Steven Spielberg (63 page)

As a child of divorce and suburban anomie, Spielberg grew up learning not to idealize family life. But in the emotional void left by his family's dissolution, he could not help yearning for a substitute father figure. In his adulthood, that led him to seek father/mentors in such powerful figures as Sheinberg and Time Warner's Steve Ross. It was an emotional need that loomed large in Spielberg's conception of
E.T.
“When I was a kid,” he
recalled, “I used to imagine strange creatures lurking outside my bedroom window, and I'd wish that they'd come into my life and magically change it.”

Elliott's father is absent from the film—on vacation in Mexico with his new girlfriend—and in one bittersweet scene, Elliott and his brother Michael (Robert Macnaughton) ruefully examine a shirt their father has left behind in the garage, trying to recall what brand of aftershave lotion he used. The boys' emotionally bereft mother (Dee Wallace) is so distracted that for much of the film she does not even notice an extraterrestrial is living in her house. The absent father and the childishly vulnerable, scatterbrained mother are a reflection (albeit somewhat exaggerated) of Spielberg's ambivalent feelings about his own parents. The wise and wizened E.T. takes the emotional place of Elliott's father, while Elliott, in a touching reversal of roles, serves as the protector of the homesick little creature, trying to keep him safe from the world of adults.

As a way of compensating for the pain of E.T.'s departure, Spielberg introduces another surrogate father figure, the government scientist played by Peter Coyote, who initially appears menacing but eventually becomes Elliott's ally in helping E.T. return home. Like Truffaut's Lacombe in
Close
Encounters,
the scientist is a sympathetic figure because he remains in touch with his childhood feelings. He says of E.T., “Elliott, he came to me too. I've been wishing for this since I was ten years old.” In the credits, the character is referred to as “Keys,” because in the early part of the film he is seen mostly from waist-level, visually identified by the set of keys dangling from his belt. As critic Andrew Sarris observed, Spielberg in the final sequence subtly implies a romantic pairing of Keys with Elliott's mother by linking them together in two-shots as they watch the spaceship depart. By suggesting the relationship visually rather than verbally, Sarris wrote, Spielberg ensured that “only children and Freudians can make the crucial connections between the telltale keys fondled near the crotch of the potential father figure and the displaced phallus represented by E.T. himself.”

Like so many other children in Spielberg films, Elliott is mature beyond his years. He has been forced by his parents' separation to act more like an adult than like a child. Elliott's protectiveness toward E.T. stemmed from “a situation in my life,” Spielberg said. “When my father left, I went from tormentor to protector with my family…. I had to become the man of the house.”

Eleven-year-old Henry Thomas plays Spielberg's adolescent alter ego with a gravity and reserve that helps keep the movie from becoming cutesy or cloying. When Thomas auditioned for the role, Spielberg was intrigued by that quality, yet worried that “Henry was too serious. But then I introduced him to E.T. and he burst out laughing…. I felt the best way to work with Henry in
E.T.
was not to be his director but his buddy. It was easy because we both like
Pac-Man
[a popular video game].” Spielberg and Thomas spent every lunch hour during the making of the film playing video games together. That was an example of what the director has called his “intuitive” approach
to directing children, finding a shared interest with them and communicating his feelings about the movie by osmosis, much as E.T. does in his telepathic communication with Elliott. Never talking down to children, but dealing with them as equals, Spielberg makes them feel like teammates in the marvelous game of moviemaking. In Thomas's case, Spielberg's unusually close personal rapport with both the actor and the character was what made the performance seem so effortlessly affecting.

“The friendship that E.T. and Elliott find and hold on to—clinging to each other desperately—is sort of what I went through in four moves from the ages of four to sixteen [actually two to seventeen],” Spielberg said. “I wished I had had a best friend…. My feeling about the whole story is that if E.T. had not come into Elliott's life and without Elliott having a father around, Elliott would have gone down a dark road. E.T. filled the gap left by the father who flew to Mexico with another woman, and then transforms the father-son relationship into something much more cosmic. That's probably the most important aspect of the movie for me, personally. I think it's critical for our understanding of the movie that we realize that Elliott, without a dad, will go in a very rebellious direction.”

