Who would you cast to play your mother in a movie about your life? Steven Spielberg, it turns out, would choose Michelle Williams, soft-spoken queen of indies and occasional mainstream forays like Venom. According to Deadline, the Oscar-winning filmmaker is set to make a movie loosely based on his own childhood, with the Oscar-nominated actor in talks to play a role inspired by his late mother, Leah Adler.
Spielberg will cowrite the script with frequent collaborator Tony Kushner. Production will begin this summer, with a release date expected for 2022. Casting will soon be underway for a young actor to play a role loosely inspired by Spielberg himself, who started filmmaking at a young age and went on to direct classics like Jaws and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. (Not a drop of pressure there.)
The currently untitled film will trace Spielberg’s childhood and teen years as he moved between Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona—places “where you could listen to the cactus grow if you had nothing better to do,” he said in the 2017 documentary Spielberg. The director has also spoken candidly about what it was like growing up as one of the few Jewish kids in his neighborhood, noting how it shaped his teen years. “I was embarrassed, I was self-conscious, I was always aware I stood out because of my Jewishness,” he once said. “In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible.”
The director is currently prepping his latest project, a revamped edition of West Side Story, which is expected to hit theaters later this year. (It was originally planned for a 2020 release, but was pushed back due to the pandemic.) All that waiting time was, per Deadline, what gave Spielberg the space to plan out this next film, pushing his childhood adaptation to the front of the Amblin assembly line.
Williams, the outlet notes, apparently blew the director away in recent meetings. Adler, who died in 2017 at the age of 97, was a former concert pianist and painter. The director was close with his mother, who was one of his biggest supporters—and wasn’t too shy to talk about her famous son in the press. “I told Steve, if I’d known how famous he was going to be, I’d have had my uterus bronzed,” she cracked in a 1994 Los Angeles Times profile.
“She’s the Peter Pan that he couldn’t put in his films,” family friend Shirley Lamm told the outlet about Spielberg’s mother, who inspired his oeuvre. “She’s the E.T. that he couldn’t put in his films. She’s the pixie, she’s quixotic; she doesn’t have an artificial bone in her body.”
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