On paper, his success might have seemed more than logical. The most famous director of his time, collaborating with Universal Studios, responsible for many characters that became legends, and for special effects that changed the history of making movies, gave us memorable cinematic results.

Yet 40 years ago, E.T. the Extraterrestrial’s director Steven Spielberg (Golden Globe winner for Best Director for Saving Private Ryan in 1990), was filled with anxiety as he thought he’d get nowhere with this project.

It was in the midst of filming E.T. that Spielberg feared that the story – in which children in a Los Angeles suburb help an extra-terrestrial alien return home – could be something that would attract only the young kids, and that only Walt Disney Studios movies could attract millions of moviegoers of all ages.

That fear dissipated in the spring of 1982 when E.T. was shown to a test audience in a theater in Dallas, Texas, with people saying they had a “quasi-religious” experience worth repeating. Then came the world premiere at Cannes, with 15 minutes of ovation from the crème de la crème of French and international cinema clapping even before the first end credit rolled.

Spielberg’s film would spend more than a year in theaters after its US premiere on June 11, later winning the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama, and Best Original Score, and four Academy Awards, propelling it to become the highest-grossing film in history at the time.

E.T. moved the world’s audiences in 1982. Spielberg found the courage the same year to establish Amblin Entertainment and turn his studio into the new dream factory of Hollywood by producing films like Back to the Future, Gremlins, The Goonies, Innerspace, and An American Tail. He teamed up with Disney for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Amblin’s films were shot by filmmakers like Spielberg who learned the values ​​of life on TV sets, watching shows from Disneyland and The Twilight Zone to westerns and crime series, mixed with the newsreels of the Nixon era and the Vietnam War. At home, the gray turned into the colors of technicolor in matinee theaters.

On a starry night in 1980, when Spielberg was with his star Harrison Ford, recipient of the Cecil B. deMille Award at the 2002 Golden Globes, and the latter’s writer girlfriend Melissa Mathison, heading to the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in the Tunisian desert.

Spielberg shared that he wanted to make a film about those years as a child when he faced his parents’ divorce. It was added to an idea that Spielberg had from the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the aliens show up – he wondered what would happen if one of those aliens got left behind on Earth.

Mathison returned eight weeks later with the draft of what was then called A Boy’s Life. Spielberg saw his film becoming a rescue adventure. A boy saves an alien and helps him return to his planet while that extraterrestrial being helps him heal his broken heart after the departure of his divorced father. E.T. was an ally, a mentor, and a friend.

Spielberg saw the plot of E.T. as a personal, intimate work, without the need to summon a large cast to film it.

Child actors Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, and Drew Barrymore (winner of the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a miniseries for Grey Gardens in 2010) play the siblings who would share Dee Wallace as their mother in the suburbs of San Fernando Valley. An agent of the government nicknamed Keys (Peter Coyote) is on the trail of the missing alien.

Mathison took advantage of the fact that she had become a stepmother of two teenagers while living with Ford to create a fresh script from their perspective, including their way of speaking and anxieties.

Adults were invaders, and Spielberg embraced that by shooting his film from the waist down on adult actors. Only the face of Mary (Wallace) could be seen as part of the universe of the kids until the plot’s climax.

The visual effects of the spaceship and some powers that E.T. have, like being able to levitate objects, were created by George Lucas‘ visual effects house, ILM.

The alien lead character was designed and built by Carlo Rambaldi (King Kong, 1976), with a vision to represent a wise being with Einstein-type eyes. A dozen operators, in addition to a child who was born without limbs (Matthew De Meritt) and two adults born with dwarfism, Pat Bilon, and Tamara De Treaux, were needed to operate this animatronic.

Spielberg always hid the “magicians” in an adjoining room, creating the illusion for children that the creature was actually breathing. Thomas remembers that once Spielberg yelled, “Action!” the illusion was impossible to break. The tears, screams, and laughter were always genuine from the young cast.

Spielberg followed his instinct that his film should be shot chronologically. Thus, when the day to shoot the final goodbye sequence arrived, Henry as his character Elliot, Robert (Michael), and Drew (Gertie), had to say genuine farewell to E.T. There was no one – in front or behind the cameras – who did not cry with that goodbye hug, even without the grand music of John Williams being heard.

E.T. the Extraterrestrial stands among the classics after four decades, part of the memories of generations, with many filmmakers taking inspiration from this story. The most recent example is the makers of the TV series, Stranger Things, showing their teen stars playing Dungeons & Dragons just like Elliot, as a supernatural mystery surrounds them and invites them to face the unknown beyond their doors.

Spielberg was right – childhood is part of what we bring to the screening room. And the wizard behind the curtain, if he knows what he’s doing, will send us home seeing the night lights above us, with the magic and optimism for life that the story of E.T. and Elliot inspired in all of us.

Translation by Mario Amaya

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