Steven Spielberg reveals he showed one of his early shorts to the cast of Saving Private Ryan

Apparently, Steven Spielberg's preoccupation with World War II dates back to his earliest creations.

In The Fabelmans, which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, Spielberg chronicles the moviemaking first steps of film-obsessed Sammy (Gabrielle LaBelle), an autobiographical rendering of the director himself.

As a teenager, Sammy makes a short film about WWII that he titles Escape to Nowhere. As it happens, the real-life Spielberg made a short film of the same name at age 16. "I worked really, really hard to make sure the re-creation of the 8 mm I shot as a kid was better than the 8mm I shot as a kid," the director quipped during a TIFF press conference. "The angles were better. I was presaging a little bit of Saving Private Ryan, so I had the camera low on the ground when the kids were blowing themselves up by stepping on that see-saw to throw the dirt in the air."

Steve Granitz/FilmMagic 'The Fabelmans' director Steven Spielberg.

It turns out Spielberg has used his Escape to Nowhere short as a touchstone before: "When I made Private Ryan, I actually showed Escape to Nowhere," he admitted. "I showed it to the entire cast around a monitor, and I showed it to them when we were shooting the Omaha Beach scene, the third day of shooting in Ireland and they all gathered around the monitor because I wanted to show them this movie I made when I was like 16 years old."

Spielberg jokes that his early efforts might not have made the best impression on the cast: "I'm sure, to an actor, they felt like, 'What are we doing in Ireland with this guy? It can't look like that. Why is he showing this to us?'"

The Fabelmans is Spielberg's most explicitly personal film yet, delving into his childhood, his parents' divorce, and the solace he found in filmmaking as an escape. It hits theaters Nov. 23.

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