From W.H.Y. Wine Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger in for Terry Gross.

Today, Steven Spielberg, his new film The Fable Men's, is based on his childhood and teenage years,

when he fell in love with movies. The very first movie he ever saw both enchanted and terrified him.

But the man who made jaws, emits a lot of things scared him as a kid.

Everything. There was nothing that didn't scare me. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of this horrible scary naked tree out the window that looked like it had tentacles.

You see, these horrible branches and it looked like arms and long fingers and long fingernails. The tree terrified me.

Sound familiar? That tree would later show up in his movie, Poultergeist, dragging a boy from his bed and out the window.

Also, historian Matthew Delmont talks about the experience of African Americans in World War II.

And Maureen Corrigan reviews Foster, an novella by Irish writer Claire Keegan.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger in for Terry Gross. Terry has today's first interview. Here she is.

My guest today is Steven Spielberg. It's a great time to interview him because his new movie The Fable Men's is a personal one.

He says all his movies are personal in the sense they come from his experiences, observations and imagination.

But this one is personal in a more direct way. The Fable Men's is a semi-autobiographical film based on Spielberg's childhood and teenage years,

and tells the story in a fictionalized way of how he fell in love with movies and became a filmmaker.

The movie is also about tensions in his family during those years and why his parents divorced when he was 19.

Spielberg has directed over 30 movies including,

Jaws, ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Indiana Jones films, The Color Purple, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Amestad, Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln, and the recent adaptation of West Side Story.

His movies have grossed more at the box office than any filmmaker.

And as Michael Schulman wrote in The New Yorker, Spielberg has shaped merely half a century of the American popular imagination.

Steven Spielberg, welcome to Fresh Share. I'm so glad we have this opportunity to talk. I wasn't sure I'd ever have that opportunity to talk with you.

And congratulations on this film, which I really enjoyed.

Let's start with the greatest show on Earth. It's a circus movie with some very disturbing things in it.

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