E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for iphone instal

“I didn’t have children back in the early Eighties,” he said in 1996. During the shooting of the Halloween sequence, Spielberg spent the whole day dressed up as an old lady, much to the child actors’ delight. Despite the old showbusiness adage about never working with children or animals, Spielberg found himself thrilled to direct his young cast. But it also affected him in subtler, more profound ways.

For a start, there is the not insignificant fact that – at the peak of the film’s popularity in 1982 – he was making half a million dollars a day from his share of the box office and merchandise sales. He had a ride at Universal Studios Florida, advertised for BT in the UK and even inspired his own playground joke: What’s ET short for? Because he’s got little legs.įor Spielberg himself, ET changed his life in a myriad ways. The resourceful, peace-loving ET was adored by both critics and audiences alike, and became a true pop culture phenomenon, with his wise old eyes soon staring out from every conceivable type of merchandise. The movie quickly rocketed past Star Wars to become the highest-grossing film of all time, a record that stood for more than a decade until Spielberg broke it himself with 1993’s Jurassic Park.

Released 40 years ago on 11 June 1982, it didn’t take long until the little alien with a big, glowing heart was everybody’s new best friend. “A special friend who rescues a young boy from the sadness of a divorce.” That special friend would become the titular star of Spielberg’s next film, ET the Extra-Terrestrial. “It was a childhood fantasy to tell the story of a best friend,” Spielberg explained in a 1996 documentary. At night, however, his mind kept returning to the loneliness of his own childhood, the imaginary friend he’d created to cope, and the pain he’d felt when his parents split while he was a teenager.

The director, just 34 and with hits like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind already under his belt, was in North Africa shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark, the blockbuster adventure that would launch the Indiana Jones franchise. In 1980, in a tent somewhere in the Tunisian desert, Steven Spielberg sat painfully alone.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for iphone instal