This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. We're ending 2022 with a few of our favorite interviews of the year.

Today, Steven Spielberg, I spoke with him last month, was a great time to talk with him because his new movie, The Fabelman'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 Fabelman's is a semi-autobiographical film based on Spielberg's childhood in 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 is 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, 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 Schoemen wrote in The New Yorker, Spielberg has shaped nearly half a century of the American popular imagination.

The Fabelman's is streaming available for rent or purchase.

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, and I'll preface this by saying the first movie I ever saw was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and I was probably around 6, the same age you were.

When you saw the greatest show on Earth, and I walked in late, which people used to do at that time, and the first thing I saw was Kirk Douglas wrestling with an octopus underwater, and I was terrified, and I begged my mother to just take me home.

So tell us about what terrified you about the greatest show on Earth, a circus movie directed by Cecil B. Dumile.

Well, first of all, I sympathized with you. I too saw 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with James Mason and Kirk Douglas and Peter Laurie, and that sequence with the giant squid attacking the Nautilus was terrifying, especially because they were cutting the tentacles off with axes, and that was pretty gross.

I remember that, but I was older when I saw that movie, but I was only 6 years old when I saw my parents took me to the greatest show on Earth, and they thought it was going to be a great picture having to do with circus clowns and three rings of entertainment, and I actually thought they were saying to me, we're taking you to a circus, because I had never been to a movie before.

We had television at home, but I had never been to a motion picture, and I thought what they meant to say was you're going to actually see giraffes and elephants and lions and tigers, and what happened was we waited in line for hours in the freezing winter, and then we walked into this big theater with all these seats facing forward, and it was not a big top.

It wasn't a tent, it was just a structure. I just remember as a kid looking around, and it was all these seats. I remember the color of the seats, they were red, and the curtain was red, and then suddenly this curtain opens, and this big, gritty image and color comes up on the screen, and I felt very betrayed.

My first reaction was, you said you were taking me to a circus, and this movie started playing, and I don't know how long it took me to fall under the spell of the film, and I was enchanted.

I remember just being enchanted by, didn't understand the story, didn't understand what they were saying, but the imagery was amazing.

Then, along came this horrible train crash, and the train wreck was terrifying. I wanted to leave the theater like you did with 20,000 leagues, and I was knocking on my parents' shoulders, and I was sinking as low as I could get in my seat, so as not to see the screen, but it was a really terrifying, traumatic thing.

It never left me. My first movie was a movie that scared my pants off, and I'll never forget that.

In your semi-autobiographical film, after seeing that movie, Sammy, whose alter ego in the film, starts to recreate what terrified him with lionled toy trains, and crashing into things, and then he starts filming scenes like that.

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