Steven Spielberg Says His Late Mother Is ‘Kvelling’ Over His Golden Globes 2023 Win for ‘Fabelmans’

Spielberg accepted the award for best director at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, beating out James Cameron, Baz Luhrmann, Martin McDonagh, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Steven Spielberg won one for the family.

The filmmaker, 76, won best director at the Golden Globes on Tuesday for his semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans, beating out James Cameron (Avatar: The Way of Water), Baz Luhrmann (Elvis), Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin) and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once). This is Spielberg’s 20th nomination and fourth win, including when he was given the Cecil B. DeMille Award back in 2009. “I always say that if I prepare something, you know, it’s going to jinx it, so I never prepare anything and I’m really, really happy about this,” Spielberg said while accepting the honor. “But I’m … there’s I think … there’s five people happier than I am. There’s my sister Anne, my sister Sue, my sister Nancy, my dad Arnold and my mom. She is up there kvelling about this right now.”

Spielberg continued to explain how, for a while, he hesitated to tell the story of The Fabelmans, based on his youth. “I’ve been hiding from this story since I was 17 years old,” he said. “I put a lot of things in my way of this story. 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, when we were working on Munich, which was a long time ago, sat me down and said, ‘Start telling me about all these stories I’ve heard about your life.’ And we started a conversation.” The three-time Oscar winner said his wife, actress Kate Capshaw, encouraged him to put those stories on paper.

“My wife Kate was always saying, ‘You have to tell this story.’ 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 said. “So we sat down to tell a story which is, I think, 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 … everybody sees me as a success story and everybody sees all of us the way they perceive us based on how they get the information, 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 can tell that story. And I figured out when I turned about 74 years old, I said, ‘You better do it now.’