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Steven Spielberg has spent nearly 50 years thinking about extraterrestrials, and it turns out the director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is convinced we’re not alone.
During an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, Spielberg reflected on the legacy of his iconic 1977 sci-fi classic while promoting his upcoming film Disclosure Day, a UFO conspiracy thriller that he describes as a sort of bookend to Close Encounters.
The filmmaker also made it clear that his fascination with the subject isn’t limited to the movies.
Watching Close Encounters with Spielberg apparently comes with its own commentary track. Looking back at one memorable scene, Richard Dreyfuss immediately recalled the sweltering conditions on set.
“It was, like, 95° in Mobile, Alabama, and, like, 80% humidity. I remember that!” he laughed.
Spielberg, meanwhile, broke down the sequence in which Roy Neary begins connecting the dots after seeing a TV report about Devil’s Tower.
“Right there you say, Wait a second, did I see what I think I saw?” said Spielberg. “And then, who are you gonna watch? Are you gonna watch the [TV] screen, or are you gonna watch the actor? Richard’s great, but you’re watching the [TV] screen now.”
His new film imagines a world where the truth about extraterrestrial life is finally exposed.
“‘Disclosure Day’ is about how, if somebody had the power and if somebody had possession of the entire archive of visual evidence of what’s been happening for the last 80 years, what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once?” Spielberg said. “And the people who are trying to stop that data dump from happening, that is basically the core of this chase movie.”
The story stars Emily Blunt as a Kansas City meteorologist whose life is upended by unexplained abilities, while also exploring how the discovery of alien life could challenge deeply held religious beliefs.
“The movie takes the position of the believers, or the curious, the ones that have been deeply affected by this,” said Spielberg.
He also believes audiences are primed for that kind of story.
“Oh yeah,” Spielberg said. “I can’t speak for the entire audience, but there are certain things that unite us. And one of the things that unites us, one of the places we can find common ground, is our united belief that the extraordinary is possible, and the impossible is possible. And I think UAP, UFO, the whole phenomenon is something that everybody across any spectrum – culturally, politically – can agree on.”
Spielberg traced his own obsession with the unknown back to childhood, when his father woke him up in the middle of the night to watch the Perseids meteor shower.
“I was about five or six years old,” he recalled. “Just my father and me drove through the night… And that was the beginning of my love affair with the sky.”
Even now, the 79-year-old says he develops ideas on his phone instead of writing them by hand.
“That’s where I wrote it! And then I printed it out and would read it and then go back to my iPad again. I mean, my handwriting is so bad.”
Despite spending decades making movies about extraterrestrials, Spielberg admitted he’s never had a paranormal experience himself.
“Isn’t that terrible?” he laughed. “I deserve that! I deserve a sighting. Ben, I need a sighting. I mean, I’m an ambassador to these guys, and they haven’t shown themselves to me? I don’t get that.”
But when CBS Sunday Morning‘s Ben Mankiewicz asked whether aliens have visited Earth — and whether they might still be here — Spielberg didn’t hedge.
“Based on the circumstantial evidence of everything that I’ve gathered throughout my whole life, everybody I’ve listened to and every documentary I’ve ever watched and all the testimonies in Congress that I’ve heard, I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here,” Spielberg said. “And who knows, maybe they’ve always been here.”
English (US)