The movie Steven Spielberg cherishes the most: “The gift that came from the heavens”
Inspiration can often strike in the most unexpected ways, with many artists discussing ideas that hit them in moments they were entirely unprepared for, whether it be in the shower, on the train or at a bad dinner party. Sometimes the most serendipitous stories are the ones we love the most, feeling pleasantly surprised by their sudden arrival and the sense of urgency we feel in sharing them, something that Steven Spielberg was taken away by after discovering the idea for one of his most beloved films.
Spielberg might be one of the most influential directors of all time, but creativity is an untameable force that cannot be tamed, which is perhaps why he has helmed some of the greatest films of all time. From the eternal fear of Great White sharks that was sparked by Jaws or the legacy of Jurassic Park, the director often realises our wildest dreams and fantasies through his stories, creating characters who achieve the impossible through friendships with aliens or escaping dangerous situations.
However, while some of these stories took a while to develop, one came all of a sudden while Spielberg was in the middle of shooting something else. In it, Spielberg described the all-encompassing takeover of ET: the Extra-Terrestrial.
At the time, Spielberg was in the middle of a desert shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark with Harrison Ford, saying, “ET was a gift that came from the heavens for me. I was in Tunisia making Raiders of the Lost Ark, 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. And I was remembering the end of Close Encounters, when Richard Dreyfuss goes up into the mother ship and just before that, the alien comes down and does the hand signs to François Truffaut. And it just hit me out of the sky, I thought, what if the alien had stayed behind on Earth? What if it was a kind of foreign exchange, and Dreyfuss goes away and the alien stays?”
It’s the kind of Earth-shattering idea that seems so simplistic yet had never been done before. It’s the perfect breeding ground for creativity, with Spielberg allowing his imagination to run wild as he cultivated this new story world.
He expanded on this light-bulb moment, adding, “And suddenly this whole story hit me like a ton of bricks, which was really a story about my mum 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 I actually put the story together in a couple of days.”
When a story comes to you so organically, it sometimes means you can fill the gaps more quickly, fleshing out a narrative that feels as though it was always there, just waiting for you at the back of your mind. Two days is a crazy amount of time to come up with a movie that is now an integral part of all of our childhoods, but for Spielberg, two days is all it takes to achieve greatness.
