Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  “I believe that the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind comes from Steven’s very special gift for giving plausibility to the extraordinary,” Truffaut wrote. “If you analyze Close Encounters, you will find that Spielberg has taken care in shooting all the scenes of everyday life to give them a slightly fantastic aspect, while also, as a form of balance, giving the most everyday possible quality to the scenes of fantasy.”

  What made it possible to blend all the elements so smoothly was the innovative Electronic Motion Control System, a digital, electronic system that recorded and programmed camera motions so they could be duplicated later when matching miniature effects were composited with the live-action photography. The system allowed all the visuals to move in harmony, adding an almost subconscious sense of credibility to the many composite images in Close Encounters. “Our plan,” explained Trumbull, “was that even though the UFOs wouldn’t be shot until postproduction, any live-action scene in which they appeared had to include the apparent illumination created by them, complete with flared-out overexposure, shifting shadows, and correct color.” To that end, dozens of sweltering electricians spent twelve hours a day manipulating lights from catwalks and cranes above the actors, who, Truffaut punned, felt “im-Mobilised … everything seems to take forever.”

  The film’s single most spectacular effect, the mother ship, did not take on final form until late in the production. It was originally conceived by Spielberg and Alves as a “horrifyingly huge” black shape blotting out stars and emitting light from an opening in its underbelly. The massive shadows seen in the film as the mother ship passes overhead are remnants of that design. But given Spielberg’s preoccupation with childhood motifs, it is fitting that the overwhelmingly large object transporting Roy Neary to a womblike state of bliss is called the mother ship and filled with childlike inhabitants. “My first concept,” Trumbull said, “was that the mother ship underbelly—this big thing that hung down from there—should look like a giant breast with a nipple.” That concept reflected psychological studies of the human longing for contact with UFOs, which link the phenomenon to the recall of infantile perceptions, especially the approach (both frightening and comforting) of the mother’s breast.

  Spielberg’s ideas for the mother ship evolved further when he visited India for location shooting (his first outside the United States) in February 1977. For six days, coming and going to a village outside Bombay, Spielberg passed a gigantic oil refinery lit by thousands of small lights and festooned with pipes, tubing, and walkways. Upon his return to Los Angeles, Spielberg had illustrator George Jensen draw a new ship from that description. “[T]hat very same night,” Spielberg related, “I was up on Mulholland Drive—a little stoned—and I got on my head on the hood of my car and looked out at all the lights from the San Fernando Valley upside down. And I thought that would be incredible as the underbelly of this oil refinery from Bombay.” Combining both elements into what Trumbull described as a “City of Light … like the Manhattan skyline at night,” the ship for the film was designed by Ralph McQuarrie and built by Greg Jein. When shooting was completed, Spielberg took the mother ship home as a keepsake.

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  TRUMBULL and Kubrick experimented with concepts of alien beings for the finale of 2001, but the tests proved too costly and time-consuming, and Kubrick finally decided not to risk losing credibility by showing aliens on screen. The film’s elliptical approach befitted Kubrick’s detached, cerebral view of mankind’s first contact with extraterrestrials, but for the warmer, more emotional Spielberg, showing communion between humans and aliens was a sine qua non. “I also knew that it was the most dangerous move I could possibly make with this movie,” he admitted. Coming up with believable aliens was such a problem that the final shots of the lead alien, nicknamed “Puck” by the director, were not filmed until three weeks before the first preview.

  “The first thing I did was go in search for the perfect E.T.,” Spielberg recalled. “I had the strange idea that they shouldn’t be people in costume; they had done that from the dawn of time in Hollywood. So what I did was, I had a chimpanzee brought to the set. We put the chimpanzee in an E.T. suit and further complicated the test by putting rollerskates on him, because I didn’t want the chimpanzee to walk simian-like, but I wanted him to glide smoothly down a ramp. You can imagine the test … a chimpanzee with a large rubber latex head and a little kind of flimsy ballerina costume and large rollerskates, disguised with a kind of dust ruffle so you couldn’t see the actual wheels. We put the chimpanzee on a ramp and the first thing that happened, of course, was the chimpanzee fell and slid down the ramp … and it kept making these rather remarkable Charlie Chaplin pratfalls … the chimpanzee was laughing like he had a great time doing this…. At one point the chimpanzee did pull off his head and throw it at the crew. That was his way of telling me, ‘Find another way.’”

