Dee Wallace Henry Thomas Peter Coyote Robert MacNaughton Drew Barrymore
Cinematography:
Allen Daviau
Distributed By:
Universal Pictures
Release Date:
May 26, 1982 (Cannes) June 11, 1982 (United States)
Runtime:
114 minutes
Country:
United States
Language:
English
Budget:
$10.5 million
Box Office:
$792.9 million
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (or simply E.T.) is a 1982 American science fiction film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Melissa Mathison. It tells the story of Elliott, a boy who befriends an extraterrestrial, dubbed E.T., who is left behind on Earth. Along with his friends and family, Elliott must find a way to help E.T. find his way home. The film stars Dee Wallace, Henry Thomas, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton, and Drew Barrymore.
Why It Phones Home
Aside from being an extremely high-grossing film, this film is one of Steven Spielberg's most autobiographical features. The suburbia the film's set in resembles his childhood homes in Phoenix, Arizona, and Los Gatos, California, and the film itself features incidents taken directly from the director's life. he claimed it was "a very personal story," and "a film that was inside [him] for many years and could only come out after a lot of suburban psychodrama." Specifically, it was an attempt to address his parents’ divorce and his estimation of himself as an outsider. He also stated that he felt E.T. was a minority story.
Touching story where a benevolent space creature stranded from his crew befriends a ten-year-old boy.
The film essentially updates elements of Peter Pan to contemporary suburbia, complete with flying sequences, and with the alien sort of like Tinker Bell. It also relies on a child's imagination, examining the fears and desires of a ten-year-old.
E.T. is Spielberg's most lyrical film, the closest he has come to "pure" cinema. Long passages of the film are without dialogue, and many of the lines in the film are irrelevant, background conversations. Instead of following a strict plot, images, and sounds are offered that feel deeply personal: a quarter moon, sliced by clouds, in an autumnal sky; pine trees swaying in the wind; the monotonous symmetry of suburban streets; a Halloween that verges on anarchy. Home is a sanctuary, but also a retreat constantly under threat. Adults are either Elliot's mother or unfathomable, capricious, cruel, and anonymous figures.
The key to the film's success was Spielberg’s ability to ground the story in a suburban reality that his audience could recognize. There was also the matter of finding a way to make the characters more appealing than typical suburban residents. The script wasn’t as important as finding the proper actors and giving them the right direction.
Unlike his previous blockbusters, the film has a relatively small budget, $10.5 million, and a short shooting schedule of sixty-five days. For the first time in his career, Spielberg did without storyboards, a move that was risky but also liberating. He limited his use of special effects, going back to simple tricks that could be filmed easily. The Halloween sequence is a good example of how effective the newly relaxed shooting methods could be.
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