The one scene Steven Spielberg will regret for the rest of his career: “I never should have done it”
The iconic American filmmaker Steven Spielberg has always been fond of cosmic fantasy and extraterrestrial adventures, delving into such worlds with films like War of the Worlds, ET The Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. There’s a myriad of reasons why filmmakers enjoy diving into the vast expanse of the universe, but for a director so intrinsically connected to the humanity of cinema, Spielberg’s dalliances with science fiction have rarely strayed off this planet.
In truth, Spielberg’s fascination with outer space comes from a specific feeling. It all comes from his very real-life paranoia, with the filmmaker superstitious about life way beyond our solar system and understanding. The inky black outside of our atmosphere has always provided a sense of impending dread and unstoppable possibility.
The filmmaker explains this stance in a rare interview from 1977, conducted the very same year as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind was released. Telling the interviewer why he believes in all the UFO sightings and close encounters, the filmmaker explains: “There have been enough sober reports from very reliable, multiple witnesses, individuals who have all seen these things all over the world, not just in this country but all through Canada all through France all through Brazil, Australia you name it”. Since these comments, even Blink-182 singer Tom Delonge has gone a long way to prove this theory.
Like any good director, Spielberg didn’t let his fascination simply drift around his daydreams. He cultivated and captured it, using the swirling images of aliens and spacecraft to make some of his most beloved pictures. Using much of his research into the subject for the sci-fi Close Encounters, the film became a considerable critical and commercial hit, taking $306million from a production that only cost $19m to put together.
Such a capitalisation can only be considered a resounding success for a director. Few filmmakers are able to deliver such returns. However, for Spielberg, the movie in 1977 had one scene which gnawed away at him. Despite the movie’s overwhelming success, the director still felt the need to meddle, changing one particular aspect in the 1980 special edition that he regrets making today.
The special edition of Close Encounters added brand new footage to the film’s ending, showing the inside of the mothership that the protagonist Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) enters at the climax. It’s a desperate bid for closure that largely belies Spielberg’s usual MO. This footage was added under pressure from Columbia Pictures, which wanted a new version of the film to sell the VHS and LaserDisc versions of the movie. Spielberg later admitted that he regretted ever following their request.
“I compromised and showed Richard Dreyfuss walking inside the mothership,” the director recalled in a behind-the-scenes interview about the making of the movie, adding, “Which I never should have done because that should always have been kept a mystery”. Tacked onto the end of the movie, the scene in question certainly does take away from the dramatic majesty of the film’s original conclusion.
Spielberg once famously reneged on showing the star of the show in Jaws and kept the shots of the monster to a minimum. While that move would be a financial one, it would see Spielberg tap into an American ideal. For a nation so willing to tackle beasts head-on, the danger you couldn’t see was always scarier than the one you could. This addition to Close Encounters of the Third Kind goes against everything he had learned a few years before.
For this very reason, Spielberg prefers the final cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a version that combines elements from several different movie cuts and removes the final mothership interior scene entirely. Starring Dreyfuss alongside such stars as François Truffaut, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban and Rob Blossom, Close Encounters is one of the filmmaker’s most memorable cosmic outings, behind the release of the 1982 film ET the Extra-Terrestrial.