  Because people who report encounters with aliens usually describe them as short, childlike creatures with spindly limbs and large heads, most of the aliens were played by six-year-old girls from dance classes, wearing oversized heads and gloves. But Spielberg found Tom Burman’s alien design “a complete disaster.” “He thought they looked too scary,” Burman recalled, “and he wanted something softer and more gentle-looking.” Burman revised his design and Spielberg spent several days shooting scenes of aliens, most of which did not wind up in the finished film. “Spielberg was changing his mind drastically all the time,” noted Burman assistant David Ayres. “But he had guts. He’d try anything to see if it would work on film…. At one point, the camera was on a dolly mount and Spielberg went running around with it, in and out of this whole crowd of technicians, and people would be jumping away—like a subjective point-of-view for the aliens. And he had them open a can of [Coca-Cola] and it fizzed all over. He had a whole lot of wild, crazy ideas.”

  The script called for the aliens to behave “like children let loose in a toy factory,” flying through the crowd of scientists and curiously stroking Dreyfuss, Truffaut, Hynek, and others with their long, willowy fingers. Judging from Jensen’s production drawings, those scenes might have appeared too bizarre or frightening for a movie portraying aliens as benign, ethereal creatures. But Spielberg’s biggest concern was that such extended scenes with aliens “bordered on the ridiculous” and “would destroy the credibility that I had hopefully achieved.”

  “Unfortunately, the aliens didn’t look real,” Zsigmond says. “Steven told me, ‘The only way we can do this is to overexpose them, so we can hardly see them.’ I overexposed two and a half stops, but the lab screwed up the dailies and printed the whole scene with nothing in it—white, no details. Julia Phillips came down to me, panicking: ‘Vilmos, you ruined it. We have to shoot it again.’ I was really insulted that they went to see dailies without me. I said, ‘Show me the dailies.’ I saw from the lab information that they didn’t print it right. I said, ‘Tell the lab to print it eight points darker.’ We had to wait twenty-four hours. The next day the dailies came back, and it was just perfect. Steven said, ‘Thank you.’”

  After Spielberg returned to Hollywood, he turned his attention to “Puck.” The full-body figure was created by marionette maker Bob Baker and the upper torso and head (for close-ups) by Carlo Rambaldi, an Italian craftsman who came to Spielberg’s attention with his facially expressive animatronic title character in the remake of King Kong. Eight people operated the cable mechanisms controlling Rambaldi’s Puck. Spielberg was so pleased with the creature that “he spent a lot of time playing with it,” Rambaldi recalled. “He especially liked the smile; and during the filming, it was he who operated the levers controlling it.” The joyous exchange of smiles between Puck and Truffaut, Spielberg’s representative of mankind at its most humane, is the film’s emotional climax. “The audience’s reactions to the extraterrestrials will be largely determined by Truffaut’s reactions,” Bob Balaban, who played Truffaut’s English interpreter, observed in his diary. “[Spielberg] wants Truffaut to t
hink of the extraterrestrials as little children. He knows how Truffaut likes little children.” The French filmmaker became so enchanted with Rambaldi’s creation that each day when he arrived on the set and saw Puck, Truffaut would go over and shake the alien’s hand, saying, “Bonjour! Ça va?”

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  “DIRECTING a movie with Truffaut on the set,” Spielberg said, “is like having Renoir around when you’re still painting by numbers.”

