Tony Kushner on Nearly 2 Decades of Collaboration With Steven Spielberg

So Kushner, who spent years meeting with Lincoln experts and academics, decided that the only way to tell this larger-than-life tale was to focus the script on just the last few years of Lincoln’s life. He spent two and a half years attempting to write that version of the story, but still could not find a way to condense it down into a script. “Every time I did it, I would get through two or three months [of his life] and I’d have 100 pages,” he says. “And I would stop and pull my hair and scream and go back to the drawing board.”

Then the 2007 writers strike forced Kushner to put the script on the back burner, and the solution finally came into view. “I was walking around in a picket line somewhere, and I started going through the things that happened to him in the last four months of his administration,” says Kushner. “I realized that I could cover all the major themes of Lincoln’s administration in those last four months, starting with the fight for the 13th Amendment.”

As soon as the strike was over, he put pen to paper and wrote a 500-page script. He immediately sent it to Spielberg. “I said, ‘I think, obviously, we need some cutting,’” says Kushner. “But I was excited about what I had done. And he read it and he was thrilled.”

They continued to cut down the script, eventually getting it down to 200-ish pages, though it was still too long. Then, as Kushner was driving to one of his first meetings with the film’s star, Daniel Day-Lewis, Spielberg called him to say he thought they should focus purely on the fight for the amendment. “I was so shocked I had to pull the car off the road and sit for a minute, and I said, ‘Can we really do that?’” he says.

The film was nominated for 12 Oscars, winning for production design and best actor for Day-Lewis. Kushner says now that the story’s tight focus allowed it to be about much more than just the iconic president. “Steven didn’t do this consciously, but unconsciously he figured it out: There were two heroes in the movie. One is Abraham Lincoln, and the other, weirdly, is the House of Representatives, which no one would ever describe ordinarily as heroic, certainly not these days,” says Kushner.

West Side Story, 2021

(Best-picture nomination)

“When he first told me he wanted to do West Side Story, I came home and told my husband, ‘I think he’s lost his mind,’” Kushner remembers about his first conversation with Spielberg regarding this particular adaptation.