Steven Spielberg (52 page)

C
ONSTANT
time and budget overruns during the Mobile filming and during a year of postproduction caused the beleaguered studio to become increasingly impatient with all the filmmakers, but especially with the stressed-out line producer. Because of her cocaine problem (exhaustively documented in her 1991 memoir), Julia Phillips was forced off the picture by Columbia during postproduction in the summer of 1977.

She felt “betrayed by the only partners who have mattered: Michael. Steven. Begelman.” Her ex-husband
¶
takes strong exception to that statement: “There was no conspiracy to do her in. That was complete nonsense. She had a drug problem and she was really out of it. At that point she was not helping, but she was in the way of the picture getting done. Her authority was removed. She went off to Hawaii when that happened and we didn’t really communicate. Her perceptions were, at the time, not really accurate. It was a lot of pressure because it was a high-profile film with budget problems, and the press and everybody kind of rooting against it. But I don’t think that’s what the problem was for her. It was a serious chapter of substance abuse that made her not capable of functioning the way she would normally have functioned.”

Julia Phillips claimed in a 1991 interview that cocaine “had never been a problem” for her before
Close
Encounters:
“It was only after I started working with Steven. He was such a perfectionist.” In her book, she attacks Spielberg as “the little prick … a precocious seven-year-old” with “a childish self-preoccupation.” At the time of the book’s publication, a spokesman for Spielberg told the press that the director was busy shooting
Hook
and would have nothing to say about
You’ll
Never
Eat
Lunch
in
This
Town
Again.
To this day, he has made no public comment about it.

S
O
much of the imagery of
Close
Encounters
was added in postproduction that the actors had to spend most of their time staring into lights passing
overhead, trying to imagine sights they could not see. “There’s no way to work with effects,” said Melinda Dillon. “… For weeks we were just sitting on a rock, shifting positions, pretending to look at the landing site and the sky. Steven would say to us, ‘There’s a light going by you. Oh, but there’s an
extraordinary
light going by you.’ It was a great acting exercise.” François Truffaut, however, found the experience unnerving: “I never had the impression of playing a role, only of lending my carnal envelope. Spielberg had shown me the two thousand sketches of his storyboard, so I knew that what he was after was a grand cartoon strip and that I could put back in my suitcase the book by Stanislavsky that I had bought for the occasion.”

Richard Dreyfuss was “very upset with several moments in his performance,” Spielberg recalled, “because he feels that had he seen the effects, he might have reacted differently.” Dreyfuss admitted being depressed the first time he saw the film, because “I didn’t like my work. And it took me a long time to recontact that feeling in me of why I made the film…. I didn’t do it because it was a Spielberg movie, because they didn’t exist as such yet, or because it was a great role. I did it because I knew that they would show that film in the Museum of Modern Art in the year 2030, that … this movie would be potentially the most important film ever made, and I wanted desperately to be a part of that experience.”

More than two hundred shots in
Close
Encounters
involved special effects, and some shots contained as many as eighteen separate visual elements. Dozens of matte paintings by Matthew Yuricich rounded out the design, which also employed miniature outdoor settings for some of the Indiana and Devil’s Tower landscapes. The film’s night imagery was augmented with artificial stars and cloud formations, and animation was used for sequences showing the Big Dipper and a meteor appearing above Devil’s Tower. Spielberg commissioned tests of computer-generated imagery (CGI), a technique then in its embryonic stages, but concluded it did not look believable enough and would be prohibitively expensive (seventeen years later, Spielberg would help pioneer the combined use of live action and CGI in
Jurassic
Park
).

Admitting he had “no savvy about optical and miniaturized special effects,” Spielberg interviewed various effects technicians but felt he needed “one enthusiastic, driving ‘wilderness guide’ who would take me where nobody else had gone before.” He found that person in Douglas Trumbull, who had played a crucial role in helping Kubrick realize his vision on
2001.
“If Trumbull hadn’t accepted the job,” Spielberg acknowledged in his 1978 article on the filming in
American
Cinematographer,
“I’d still be on the Columbia back lot trying to get a cloud to materialize from thin air.”

After making his feature directing debut with the sci-fi movie
Silent
Run
ning
in 1971, Trumbull was resistant to doing special effects for another director; he was working on innovative projection systems with his Future General Corporation and had turned down an offer from George Lucas to work on
Star
Wars,
which was in production at the same time as
Close 
Encounters.
“I didn’t have any adverse reaction to
Star
Wars
per se, but I felt I was space-movied-out,” Trumbull recalls. “When Steven came along, I was hunting for ways to put together 65mm camera equipment to develop the Showscan process, and that was part of the deal with Steven, to put together this 65mm facility I needed. I was very impressed with
Jaws,
and I thought, This is going to be a really interesting filmmaker to work with, and an opportunity to push the envelope.”

The guiding principle of the special effects in the first two-thirds of
Close
Encounters
was to bring about a seamless integration of fantasy elements into a mundane, Middle-American setting. That would help the audience accept the UFOs as real and prepare them for the rhapsodic, almost avant-garde spectacle of the last forty minutes when the mother ship lands. Spielberg’s UFOs announce their presence by activating a toddler’s toys, turning out the Muncie municipal light grid, vibrating a railroad crossing sign, and illuminating a McDonald’s billboard. Manipulating those familiar sights and sounds makes the film’s most extravagant phantasmagoria—clouds turning into strange shapes and colors, a dazzling orange light flooding through the door of a farmhouse—seem natural occurrences.

