The scene Steven Spielberg will always regret: “I wanna recut certain scenes”
Even though it’s heralded as one of the biggest achievements in science fiction, Steven Spielberg wasn’t altogether happy with the original theatrical version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Coming off the major success of Jaws, Spielberg thought that he had earned the right to spend as much time on the film as possible. Columbia Pictures disagreed and demanded that Spielberg finish the film in time for a Christmas 1977 release.
It is a beautifully engaging story which insists that life can never be ordinary when we are surrounded by the magical mysteries of the cosmos. It won the Academy Award for ‘Best Cinematography’ in 1978. Spielberg revealed that his father took him to view a meteor shower through the telescope in New Jersey, and the experience later inspired his work on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, “We got out there, and we lay down on his Army knapsack, and we looked up at the sky, and every 30 seconds or so there was a brilliant flash of light that streaked across the sky.” He added, “I just remember looking at the sky, because of the influence of my father, and saying, ‘If I ever get a chance to make a science fiction movie, I want those guys to come in peace’.”
“I was trying to get Columbia to let me finish the movie the way I wanted it to be finished, but they were having big financial problems in 1977 and they needed the film to come out during Christmas,” Spielberg recalled in the 1997 documentary The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “I was hoping to come out the following summer because I couldn’t make Christmas. But they kept insisting, ‘Not only must you make Christmas, because our whole company is at stake and we’re all counting on this film. You have to make November.’ So I had no choice.”
“After the film’s success, I went back to Columbia a year and a half later and said, ‘Now let me finish the film the way I had always intended to. I wanna recut certain scenes and I want to shoot more sequences.’ And then they said to me, ‘We’ll give you the money… if you show the inside of the mothership. Give us something we can hang a campaign on.’ And so I compromised and had Richard Dreyfuss walking inside the mothership.”
That’s why, if you saw the 1980 cut of Close Encounters, you would have seen the elusive inside of the alien ship. It certainly satisfies the intrigue that fans had about the aliens from the original cut, but it also takes away most of the mystery regarding the lifeforms. For years, the 1980 cut was the only version of the film available on VHS, and even though superfans like Kurt Cobain obsessed over the tape version of the film, Spielberg began to regret taking the viewer on an inside tour of the ship.
“I never should have done [that], because that should have always been kept a mystery, the inside of that ship,” Spielberg proclaimed. Even though Spielberg later regretted showing the interior of the mothership, the special effects that went along with the new scene were routinely praised. In the era before CGI, the practical effects truly made the inside of the ship look extraterrestrial.
When Spielberg once again returned to Close Encounters in 1998 with a Director’s Cut of the film, he took his favourite parts of the original cut and the 1980 cut. What he left on the cutting room floor was the interior scene of the mothership that Columbia Pictures insisted on including in the 1980 version of the movie.
