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It’s long since been established that Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest filmmaker’s to ever grace the cinematic medium. He’s a born visualist, and just like his movies, tales of the director’s innate storytelling intuition never fail to impress and inspire those around him. “He comes to set, looks around, and he’s like, ‘You know what would be good…?’ [Then] he points out the two shots that are better than you would have thought of,” J.J. Abrams states on the commentary track for Super 8.
Abrams’ Bad Robot co-founder Bryan Burk told SYFY WIRE something similar while recounting the time he wandered onto the set of The Lost World: Jurassic Park and saw Spielberg making tweaks to the shot where the rampaging T. rex attacks the bus on the streets of San Diego.
“Keep in mind: there’s a gazillion people around and they’re hemorrhaging money. They’re shutting off streets and all they need is this one shot and they have to implode the bus. Steven looked at it, in the middle of this craziness, and he goes, ‘Yeah, it’s a good shot, but instead of the camera going up, what if we bring the camera down, so it’s looking down and the dinosaur’s looking larger against the bus?’ That small change made the shot 10 times more fantastic. At that moment, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why he’s Steven Spielberg.’ It’s the way he’s constantly able to see things and either give big adjustments, which, obviously, he does, but in this case, it’s just those small little adjustments that suddenly take it from good to fantastic.”
You’ll hear countless stories like that from creatives who have collaborated with Spielberg over his 50+-year career in Hollywood. The latest anecdote comes to us from William Kotzwinkle — author of the official novelization for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and its 1985 sequel, The Book of the Green Planet — who bore witness to the moment the born filmmaker came up with the iconic design for the alien’s spaceship at the drop of a hat.
How Steven Spielberg came up with the design for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial‘s iconic spaceship
“I saw Steven’s genius at play many times when E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was being filmed,” Kotzwinkle tells SYFY WIRE over email. “One moment that stands out is when his art director came up to him on the set and said, ‘I know what the spaceship should look like. It looks like a teardrop of mercury.’ It was clear nobody had given any thought to the spaceship yet. Steven paused for a moment, then said, ‘No, it looks like a Victorian Christmas tree ornament.’
“He came up with this on the spur of the moment and it was perfect,” Kotzwinkle continued. “Who would’ve thought he would even know what a Victorian Christmas tree ornament looks like? But obviously he has a large encyclopedia of images in his mind. Anyway that’s what the ship looks like in the movie, and that’s how I described it in my book.”
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is now available to own from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.
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