Spielberg's fascination with outer space again provides him with an alluring visual metaphor for escape from an intolerable family situation. But there is an important difference between the ways the protagonists deal with space creatures in
E.
T.
and
Close
Encounters.
While Roy Neary was perfectly willing to leave wife and children behind to sail off into space, Elliott finally is unwilling to abandon his family to go off with E.T. In part, this is because he is not a grown man desperate to escape a dead-end marriage, but a child with strong emotional ties to his mother and siblings. While acknowledging the bitter aftereffects of divorce,
E.
T.
also reflects a growing recognition by Spielberg of the importance of family responsibility.

In a 1996 documentary on the making of
E.T.,
Spielberg recalled, “I didn't have children back in the early eighties, and suddenly I was becoming a father! Every single day I felt like I was Drew [Barrymore]'s father, Henry's father, and Robert [Macnaughton]'s father, and, you know, it felt good. And I think I have a big family now because it felt pretty good having three kids back then.”

Spielberg also attributed this development to his newfound emotional openness in his relationships with women, declaring after making
E.T.
that he had a “deep yearning now to become a father. I think Kathleen [Carey] and I will have kids…. I think I've opened up more in the last three or four years than I had ever before. I allowed myself to be hurt. I'd never really allowed anything to reach me before … and I think that now that I'm starting to deal with just basic things in a relationship with Kathleen, I'm able to turn around and be a little more open through movies about how I feel…. Five years ago, I think I would probably have been too embarrassed about what people might think of me to make
E.T.
”

Opening himself up to those feelings meant exposing himself again to
something he had tried to banish from his life: the possibility of losing someone he loved. Spielberg relived his inner feelings about separation in the film's most moving scene, the final interchange between Elliott and E.T. as the spaceship prepares to depart. E.T. says simply, “Come.” Ellliott replies, “Stay.” Has any exchange of dialogue in movies ever been so eloquent in its simplicity? Embracing, the extraterrestrial and the boy (who is looking over E.T.'s shoulder at his mother) come to the mutual recognition that either of the two alternatives is impossible. E.T. utters the word he has learned to equate with suffering:
“Ouch.
”

“When I did the good-bye scene,” Henry Thomas said, “I couldn't stop crying because I worked with E.T. every day and he was real to me.” The close-up of Elliott watching the spaceship depart carries an emotional power similar to that of the famous ending of George Stevens's
Shane
—the boy shouting “Shane, come back!” and then watching silently in a tearful close-up as his hero rides out of his life forever. Critic Donald Richie described the boy's words as “the cry of innocence in pain. The boy is calling for the return of his own pristine state, and he will never be the same.” In
E.T.,
as in
Shane,
though we are witnessing the traumatic end of boyhood innocence, we are also witnessing the beginning of maturity.

“It's the most emotionally complicated film I've ever made and the least technically complicated, which for me was a breath of fresh air,” Spielberg said. “The equivalent of the mother ship landing in
Close
Encounters
is, in
E.T.,
perhaps a tear out of Henry Thomas's eye. That was my equivalent of a super-colossal special effect, and it was nice to be able to scale down to where everything rested on how people felt about people.”

E
.
T
.
marked the first time in Spielberg's career in feature films that he decided to do without storyboards (except for the shots involving special effects). For a director accustomed to elaborate preplanning, that was the creative equivalent of working without a net. “I decided that storyboards might smother the spontaneous reaction that young children might have to a sequence,” he explained. “So I purposely didn't do any storyboards and just came onto the set and winged it every day and made the movie as close to my own sensibilities and instincts as I possibly could.”

