“I’m not going to say ‘get the fuck out of my office.’ That’s a big difference between me and John Ford,” Spielberg told a press conference at the Berlinale as he recounted that meeting with the legendary filmmaker at age 16.

That meeting was captured almost verbatim in the climax of his latest film, The Fabelmans.

“That scene in The Fabelmans is, word for word, to the best of my recollection, what actually happened to me. He said no more or no less than the words he speaks in that film,” Spielberg added. As Berlin gives him a lifetime achievement award, the prestigious festival will screen The Fabelmans on Tuesday evening.

During the Berlinale presser, Spielberg opened up about his latest and most personal film, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age saga that was psychologically draining for the filmmaker to make: “It was very difficult for me because I was telling a story with a lot of funny parts, but with a lot of parts that were very traumatizing, and even in recreating those scenes, it was very hard to relive it.”

Much of The Fabelmans focuses on Spielberg’s early passion for filmmaking and how he was supported and encouraged on that creative journey by his parents. But the director did recall at age 9 years being told by his parents in real life he could not accompany them to a local cinema in New Jersey to see Ford’s classic western The Searchers because its subject matter was too violent.

So Spielberg recalled taking some change from a family savings jar and going to see The Searchers on his own at the cinema. “I probably didn’t understand the movie at nine as well. When I saw the movie multiple times after that, I understood it better. But I know how it feels to be left behind and then realizing that’s a film I could have used my mom and dad to help explain to me.”

Michelle Williams, five-time Oscar nominee, is playing a version of his mother named Mitzi, Paul Dano a character named Burt, based on his father, and Gabriel LaBelle as the family’s son, Sammy.

Early in the movie, when Burt and Mitzi take Sammy to the movies for the first time at age 5, to see the slightly too-scary-for-him Greatest Show on Earth, they ignite in the boy a fascination with film and cameras, toys and tools that Sammy will train on his own family.

Spielberg told the Berlin media that, even at 76 years of age, he still has that childhood fascination and zeal for movie making. “Whatever seized me as a little kid, it’s the same feeling I have retained all those decades later. And I feel that every time right now the same level of excitement when I find a book or a script, or come up with an original idea that I think could make a good movie.”

At the same time, having made and released West Side Story and The Fabelmans in quick succession — and doing so against the backdrop of the pandemic and being sequestered for a time at home with his family — Spielberg, well known for being a workaholic, expressed anxiety over not having a major movie project lined up currently.

“I never had a chance to think about what I’m going to do when these two movies are over. And I sit here, in front of you, saying I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I have no idea. And it’s kind of a nice feeling, and it’s also a horrible feeling,” Spielberg insisted as he looks to settling into his next on-set director’s chair.