In ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and ‘Fabelmans,’ Screenwriting Teamwork Makes the Scene Work

Collaboration is vital to filmmaking — no one can make one completely alone. For many of 2022’s screenplay nominees, that process began on the page with a team of individuals whose efforts completed and complemented one another to ensure that the story being told was as thoughtful, fully realized and emotionally evocative as possible. But even though “ The Fabelmans ” co-writer Tony Kushner had previously partnered with Steven Spielberg three times, starting with 2005’s “Munich,” the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright say he was initially unsure how well the duo would work together as co-authors as opposed to handing over a finished script Spielberg would bring to life on the screen. “I had never co-authored anything with anyone, so I was very nervous about how that was going to feel,” Kusher tells Variety. “But we’ve worked so closely on every script I’ve done for him that this felt very different in some ways, but also very familiar.” The foundation of their work was a series of interviews he did with Spielberg about his family and his upbringing, the notes from which Kushner used to write out a “novella” version of the story. “I had his permission to reorganize them and to make some changes, but I wanted them to stay recognizable to him,” Kushner says. “I think he needed somebody to step in and provide a degree of objective distance that helped create a space for fiction and imagination to enter in and interact […] ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

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