Faced with the self-imposed discipline of a tight budget and a brisk sixty-five-day shooting schedule (which he bettered by four days), Spielberg decided to take another creative chance by hiring a cameraman who not only could work fast but was also “a little hungry, hadn't done a [major] theatrical feature before, [and] was going to make an audacious first impression.” However, he came to that decision only after offering the job to two well-known cameramen, William A. Fraker, the cinematographer of
1941,
and Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, celebrated for his work with Bernardo Bertolucci; both were unavailable. The cameraman he finally turned to was his old friend Allen Daviau, who had photographed
Amblin'.

After winning entry into the cameramen's union through a protracted lawsuit, Daviau shot a sequence for Spielberg on the
Special
Edition
of
Close
Encounters
and made a modest breakthrough in TV movies. Spielberg saw his work on
The
Boy
Who
Drank
Too
Much
and “did something that I rarely do. I didn't think twice: I picked up the telephone that night and phoned Allen and said, ‘Would you photograph my next feature?' There was a rather stunned pause on the other end of the phone and Allen said, ‘Why?' I said, ‘I just saw something on television which knocked me out and I'd love for you to work on this.'”

Daviau's delicately lyrical lighting for
E.T.
proved crucial to the film's success. As the cameraman puts it, “I remember saying from the very beginning when I read the script, ‘It's got to be so real. The whole world around has got to be absolutely realistic, so that the magic that happens isn't hokey, so that the whole thing isn't
intentionally
magical. The magic
comes
out
of
this incredible situation.'”

Location scenes were filmed in the southern California suburban communities of Northridge and Tujunga, in a redwood forest near Crescent City in northern California, and at a Culver City high school. But most of the movie was shot in the fall of 1981 on three small soundstages at Laird International Studios in Culver City. “Steven wanted to be away from the Universal lot,” Daviau explains. “He wanted secrecy, and he felt he could maintain his secrecy a lot better if he wasn't on a major lot.” Fearing a TV movie ripoff, Spielberg shot
E.T.
under a phony title,
A
Boy's
Life.
Deliberately causing confusion with Spielberg's previously announced project
Growing
Up,
the company simply described
A
Boy's
Life
as a “Comedy about antics and lifestyles of boys living in southern California today.” Everyone working on the movie was required to sign an agreement not to talk about it. Leading lady Dee Wallace thought the secrecy “almost got to the point of ridiculousness.” She was so intimidated that she felt she had to ask permission to discuss the movie with her own husband. Even Spielberg's cocker spaniel, Willie, wore a photo ID badge on his collar while visiting the set.

Shooting many of the exterior scenes on sets designed by James D. Bissell helped Spielberg and Daviau control and stylize
E.T.
's environment, as did the film's extensive use of fog effects and backlighting, by now a trademark of Spielberg pictures. Since the director was making an unusually small-scale movie, much of it taking place in the cramped quarters of Elliott's bedroom closet, those limitations “suddenly got me thinking we don't have a thousand extras to paint my canvas with, but we do have light, we do have the sun, and we do have a kind of color texture to work with, [so] let's let the lighting give the movie the production value,” Spielberg told
American
Cinematog
rapher
in 1982. “I think as a director I was more conscious of lighting on
E.T.
than I have been on any other movie before.”

The director gave Daviau an endless series of creative challenges. As the cameraman recalled, “One time he told me, ‘Allen, if you blow a scene because you went too far, I won't be half as mad at you as I would be if you
blew it because you played it too safe.' For instance, one time he asked, ‘How would it look if we overexposed somebody's face five stops?' I wasn't sure, but I gave it a try and held my breath throughout. It was when the boys were searching the garage for objects to build the communicator. The extreme contrast made a dramatic effect and the scene is in the picture.

“Steven will say two things that may appear contradictory. That means he wants you to work toward incorporating both. For example, he wanted E.T.'s skin to glisten, but wanted him to stay indistinct. Another time he said, ‘I don't want to see his face, but I want to see
just
enough.
'
Challenges like that make for distinctive photography.”