Coppola, for instance, has another way of ducking the star system. Look at the constellation that was formed by Godfather I alone: Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Al Pacino. Spielberg uses a more radical technique for avoiding the big salaries and big egos that always accompany the big names. He casts his actors for their anti-charismatic qualities. ‘The play’s the thing,’ says Spielberg. ‘In every movie I have made, the movie is the star.’ He is the first director with the nerve to capitalise on something very obvious: audiences are composed of ordinary people.
After his 1941 debacle, Spielberg brought himself violently to heel with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and this perhaps explains why it is the most anonymous of his major films. (It was the most personally profitable too, before E.T.: Spielberg and producer George Lucas simply offered the studios distribution rights — in other words, they kept it all.) With Raiders, Spielberg completed a movie under budget and within schedule for the first time, and has not erred since. A perfectionist and non-delegator, a galvanised handyman on the set, he worked loo-hour weeks to keep the production under tight control. ‘Raiders was popcorn,’ he admits, ‘but great popcorn.’ It also brought him to the end of something. It marked the apotheosis of Spielberg the pyrotechnician.
Up until this point in his career it was just about possible to regard Spielberg as merely a brilliant hack. Flitting from studio to studio, he was the lucky mercenary, the big-budget boy with a flair for astronomical profits. Poltergeist and, far more centrally, E.T. put such dismissals quietly out of their misery. The time had come to acknowledge that Spielberg was unique.
Spielberg produced and co-wrote Poltergeist but leased the direction out to Tobe Hooper, the horror-buff and gore-bandit who gave us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like the bygone nabobs of the Forties and Fifties Spielberg had hired his director and yet was unwilling to relinquish his original conception. Later, he ran apologetic ads in the trade-papers, saluting Hooper’s contribution. As it turned out, Hooper’s contribution was all too palpable. The film’s ambitions were in any case pretty limited. ‘I started out’, says Spielberg, ‘just to scare the be-Jesus out of anybody who dared to walk into the theatre.’ The film is more than that – and exploits the mother-and-lost-child theme with harrowing relish. But Spielberg’s humour and clarity are in the end barely visible through the miasma of Hooper’s Gothic-graphic mediocrity.
E.T. is something else again. It is all Spielberg, essential Spielberg, and far and away his most personal film. ‘Throughout, E.T. was conceived by me as a love story — the love between a ten-year-old boy and a nine-hundred-year-old alien. In a way I was terrified. I didn’t think I was ready to make this movie — I had never taken my shirt off in public before. But I think the result is a very intimate, seductive meeting of minds.’
Intimacy is certainly the keynote of E.T. Using a predominantly female production team, Spielberg effectively re-created the tremulous warmth of his own childhood: a ranch-style suburban home, full of women and kids, with Spielberg the dreaming nucleus of the action. His well-attested empathy with children is tied to a precise understanding of how they have changed since he was a boy. ‘The years of childhood have been subject to a kind of inflation. At sixteen, I was the equivalent of a ten-year-old today.’ In the movie, the kids have a wised-up naïveté, a callow, TV-fed sophistication. Reared on video games and Spielberg movies, with their Space-Invader T-shirts, robot toys and electronic gizmos, they are in a way exhaustively well-prepared for the intrusion of the supernatural, the superevolved.
Despite his new-deal self-discipline, Spielberg decided to ‘wing’ E.T., to play it by ear and instinct. (He brought the movie in on the nail anyway, at $10 million.) ‘If you over-rehearse kids, you risk a bad case of the cutes. We shot E.T. chronologically, with plenty of improvisation. I let the kids feel their way into the scenes. An extraordinary atmosphere developed on the set.’ E.T. is, after all, only an elaborate special effect (costing $1.5 million — ‘Brando would cost three times that,’ as Spielberg points out); but ‘a very intense relationship’ developed between E.T. and his young co-star, Henry Thomas. ‘The emotion of the last scene was genuine. The final days of shooting were the saddest I’ve ever experienced on a film set.’ Little Henry agrees, and still pines for his vanished friend. ‘E.T. was a person,’ he insists.