  Truffaut was one of the directors Spielberg most admired when he was breaking into the movie business. The French filmmaker left perhaps an even more lasting and pervasive imprint on Spielberg’s work than had his boyhood masters Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean. While attending Cal State Long Beach, Spielberg studied such Truffaut films as Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, and Stolen Kisses at art theaters, drawing inspiration from their romantic lyricism, their visual frissons, and their graceful blend of playful humor and emotional gravity. Truffaut’s celebration of the communal process of moviemaking in Day for Night made it “the closest to home for me of Truffaut’s films,” Spielberg recalled. “… Day for Night brought you into what Truffaut was. And he was the movies.” Their deepest temperamental affinity, Spielberg felt, was their mutual fondness for “working with children, and with adults who act like children…. There was a child inside François Truffaut. Watching him perform in his films The Wild Child and Day for Night, I saw that child…. That was the spirit I wanted for Lacombe.”

  Even so, Spielberg hesitated to approach him. “I didn’t want Truffaut to say no to me,” he explained. “I didn’t want to insult him by saying, ‘I’d like you to be an actor.’” But after considering such European actors as Gérard Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Lino Ventura, Spielberg finally summoned up the courage to call Truffaut at his home in Paris.

  “Steven attracted me,” Truffaut recalled. “I knew his work. I had confidence in him. When he called me in France and said he had written the role especially for me, I didn’t think he was serious. I assumed he thought I spoke English.”

  Truffaut protested, “I am not an actor. I can only play myself.”

  “But that’s what I want,” Spielberg assured him.

  After reading the script, Truffaut accepted an offer of $75,000 to play a character he described as “un savant français.” He had no particular interest in the subject matter. When asked if he believed in UFOs, Truffaut replied, “I believe in the cinema.” On other occasions, he declared, “When people talk about UFOs, I tune out,” and “The only close encounters I ever have are with women, children, or books.” Until he arrived in Mobile, Truffaut did not admit to Spielberg that he had ulterior motives for wanting to be in Close Encounters. He planned to use the experience as research for a book called The Actor (a project he later abandoned), and he used his spare time on location to write the screenplay for The Man Who Loved Women.

  The endless waiting on the set of Close Encounters exasperated Truffaut, who felt himself losing interest and growing impatient to shoot his own movie. One day during the filming in Wyoming he exclaimed to actress Teri Garr, “It cost $250,000 for that shot they just did with the helicopters. I could make a movie for that. And they did two takes!” But the experience also helped him understand why “the atmosphere becomes so passionate and intimate” for actors working on a film. With all the fussing and coddling he experienced between shots from wardrobe, hair, and makeup people, the actor becomes “like a little baby again,” he mused. A more sobering discovery was that “everybody says many nasty things behind the director’s back.”

  Truffaut was not entirely immune to that temptation. In one of the many letters he wrote from Mobile to friends in France, Truffaut reported, “Like every actor in every film ever made, I’ll find myself saying, ‘He never directed me, no one ever told me what to do,’ and, in fact, it’s both true and false. In any event, I find it very amusing to watch another director at work, and despite the huge differences (to give you an idea, his favorite French directors are [Robert] Enrico and [Claude] Lelouch), to discover all kinds of points in common, or rather reactions in common. In any case, he really isn’t pretentious, he doesn’t behave like the director of the most successful film in the history of the cinema (Jaws), he’s calm (outwardly so), very even-tempered, very patient and good-humored. This film of flying saucers means a great deal to him, it’s a childhood dream come true.”

  At first Spielberg felt “intimidated” having Truffaut in his movie. Truffaut reassured him, “I will be the easiest person you’ve ever worked with—either in the cast or on the crew. This actor will not have ideas. I will perform your ideas.” Truffaut not only was true to his word, but often seemed to know what Spielberg wanted without being told. Sometimes Spielberg deliberately refrained from giving Truffaut any direction at all, such as in the sublime moment when Lacombe says good-bye to Puck with hand signs and “that expression on his face when he almost laughs at the gentleness of it all.” Truffaut’s personality also made the character “much more intense than he was originally written,” Spielberg acknowledged. “He’s still a man of peace … still a man-child, but he has a great deal of cunning and enthusiasm.”

  Although he had warned Spielberg that he could not be asked “to laugh or cry on command like a professional actor,” Truffaut found that “several times during the shooting he made me surpass myself. He directed me so as to make me come out of myself. Thanks to that, I discovered a real pleasure as an actor. I behaved like every actor in the world who, as soon as the take has been shot, turns to the director to find out if he is satisfied. And every time I achieved the result Spielberg expected, I was satisfied.”

