Director Steven Spielberg regrets his decision to remove guns from his 1982 film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
In 1982, Steven Spielberg made a movie about a boy named Elliott who finds and befriends an alien named E.T. and tries to help him return to his planet.
The movie was a massive hit with critics and audiences and broke box office records.
At the 2023 TIME100 Summit, Spielberg shares his thoughts on his changes to E.T. for its 20th-anniversary edition in 2002. He says he replaced the guns the cops had with walkie-talkies in the movie.
He wishes he hadn’t done that and says that movies should not be altered based on current views. Check out what he said and watch the video (the quote starts at 3:30) here:
[Removing the guns] was a mistake. I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through. E.T. was a film that I was sensitive to the fact that the federal agents were approaching a bunch of kids with their firearms exposed, and I thought I would change the guns into walkie-talkies. Years have gone by and I changed my own views. I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anybody really do that. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.
Spielberg clearly regrets having altered the original E.T. film, but it is debatable whether he was actually correct.
His frequent creative partner George Lucas has a different opinion. He has used technological advances to modify the original Star Wars trilogy and has significantly changed The Phantom Menace two years after it came out.
Spielberg’s quote from his Hollywood Masterclass explains why he thinks E.T. should not be changed. He says a film is like a picture of the time and place it was made and the people who made it.
So, he is not a fan of changing a film to fit modern standards or using new technology.
Disney+ has found an interesting way to bypass the generational shift. Instead of erasing some very problematic and offensive portrayals of racial stereotypes from some of their older animated films, the streaming giant has added a warning for those films to inform viewers of the content.
Films from different periods, like E.T. the Extraterrestrial, reflect the time and culture in which they were produced, which should be acknowledged.
Without them, we will not be aware of the times we have left behind, hindering the growth of values in the modern generation.
About E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (or E.T.) is a 1982 American science fiction film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Melissa Mathison. The film stars Dee Wallace, Henry Thomas, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton, and Drew Barrymore.
The concept of the film was based on an imaginary friend that Spielberg created after his parents’ divorce. It tells the story of Elliott, a boy who befriends an extraterrestrial dubbed E.T., who is stranded on Earth. Along with his friends and family, Elliott must find a way to help E.T. return home while avoiding the government.
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