The result both delighted his patrons – Fox had opened a space opera earlier that year, hence the company was thrilled to have their own science fiction movie on deck – and worried them, given this expensive project was supposed to have come out the previous summer before production problems caused delays.
That included Columbia Pictures, as well as Taxi Driver producers Michael and Julia Phillips, who gamely took the director’s extraterrestrial-visitors story and got him a greenlight. One three-men-and-an-apex-predator hit later, he was a hot Hollywood director who had folks ready to sign on for whatever he did next. And then maybe you look up.Ī longtime watcher of the skies, young Steven Spielberg had already been kicking around an idea involving alien visitation, spacecraft “sightings” and government cover-ups – some sort of story, in the gentleman’s own words, about “UFOs and Watergate” – before he had started turning Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws into a movie. Those pressures may be why ‘Close Encounters’ remains the only film credited to Spielberg as sole writer and director.How do you follow up a record-breaking blockbuster about a killer shark? For starters, you get out of the ocean. But all these years later, it’s the tricky personal stuff that makes the film remarkable: the depiction of a man crumbling under the pressure of forces he can’t understand the riotous, relatable scenes of madcap family life the sense that it’s a film as much about the pressures of creative inspiration as alien contact. Sure, the story’s thrilling and the set-piece special effects are still unrivalled – the mothership cresting Devil’s Tower stands as one of the few literally jawdropping moments in cinema. This lurking emotional discomfort is just one of the fascinating things about ‘Close Encounters’. For all its dewey-eyed optimism regarding creatures from another world, ‘Close Encounters’ is pretty uncomfortable with the inhabitants of this one.Įveryman hero Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) may be a loveable, star-gazing dreamer, but his wife is a nag who doesn’t understand him, his kids are shrieking pre-pubescent lunatics and let’s not even start on the shady military types who start nosing around following Roy’s night-time run-in with a flying saucer. As a husband and father, he says he no longer believes in the story of a man who abandons his family to explore the stars. Not too long ago, Steven Spielberg went public with his regrets about the climax of his 1977 science-fiction masterpiece ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.
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