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Nov 28, 2017 · Producer-director-writer Steven Spielberg changed all that some years ago with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a highly successful film about benign visitors from outer space. Recently he went a step further and brought to the screen an alien being that is not only benign but lovable — a strange little creature known only as E.T.
- Jaws
Discussing scenes shot aboard our shark-hunting heroes'...
- Raiders of The Lost Ark
This article was originally published in AC, Nov. 1981.Some...
- The Two Towers
Unit photography by Pierre Vinet, Ken George and Chris Coad...
- Jaws
Sep 21, 2017 · When Spielberg signed up for a science fiction film in 1973, it was to be called Project Blue Book. Like the venal mayor of Jaws, it would be steeped in the justified paranoia of the then-swirling ...
- It Was Initially A Very Different Film.
- It’S Named After Legitimate UFO Research.
- There’S A Cameo from The Godfather of UFO Research.
- Nobody Wanted The Starring role.
- But It Wasn't The Most Difficult Role to Cast.
- Meryl Streep Could Have Played Roy's Wife.
- They Shot in A Disused Air Force Hangar.
- The Team Bought A House For The Production—And Sold It For A Profit.
- The Memorable 5-Note Tones Took A Long Time to Figure Out
- Spielberg Used Tricks to Get The Performance Out of His Child Actor.
Spielberg’s initial story outline involved UFOs and shady government dealings following the Watergate scandal, which became a script entitled “Watch the Skies.” The idea involved a police or military officer working on Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s official study into UFOs in the 1950s and 1960s, who would become the whistleblower on the gover...
Spielberg partly based his idea on the research of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a civilian scientific advisor to Project Blue Book who eventually admitted that 11 percent of the study’s findings about unidentified flying objects could not be explained using science. The title (which is never specifically explained in the movie) is actually derived from Hyne...
Hynek, who also servedas a technical advisor on the movie, makes an uncredited cameo in the final scene of the movie. You can spot him pretty easily—he’s the goateed man smoking a pipe and wearing a powder blue suit who pushes through the crowd of scientists to get a better look at the aliens.
The director first offered the part of Roy Neary to actor Steve McQueen, who turned it down because he said he couldn’t cry on cue, something he saw as essential to the character. Spielberg then went to Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, and James Caan who all turned him down as well before asking his friend Richard Dreyfuss, ...
Spielberg approached French actors like Lino Ventura, Yves Montand, and Jean-Louis Trintignant to play Claude Lacombe—who was based on famous UFO researcher Jacques Vallée—before settling on director and sometimes-actor François Truffaut. The initially skeptical Truffaut, who was nervous about appearing in a big budget Hollywood movie, accepted the...
Many actresses—including a then-unknown Yale Drama School grad named Meryl Streep—auditioned for the part of Roy’s wife Ronnie, but he ultimately cast actress Teri Garr because he saw her in a coffee commercial and loved the way she was able to convey a wide range of emotions in a 30-second clip.
Spielberg wanted to shoot in real suburban locations rather than studio backlots, but the production had trouble finding locations. The biggest question: Where could Spielberg shoot the climactic canyon sequence with the mothership? The production looked for huge indoor enclosures that would allow for the massive scale of the scene, though they onl...
The Nearys' house, which is located at 1613 Carlisle Drive East in Mobile, was actually purchased by the production for $35,000 so they could do whatever they wanted with the interiors. It was later sold for $50,000 after production wrapped, netting a $15,000 surplus that went back into the film’s budget.
Composer John Williams worked with Spielberg to come up with the movie’s distinct five-note musical method of communication between humans and aliens—which Spielberg partly based on the Solfège systemof musical education—a year before shooting began. Williams initially wanted a seven-note sequence, but it was too long for the simple musical “greeti...
Cary Guffey, who plays little Barry Guiler, had never acted before, so Spielberg set up ways to coax a performance out of the 3-year-old. To get a shot of Guffey reacting to the aliens first approaching the Guiler house, Spielberg slowly unwrapped a present for the young actor just off camera, making him smile. Guffey even exclaims “Toys! Toys!” in...
- Sean Hutchinson
- Sean Hutchinson
- E.T. was initially patched together from different ideas for separate movies. With his newfound success following the back-to-back smash hits of Jaws in 1975 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, director Steven Spielberg wanted to tell a smaller, more personal story for his next film.
- Melissa Mathison’s first draft of E.T. became the shooting script. Most films go through several drafts before a final shooting script is locked into place, but Melissa Mathison’s first draft is what Spielberg used during shooting.
- Drew Barrymore’s wild imagination impressed Steven Spielberg enough that he cast her as Gertie in E.T. Getting the right young actors to play the three main young siblings was a paramount problem for Spielberg.
- Henry Thomas’s improvised audition for E.T. won him the part of Elliott. The most difficult role for Spielberg to cast was that of Elliott, the boy who discovers and befriends E.T.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (or simply E.T.) is a 1982 American science fiction film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Melissa Mathison. It tells the story of Elliott, a boy who befriends an extraterrestrial, dubbed E.T., who is left behind on Earth. Along with his friends and family, Elliott ...
Oct 6, 2018 · It’s been almost forty years since E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was first released, but this 1982 Steven Spielberg-directed gem is still going strong to this day with audiences of all ages. This wonderful film about a boy and his friend alien melted the hearts of all those who first watched it back in the early 1980s, and it still remains a most treasured family film.
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Jun 28, 2022 · It's not only Spielberg's worst sci-fi movie, it's his worst movie period. 7. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) Universal Pictures. Although "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" arrived four years ...
