The Con Man Who Conned Everyone, Including Himself

A man builds an entire life from borrowed identities—pilot, doctor, lawyer—and somehow the most audacious lie of all is the one that got a movie made about him. Catch Me If You Can (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, and Amy Adams, is a crime comedy-drama that arrived at a fascinating crossroads: it was Spielberg’s first film about a real living person, and DreamWorks deliberately marketed it as “inspired by” rather than “based on” a true story—a distinction that grew sharper once journalist Alan Logan spent years documenting how much of Frank Abagnale Jr.’s celebrated autobiography was itself fabricated. Set across the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the film frames that era as a vanishing America of institutional trust, where a uniform was enough to make the world believe almost anything. A young man on the run from a fractured family discovers that confidence is a currency—and that the people chasing him may understand him better than his own father does. Join us—Pete Wright and Andy Nelson—as we continue the True Lies series with a conversation about Catch Me If You Can, our February member bonus episode.

Whose Story Is This, Really?

The hosts dig into a question that sits at the heart of the film: if Abagnale’s biography was largely invented, then what exactly did Spielberg adapt? Pete and Andy argue that the answer is Spielberg’s own story—a meditation on divorce, absent fathers, and the desperate need for paternal validation that runs through his filmography from E.T. to Indiana Jones to The Fabelmans. The Christmas phone calls between Frank and Carl Hanratty, a Spielberg invention with no basis in the source material, become the episode’s key exhibit.

The Performance of Goodness in Catch Me If You Can

One of the conversation’s sharpest threads is the distinction between characters who are genuinely good and those who are merely performing goodness—and what it costs each of them. Brenda Strong (Amy Adams) emerges as the film’s moral anchor precisely because she is the only person in it who isn’t playing a role, and the hosts trace how that authenticity shapes every scene she’s in. Carl Hanratty’s own domestic fiction—the wedding ring, the absent daughter—makes him a structural mirror for Frank rather than simply his pursuer.

Craft That Does Thematic Work

Pete and Andy give serious attention to the film’s formal elements, arguing they aren’t decoration. Janusz Kamiński’s glossy, sunlit palette is read as the visual language of an era’s trust and innocence, while John Williams’s jazz score—looser and more Mancini-adjacent than his blockbuster register—tracks the emotional temperature scene by scene, shifting noticeably darker whenever the story turns back to Frank Sr. The Kuntzel + Deygas opening title sequence, a loving homage to Saul Bass, gets its own extended appreciation.

What Walken Does That No One Else Could

Christopher Walken as Frank Abagnale Sr. is a recurring touchstone throughout the conversation. The hosts argue that the role required an actor who could play willful self-deception as an act of love—a man gaslighting himself about his son’s life because the alternative is unbearable—and that the originally planned casting of Ed Harris would have pushed the character toward severity rather than strangeness. It’s one of the episode’s most sustained performance discussions.

Key Discussion Points

• The post-film debunking of Abagnale’s autobiography and what it means for how the film should be read
• Spielberg’s parents’ divorce and its persistent presence throughout his filmography, with Catch Me If You Can as an early Fabelmans
• The dual father-son structure: Frank Jr. and Frank Sr., and Frank and Carl Hanratty as surrogate father
• The 1960s as a vanishing America of institutional trust—and the 1970s FBI office as the comedown
• Brenda Strong as the film’s only character who is genuinely good rather than performing goodness
• Christopher Walken’s performance and the range it demonstrates beyond his familiar register
• Kamiński’s cinematography and Williams’s jazz score as tonal and thematic instruments
• The Kuntzel + Deygas title sequence and its Saul Bass lineage
• The alternate-casting and alternate-director history: Gandolfini, Harris, Sevigny; Fincher, Verbinski, Hallström, Forman, Crowe
• The Broadway musical adaptation and its score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman
• Catch Me If You Can and Minority Report as twin achievements from the same year—Spielberg’s “Tom period” in full swing

Both Pete and Andy come away with a renewed appreciation for how much the film rewards revisiting—Pete admits he’d undervalued it on memory, and Andy finds that returning to it only confirmed Spielberg’s mastery across every element of the production. If you’ve filed this one away as lighter Spielberg fare, this conversation makes a strong case for a reappraisal. We have a great time talking about it, so check it out then tune in. The Next Reel—when the movie ends, our conversation begins!

If You Want to Keep Going

The Next Reel

• Tom Hanks series: Pete and Andy have covered a number of films in Tom Hanks’s filmography—find the full series here
• More Spielberg on The Next Reel: Browse every Spielberg film the show (and a few others) have covered here
• True Lies series: Catch Me If You Can is part of the ongoing member bonus series on real people who lied, fabricated, or constructed false identities—explore the full series right here

🎬 Watch & Discover

• 🍿 Watch the Film: Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• 📽️ Original Theatrical Trailer
• 📚 Adapted from Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale