Steven Spielberg: Force Behind the Box Office, From ‘Jaws’ to ‘E.T.’
How heavily did you base the movie on contemporary suburban experience, as opposed to your own memories?
In today’s world, a twelve-year-old is what we were at sixteen and a half. So a transformation happened once I cast the film with real kids. Not stage Hollywood actors, you know –— kids who’ve never been in a casting director’s office or an art director’s room. Real people, just real people –— that’s who we cast.
Dialogue changed considerably. I never would have called my brother, if I’d had one, “penis breath” in front of my mother. It’s not the most popular word in the Pac-Man generation’s vernacular, but it’s a word that’s used every once in a while, and it conjures up quite gross and hilarious images. I wanted the kids to say something that would shake up the mother, ’cause I wanted her to laugh first, then reprimand, instead of just saying, “How dare you say that in my house!” That’s the Fifties mother, the one who got attacked by the Martians who ate the dog. Today’s parent, being my age, would burst out laughing and then suddenly realize, “Omigosh, I’m the father, I can’t laugh at that. Sit down, son, and never say that word again, or I’ll pretend I’m my mom and dad back in the Fifties, and you’ll have to learn from them.”
I think kids tend to look at adults as just melodramatic excuses for people. A lot of kids look up to look down. And I found, even when I was giving Henry Thomas [Elliott] direction, that if I was out of touch with his reality, he would give me a look that seemed to say. “Oh brother, he’s old.” I could always tell when I was reaching Henry. He would smile and laugh, or he’d say, “Yeah, yeah, right.” I was constantly being rewarded or corrected by people three times less my age. I was moving faster than the kids. So I slowed myself down and began to metabolize according to them instead of Steven Spielberg.
Editor’s picks
Did that scare you?
The thing that I’m just scared to death of is that someday I’m gonna wake up and bore somebody with a film. That’s kept me making movies that have tried to outspectacle each other. I got into the situation where my movies were real big, and I had a special-effects department and I was the boss of that and that was a lot of fun. Then I’d get a kick out of the production meetings –— not with three or four people, but with fifty, sometimes nearer to 100 when we got close to production –— because I was able to lead troops into Movie Wars. The power became a narcotic, but it wasn’t power for power’s sake. I really am attracted to stories that you can’t see on television and stories that you can’t get every day. So that attraction leads me to the Impossible Dream, and that Impossible Dream usually costs around $20 million.
François Truffaut helped inspire me to make E.T. Simply by saying to me, on the Close Encounters set, “I like you with keeds, you are wonderful with keeds, you must do a movie just with keeds….” And I said, “Well, I’ve always wanted to do a film about kids, but I’ve got to finish this, then I’m doing 1941, about the Japanese attacking Los Angeles.” And Truffaut told me I was making a big mistake. He kept saying, “You are the child.”
To me, your biggest visual accomplishment is the contrast between suburbia in the harsh, daytime light, when everything looks the same, to the mysterious way it looks at night. By the end, you get a mothering feeling from the night.
Yeah, it is Mother Night. Remember, in Fantasia, Mother Night flying over with her cape, covering a daylight sky? I used to think, when I was a kid, that that’s what night really looked like. The Disney Mother Night was a beautiful woman with flowing, blue-black hair, and arms extended outward, twenty miles in either direction. And behind her was a very inviting cloak. She came from the horizon in an arc and swept over you until everything was a blue-black dome. And then there was an explosion, and the stars were suddenly made in this kind of animated sky. I wanted the opening of E.T. to be that kind of Mother Night. You know, you come down over the trees, you see the stars, and suddenly you think you’re in space –— wow, you’re not, you’re in a forest somewhere. You’re not quite sure where; you might be in a forest on some distant planet. It was Melissa’s idea to use the forest; at first, I thought of having the ship land in a vacant lot. But she said, “A forest is magical… there are elves in forests.”