  Truffaut’s benign facade concealed a sly and sometimes waspish guile. He finally let his frustration boil over in rage against Julia Phillips, telling The New York Times, “The picture started with a budget of $11 million and now I think it is up to $15 million, but that is not Spielberg’s fault. It is the fault of the producer, Julia Phillips. She is incompetent. Unprofessional. You can write that. She knows I feel this way. Sometimes it was so disorganized that they had me show up and then do nothing for five days.” At the behest of the furious Phillips—who seethes in her book, “Of all the dead people I know François Truffaut wins the prick award hands down”—Spielberg played the good soldier, writing a letter to the Times expressing his disbelief that Truffaut could have made those “rather unkind remarks.” Implausibly arguing that the highly experienced and sophisticated French director must have been ignorant of the production’s unique technical challenges, Spielberg went on to claim, “I’ve never had such constructive and consistent support from a producer as I have had from Julia Phillips, and I know that Columbia Pictures concurs.” Rather than being grateful, Phillips complained that Spielberg’s letter was “weaker than I would have hoped.”

  Truffaut expressed contrition of a sort in an interview with The New Yorker: “Jeanne Moreau once told me, ‘On every picture, you must love everybody except the one who becomes the scapegoat.’ I followed Jeanne Moreau’s advice. I made Julia Phillips, the producer, my scapegoat. Every time I find something not to my liking, I say I am sure it is the fault of Julia Phillips.”

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  WITH Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg pulled off the remarkable feat of making a deeply personal film on a grand scale within the Hollywood studio system. Even more remarkably, he was able to communicate his personal vision to a huge worldwide audience. “This is probably the most collaborative art form in the world,” he wrote in an American Cinematographer article paying tribute to his crew on Close Encounters. “There is no such thing as [an] Auteur. Without all these people movies simply are not made.” And yet Spielberg managed to use the talents of all those people to realize the dream implanted in his mind as a boy in Phoenix when his father roused him from bed in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower.

  That incident was adapted by Spielberg for the scene of Roy Neary, fresh from his first UFO s
ighting, excitedly awakening his family and taking them on a (futile) nocturnal quest to share his otherworldly encounter. Spielberg’s depiction of the Nearys’ dysfunctional family life also is filled with echoes of his childhood experiences. Far from celebrating suburban conformity, as his detractors often accuse him of doing, Spielberg offers a bleak view of suburban life in Close Encounters, depicting it as a place of quiet desperation, a plastic purgatory from which Roy Neary longs to escape. Roy’s unimaginative wife, Ronnie, reacts to his interest in UFOs with hostility, thinking he has gone mad. Her incomprehension and abandonment of Roy, while an understandable reaction under the circumstances, helps the audience sympathize with Roy’s decision to leave his family behind for a new life in outer space. Along the way, Roy forms a temporary new “family” allegiance with fellow UFO believer Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon). The anguish Jillian experiences over the extraterrestrials’ abduction of her small son, Barry (Cary Guffey), makes her kin to all the other Spielbergian mothers forcibly separated from their children, from Lou Jean Poplin in The Sugarland Express to the Plaszów forced-labor camp inmates in Schindler’s List.

  Ronnie, who mockingly addresses her husband as “Jiminy Cricket,” is an unhappy homemaker whose emotional and intellectual horizons are bounded by the walls of her messy tract house. Spielberg’s depiction of Ronnie is no mere plot expediency, but a reflection of his youthful animosity toward mother figures. In a 1990 documentary on the making of Close Encounters, Spielberg expressed second thoughts about his depiction of Ronnie, recalling that he cast Teri Garr after seeing her in a coffee commercial: “I said, ‘A homemaker—makes great coffee!’ I was young, naive, and chauvinistic…. She was the bad guy in the movie, in a sense. She’s not really a bad guy, she’s somebody who’s trying to preserve her family and save her family from the kind of insanity she’s assuming Dreyfuss is experiencing, and doesn’t want her family to be tainted by this.”