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Film Close Encounters of a Fourth Kind

Crum: Why did you make "Close Encounters"?

Speilberg: Basically I'm interested in technical sophistication. UFOs are something which I am particularly interested in. I've read a lot about them.

Do you belive they exist?

Yes I do...

Have you ever seen one?

No I haven't actually .... this might be why I made the movie.

Basically the film was trying to throw the viewer back on their own resources. . . . it was intended to be something the viewer couldn't understand?

No, I recognise that most people have not seen a UFO, therefore to say that it throws the viewer back on their own resources is fallacious.

So you're appealing to people's imagination?

Yes, that's exactly it.

Then why was the technical work done so explicitly?

People's imagination needs a bit of prodding. Did you notice the lovely way we handled the subtitles, quite in keeping with the tone of the whole thing.

Do you think that there is a threat of some sort, or a message to be held in UFO's?

Well I think that the threat of UFOs is the same threat as that of sharks there is always a threat.

There have been so many movies about UFOs, one expected to go along to this one and be subtley induced into a feeling of awe. . . .

You mean it should have been different from all the others?

Yes

It would have cost more money.

Didn't this one cost more money?

This one cost more money, yes.

Certainly cost me a lot of money. Who does get the money Mr. Speilberg?

Well you see, I don't get as much as you think .... I'll only get about 10 or 20 million out of it, but other people make more than that.. . This is something you don't quite realise.

You must be disappointed that your academy awards didn'tcome to fruition.

Well I must admit that the film was based around the technical work and we did clean up a couple of awards in that area.

You cleaned up one actually.

Yes, but Richard Dreyfus got one too. He just got it for the wrong film.

You seem to use him a lot;

Yes I do. I feel that he sums up something in the American character—the boyish enthusiasm, the engagement in unusual quests.

But he went mad Mr. Speilberg, what does that say for the typical American?

It wasn't a psychological movie...

Then why did he throw half his garden through his Kitchen window?

To show the strength of his convictions and because it gave us some good mileage with the neighbours. Very cheap to make.

Yes there were only about 20 or 25 actors to pay off in that scene compared with about 20 million bucks worth of UFO in the last one.

Well, you've got to admit it was impressive.

For about 30 solid minutes?

Well, that's hardly fair. There was a lot of action packed into those thirty minutes. The theme music was repeated untold times so that the audience would recognise the tune, which in turn allowed the composer to make his 10 million dollars. There is a lot of give and take in the film business. Also of course it contained that famous cloud sequence.

You feel you are bringing new meaning to the word cloud?

Well quite frankly yes. I do feel though, that there are some parts of this movie you have overlooked, for instance the use of Francois Truffaut.

Why did you feel that you needed a European film director of some note who has been quite 'avante-garde' in his time to be in your film?

The presence of Truffaut turned what would have been quite straight forward and rather boring scenes into rather interesting flavoursome pieces. . . something exotic. And then there's the presence of the translator, continually backing away from the screen . . . You will have noticed the way he held his briefcase.

But I felt that frankly, Truffault was wasted.

Truffault is a very wooden actor. With character though.

Mr. Spielberg, how much do you feel that the appeal of the film was based on mystifying the audience, because basically the film mystified me. The first half was boring and the second half unintelligible.

Well what did you find difficulty in understanding?

The plot

I must say that I'm glad you asked me about that. The plot was really very simple, there was the visual sighting of the UFO, there was physical evidence of the UFO and lastly there was actual contact. All we did was to pad it out a little.

Don't you think that the music in the film tended to appeal to the more basic instincts in the audience?

When you have a theatre packed full of people, you've got to treat them as a theatre packed full of people;

How much is the packed theatres dependent on the heavy selling of this movie? I was amazed that so many people are coming to see it bearing in mind the quality of the film. Just where does the power in the film industry lie?

I'm not going to deny that the people who control the film industry control it. But I am getting a lot of money and I can do basically what I want. That's basically what I'm after. They can take the film away and put high powered sell on it . . . a lot of people are going to enjoy what I've done.

So you're making purely entertainment movies . . . back to the Hollywood of the 30's

You're right, yes, and they're well made I think.

You don't feel that coping with a subject as intangeable as UFOs, a very questionable subject in many people's minds, is perhaps undermining rather than reinforcing?

Oh no. . . it plays on their imaginative devices to believe in UFOs. Basically everyone wants to believe in UFOs;

I don't want to believe in UFOs.

Everyone but critics wants to believe in UFOs, and face it, critics don't want to believe in anything you do. Basically that is your problem.

But don't you feel that you are playing on the fears and intrigues of an alienated society? Sharks for example. Sharks to me present a very physical threat in a sheltered type of society, a threat where people are thrown out into a situation where they're fully exposed, where reality becomes nothing. UFOs and sharks would be the two best examples of this. .

You don't know what I'm doing next. You've got to realise that in any film, reality is nothing. Reality is entirely on the screen. With sharks; people's expirience with monster sharks is pretty minimal, as it is with UFOs.

