact that my sisters came to the set early on and gave Michelle my mother’s favourite perfume. And Michelle wore it every single day when she was playing Mitzi Fabelman.

“Sometimes she’d just walk by me and the aroma of my mum would just linger and I would just take a break – nobody knew – and I’d walk away, walk behind a [set], and I’d just have about a good 30-second cry. Then I’d come back in, all dry-eyed.”

The Fabelmans shows young Sammy filming his own version of DeMille’s train crash at home, with an 8mm camera his mother has given him. Spielberg notes that being traumatised by a movie was not unique – Bambi and The Wizard of Oz had a similar effect on generations of unsuspecting children.

“I think that’s good because trauma leads to some conquest over your fears,” he says. “Filming my electric trains crashing, I was able to become the boss of my fears in that one instance.”

As Sammy gets older, film-making takes on more significance. It gives him friends, helps him work out who he is, teaches him something disturbing about his parents and gives him solace – a refuge – as his family disintegrates.

“Making movies was a way for me to become a less lonely kid, less of somebody ostracised,” Spielberg says. “We were Jewish people in a very non-Jewish society at the time where I was raised in Arizona and northern California.

“I was lonely and it filled in those gaps and it satisfied a need I had to figure out who I was.”

Spielberg learned how much he enjoyed affecting an audience.

“When an audience liked my movies, even my little 8mm and 16mm movies when I was a student, when I was a kid, I loved those reactions,” he says. “I loved getting an audience to laugh or getting an audience to clap their hands together or getting people to hide their eyes.

“That was a tonic for me growing up. I kind of found a place for myself in the world where I, for years, didn’t think I had one.”

Gabriel LaBelle, the now 20-year-old Vancouver actor who plays teenage Sammy, taped an audition for what was then an untitled Amblin Entertainment film while his life was on hold because of COVID-19. He thought it would come to nothing until a call-back with casting director Cindy Tolan three months later, then a meeting with Spielberg led to a breakthrough role that brought a lot of pressure.

“It’s his life story,” LaBelle says, sitting next to Spielberg on the Zoom call. “That’s a big responsibility.”

Spielberg chimes in: “I never went over to him on the first day of shooting and said: ‘Gabe, I’m entrusting you with my life.’ I spared him that.”

La Belle laughs. “You didn’t have to,” he says. “It’s a big responsibility acting in any movie but for this one, definitely there was a lot of weight to it.”

On the first two days of the shoot, working on a scene that has Sammy making a war film starring his Boy Scout friends, LaBelle saw up close how Spielberg operates.

“Normally when the cameras and the lights are turning around, Steven goes and he edits,” he says. “He doesn’t waste a second, which is really incredible to watch.

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“But for those first two days, in those moments, we got to hang out and kind of get to know each other in person. What I was so delighted to learn was that watching Tony Kushner the writer, Janusz Kaminski the cinematographer, Kristie Macosko [Krieger] the producer and Steven, they’re just friends with a camera, making a movie, and they just work really hard at it.

“But it’s this loving, really inclusive environment and that was really special to learn and really inspiring.”

While some of the events in The Fabelmans seem like inventions – Mitzi buying a manic monkey as a pet, for example – Spielberg says nothing was made up.

“There’s nothing really in the movie that doesn’t have a precedent in my collection of memories about my upbringing,” he says. “Even the crazier stuff like my mum getting a call in the middle of the night from her mother who’d just passed away telling her: ‘Don’t open the door, don’t let him in.’ And the next day, the guy she’s afraid of pulls into the driveway and gets out of a cab. That’s true.

“But there’s other things that we expounded upon like Uncle Boris (played by Judd Hirsch). That’s his actual name. He was Ukrainian, worked in a circus, trained lions back in the ’20s and ’30s. He was a massive personality and he did come to our house after my grandmother passed away.

“But the scene – I love the scene – which Tony Kushner and I fashioned in him giving life advice to Sammy was something that we created for this story.”

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Asked whether he felt more vulnerable screening The Fabelmans than other movies, given it reveals intimate details about his family, Spielberg says he made up his mind early on that he would take the leap into autobiography.

“I will sometimes hide behind history,” he says. “Still put personal moments from my personal life in my historical dramas but I use history as a kind of firewall so I can stay safe and really unattached so there’s no real responsibility except telling a good story.

“Now there’s no airbag in the steering wheel, now there’s no guardrails. Now it’s just ‘see what people think’. This is just what I went through, what my sisters went through and how my mum and dad survived in this life. I feel real good about it right now. I’m not ashamed or embarrassed for people to see this.”

So will there be a Fabelmans sequel where Sammy becomes a hotshot young director who invents the Hollywood blockbuster with a movie about a killer shark?

“It took a lot to get this story out,” Spielberg says. “I don’t have any immediate plans to continue the film. But with The Fabelmans, at this point I think I told a pretty complete story. It ends the way I was hoping it was going to end. Everything else is post script. You can probably just find it on Wikipedia.”

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Email Garry Maddox at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.