Indiewire has reported on Steven Spielberg’s most recent comments at the TCM Classic Film Festival regarding E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The director was there for the 40th-anniversary commemoration of the film where he spoke on Harrison Ford’s surprising and pivotal role in convincing Melissa Mathison to write the famed film.
From the same night, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Spielberg came up with the story for E.T. while filming Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in Tunisia, but didn’t have the time to write it himself. In search of a writer to take it on, he pitched the story to Melissa Mathison, Ford’s girlfriend at the time, and asked her to write it.
Spielberg said: “I was shooting in Tunisia; we were shooting outside the Well of the Souls with Harrison, and Harrison’s girlfriend Melissa Mathison was there on location…I was just talking to her and I told her my ‘E.T.’ idea, the whole story. And she said, ‘I’ve retired from writing, I don’t write anymore. I’m not interested in writing anymore. It’s too hard.’ She turned me down.”
Spielberg wasn’t looking to go down without a fight, though. He spoke directly to Harrison, pitched him the story, and asked him to convince Melissa to write it. Ford’s classic smooth talking ended up working and Melissa was convinced to give Spielberg another chance.
He continued on to say: “[Harrison] talked to her and she came to me the next day and said, ‘OK you got Harrison so excited about this. What is it that I missed?’ I think I hadn’t told her the story very well because I told her the story again and she got really emotional and she committed right there in the Tunisian desert.”
The rest is history after Spielberg and Mathison went on to make a groundbreaking and now classic film out of the story he pitched to her. Mathison passed away in 2015 but the pair was able to work together again on Spielberg’s film The BFG in 2016, which she wrote.
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