As Variety reports, director David Lynch is to get a “closely guarded secret” role in The Fabelmans, a new Steven Spielberg film.
The magazine adds that this was the first collaboration between the two filmmaking luminaries, and it couldn’t have come on a more personal project. The Fabelmans is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about a Spielberg stand-in named Sammy Fabelman. Michelle Williams plays his mother, Paul Dano has been cast as his father, and Seth Rogen will step into the role of a favorite uncle. Spielberg has co-written the script with Tony Kushner, and it’s his first screenplay credit since A.I.: Artificial Intelligence in 2001.
So what will be Lynch’s role? Nobody knows yet but one speculation is that since The Fabelmans concerns a budding teenage filmmaker, the easy money is on Lynch as a fictionalized version of John Ford, who spent five formative minutes with Spielberg when he was 15 years old and gave him the now-famous “Where’s the horizon?” speech.
The other is tied to the focus of Spielberg’s early movies. “What phenomena made him famous? What captured his imagination from a young age? That’s right, David Lynch is almost certainly playing an alien. And he’s perfectly cast, too.”
