Seth Rogen Was Surprised Steven Spielberg Wasn’t ‘Particularly Sensitive’ or ‘Really Nice’ to Child Actors in ‘The Fabelmans’

Seth Rogen says Steven Spielberg gave him good advice for dealing with child actors: Don’t be too nice, basically. Rogen told Esquire in the below video that, while on set for Spielberg’s semi-autobiographic “The Fabelmans,” he noticed that the auteur wasn’t “particularly sensitive” to the ensemble’s young stars. Rogen asked why.

“On the set of ‘The Fabelmans,’ I noticed there’s a lot of kids in the movie, and Steven Spielberg is kind of famous for working with kids. I would notice that when he was directing the kids of the movie, he treated them like any other actor, in that I mean he was not particularly sensitive towards them, to the point that I commented on it,” Rogen said. “I went to him and I was like, ‘I thought you would be really nice to them.’ And he was like, ‘Kids always listen to the mean teacher more than they listen to the nice teacher.’ And I thought that was really interesting.”

Spielberg, who has famously stayed close with former child stars like “E.T.” alum Drew Barrymore and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “The Goonies” actor Ke Huy Quan, apparently also didn’t mince words when it came to directing a teenage Josh Brolin.

The “Dune” actor recently recalled during SiriusXM’s “Literally! With Rob Lowe” podcast that he almost thought Spielberg was a “dick” during “The Goonies” production.

“I was on the set, reading all this stuff with these tiny wooden trailers. I came to Steven at some point, we were in one of the tunnels, and I said, ‘Hey, Steven, can I talk to you for a second?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Brolin said, adding that he was a “really dumb” teenager.

Instead, Spielberg advised him to “just act” instead of overthink the part.

“So I said [to Steven], ‘Hey, don’t you think that the tunnels kind of represent my mother’s womb? And what if we film me climbing up the tunnel, but really I’m trying to cut that emotional umbilical cord of my mother, and I could have tears coming down my face?’ I went into this whole thing, and I was getting all excited because he was nodding his head, and then I waited,” Brolin continued. “And then he looked at me and he said, ‘Why don’t you just act? Just say the words on the page, you’ll be fine.’ And I could have been like, ‘Dick!’ But I didn’t, I was like, ‘Oh, totally. I got it.’”