People's experience with UFOs is non-existant.

Well people's experience of UFOs is pretty non-existant in the main, but you are making it very difficult for me when you keep interrupting me. If you're not careful, I'll toss you into the harbour and you can become a film clip for Jaws Part 2. Now as I was saying, while documented cases are rare, people know that these things could happen, some people think that they do happen. And that's enough . . . we'll leave it at that.

Most people think they do happen, and most people have a fear of them happening, and most people are gullible enough to go along to a movie that says it does happen? Now take for example the Towering Inferno.

I didn't make the Towering Inferno.

I know, you were well off the mark there weren't you? What I am citing is a trend in modern Hollywood cinema to play on the fears and the weaknesses of an alienated mass of people.

Well, I'm not a communist you know...... people need entertainment, people need good entertainment.

Well if your aim is to provide good entertainment then you should be taking people out of their sordid miserable little lives and showing them something that will free them from that. You are showing them something they fear monster sharks on one hand and alien creatures on the other.

But these alien creatures were friendly......

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So you are presenting yet another unreal aspect. You are not only playing on people's intrigues, you're deluding them into a false sense of security.

Of course. You've got to recognise the very strong threat in that film—the main protagonist is proven right in the end, despite his apparent madness in the first part of the film. He does find, as you put it, nice aliens.

If I could put it to you Mr. Speilberg, that character wasn't ever found totally sane. You might have noticed that in the end he was packed off in that loony machine.

Now I've just warned you about smart-aleck interruptions. The character Truffaut plays, the humanist scientist, an admirable person in every respect, says to Dreyfuss, "I envy you". A very significant moment.

I notice there was no sex in it....

It's a popular movie, there's no need for dirt and sex in movies these days. You don't think I could make 20 million if only people over 16 could look at it do you? We were aiming for a broader audience—family entertainment.

You want to take in as many people as you can?

Guards! Take this man out and feed him to the Loch Ness monster in the swimming pool, but don't forget to film it. So sorry, where were we?

I notice also that your treatment of women in the film was slightly backward.

It was completely realistic. When you are making a movie which, as you put it, is playing on people's imaginations, and its about something that's outside their normal experience, then you've got to have a relatively easily identifiable base to work on—society as we know it—where women are played down. Who knows, one day I I might make a movie about women—women taking over, another fear of society.

I was interested Mr Speilberg in the role of the phallus, in both Jaws and Third Encounters.

Very subtely done though.

Yes I'd certainly have to agree with you there. A forty foot white shark cutting upwards, underneath a woman swimming, was slightly subtle.

You wanna take a long walk on a short pier? The reason we used that particular symbol was that it was one which half of society could identify with, and the other half could easily recognise. Also it got around the problem of no sex.

Why are your films so heavily concentrated on technical gimmickry?

Because it's there. The great American democracy, Mama's apple pie and ITT have given us all this wonderful gadgetry, and I feel we have a responsibility to use it.

Mr. Speilberg, you 're about 27, 28 yet Hollywood gives you all the money you need. Why do they do this and what is it in your films that makes them successful?

Where it's at in the film world at the moment is America. It's the only place where one is absolutely free to make a film about ....

Nothing at all. . . .

Exactly. The reason for that is free enterprise. I'm free to make a movie in my own time and my own way. The people just hand over their two dollars.

This doesn't worry you at all?

Worry me? Listen my friend, this is the pinnacle of human culture. Why should it worry me? I'm delighted... and rich.

What was the function of the little boy?

He represented a longing to run away, to be carried away from the world. You'll notice that the boy didn't fear the UFOs in any way.

One thing that puzzled me in the film was during the scene when the aliens were trying to break into the woman's house. They undid the screws in the heater grill. Why didn't they just break down the door?

Very simple answer. It would have made too much noise. As I said earlier there is a lot of give and take and take and take in this business. The musical director thought that it would have masked the music, which you may have noticed was particularly dramatic at that point.

Another thing Mr. Speilberg. When the UFOs came the first time they blacked out half the countryside, yet when they appeared in the final showdown nothing was disturbed, why was this?

Very simple really. Blacking out cities, scaring poor truckies half to death and other such behaviour is just the way aliens say hello. Also it made a more dramatic start to the film.

Parts of the film were obviously intended to give the impression of a very fast moving drama: the car chase, the boy almost getting run over, tension at the airport control centre. Yet other parts of the film were dreadfully slow, like the last 2½ hours, why the inconsistancy?

This was because of the requirement of rhythm. Now if the whole film was really fast, the audience wouldn't realise just how fast the film really was.

As a rounding off comment, do you really think you can justify charging ordinary people $2 to see 2½ hours of incomprehensible glamour?

People love to be ripped off. It's a very small sacrifice for someone to make in order to see one of my masterpieces.

So in regard to all the other comments tonight, you are hooked up to a bias commercial empire that you cannot alter, and it is milking you, and yet you're happy with it?

People are certainly out to rip me off. I'm just keeping one step ahead of them, that's all. It's the law of the jungle—the strong survive.