‘E.T.’: the classic movie Steven Spielberg came up with “in a couple of days”
The best work comes quickly. Creatives of all disciplines frequently talk about songs, poems and scripts falling into their lap, seemingly from nowhere. This was precisely how Steven Spielberg described the genesis of one of his most famous movies, a film he said “came from the heavens”. At that time, he was still a young up-and-coming director who had yet to make his mark on Hollywood. With this new project, however, his life was about to change.
“E.T. was a gift that came from the heavens for me,” Speilberg explained. “I was in Tunisia making Raiders of The Lost Arc, and we were setting up a shot, and I was picking up fossils in the desert, which used to be the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago. We were out there in the Nefa Desert, and I was remembering the end of Close Encounters [of The Third Kind] when Richard Dreyfuss goes up into the mother ship. And just before that, the little alien comes down and does the hand signals to Francois Truffaut.” (The 400 Blows director starred as Claude Lacombe).
“And it just hit me out of the sky,” Speilberg continued. “I thought, ‘what if the alien had stayed behind on earth? What if it was kind of a foreign exchange [where] Dreyfuss goes away and the alien stays? Suddenly this whole story hit me like a tonne of bricks, which was really a story about my mom and dad when they got divorced, and how I felt as a kid wanting a friend like that to fill the void in my life. And all these things came pouring in, and I actually put the story together in a couple of – I think a couple of days.”
Spielberg’s story reveals a lot about the nature of creativity. Firstly, it reminds us that the best deas come not when we’re sitting at our desks but when we’re involved in some unrelated repetitive activity. In Speilberg’s case, he was picking up rocks in the desert, keeping one-half of his brain occupied while the other half was busy forming connections between childhood traumas and his favourite films.
It also reminds us that most storytellers – whether they be filmmakers or novelists – are bound to tell the same stories again and again. E.T. is “a story about my mom and dad” filtered through the lens of science fiction.
Spielberg’s latest film, the heavily autobiographical The Fabelman’s, is also a story about his parent’s divorce, the only difference being that after 40 years, the director has finally managed to confront the topic head-on without the need for aliens.