“I believe that the success of
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
comes from Steven’s very special gift for giving plausibility to the extraordinary,” Truffaut wrote. “If you analyze
Close
Encounters,
you will find that Spielberg has taken care in shooting all the scenes of everyday life to give them a slightly fantastic aspect, while also, as a form of balance, giving the most everyday possible quality to the scenes of fantasy.”

What made it possible to blend all the elements so smoothly was the innovative Electronic Motion Control System, a digital, electronic system that recorded and programmed camera motions so they could be duplicated later when matching miniature effects were composited with the live-action photography. The system allowed all the visuals to move in harmony, adding an almost subconscious sense of credibility to the many composite images in
Close
Encounters.
“Our plan,” explained Trumbull, “was that even though the UFOs wouldn’t be shot until postproduction, any live-action scene in which they appeared had to include the apparent illumination created by them, complete with flared-out overexposure, shifting shadows, and correct color.” To that end, dozens of sweltering electricians spent twelve hours a day manipulating lights from catwalks and cranes above the actors, who, Truffaut punned, felt “im-Mobilised … everything seems to take forever.”

The film’s single most spectacular effect, the mother ship, did not take on final form until late in the production. It was originally conceived by Spielberg and Alves as a “horrifyingly huge” black shape blotting out stars and emitting light from an opening in its underbelly. The massive shadows seen in the film as the mother ship passes overhead are remnants of that design. But given Spielberg’s preoccupation with childhood motifs, it is fitting that the overwhelmingly large object transporting Roy Neary to a womblike state of bliss is called the mother ship and filled with childlike inhabitants. “My
first concept,” Trumbull said, “was that the mother ship underbelly—this big thing that hung down from there—should look like a giant breast with a nipple.” That concept reflected psychological studies of the human longing for contact with UFOs, which link the phenomenon to the recall of infantile perceptions, especially the approach (both frightening and comforting) of the mother’s breast.

Spielberg’s ideas for the mother ship evolved further when he visited India for location shooting (his first outside the United States) in February 1977. For six days, coming and going to a village outside Bombay, Spielberg passed a gigantic oil refinery lit by thousands of small lights and festooned with pipes, tubing, and walkways. Upon his return to Los Angeles, Spielberg had illustrator George Jensen draw a new ship from that description. “[T]hat very same night,” Spielberg related, “I was up on Mulholland Drive—a little stoned—and I got on my head on the hood of my car and looked out at all the lights from the San Fernando Valley upside down. And I thought that would be incredible as the underbelly of this oil refinery from Bombay.” Combining both elements into what Trumbull described as a “City of Light … like the Manhattan skyline at night,” the ship for the film was designed by Ralph McQuarrie and built by Greg Jein. When shooting was completed, Spielberg took the mother ship home as a keepsake.

T
RUMBULL
and Kubrick experimented with concepts of alien beings for the finale of
2001,
but the tests proved too costly and time-consuming, and Kubrick finally decided not to risk losing credibility by showing aliens on screen. The film’s elliptical approach befitted Kubrick’s detached, cerebral view of mankind’s first contact with extraterrestrials, but for the warmer, more emotional Spielberg, showing communion between humans and aliens was a
sine
qua
non.
“I also knew that it was the most dangerous move I could possibly make with this movie,” he admitted. Coming up with believable aliens was such a problem that the final shots of the lead alien, nicknamed “Puck” by the director, were not filmed until three weeks before the first preview.

“The first thing I did was go in search for the perfect E.T.,” Spielberg recalled. “I had the strange idea that they shouldn’t be people in costume; they had done that from the dawn of time in Hollywood. So what I did was, I had a chimpanzee brought to the set. We put the chimpanzee in an E.T. suit and further complicated the test by putting rollerskates on him, because I didn’t want the chimpanzee to walk simian-like, but I wanted him to glide smoothly down a ramp. You can imagine the test … a chimpanzee with a large rubber latex head and a little kind of flimsy ballerina costume and large rollerskates, disguised with a kind of dust ruffle so you couldn’t see the actual wheels. We put the chimpanzee on a ramp and the first thing that happened, of course, was the chimpanzee fell and slid down the ramp … and it kept making these rather remarkable Charlie Chaplin pratfalls … the
chimpanzee was laughing like he had a great time doing this…. At one point the chimpanzee did pull off his head and throw it at the crew. That was his way of telling me, ‘Find another way.’”

Because people who report encounters with aliens usually describe them as short, childlike creatures with spindly limbs and large heads, most of the aliens were played by six-year-old girls from dance classes, wearing oversized heads and gloves. But Spielberg found Tom Burman’s alien design “a complete disaster.” “He thought they looked too scary,” Burman recalled, “and he wanted something softer and more gentle-looking.” Burman revised his design and Spielberg spent several days shooting scenes of aliens, most of which did not wind up in the finished film. “Spielberg was changing his mind drastically all the time,” noted Burman assistant David Ayres. “But he had guts. He’d try
anything
to see if it would work on film…. At one point, the camera was on a dolly mount and Spielberg went running around with it, in and out of this whole crowd of technicians, and people would be jumping away—like a subjective point-of-view for the aliens. And he had them open a can of [Coca-Cola] and it fizzed all over. He had a whole lot of wild, crazy ideas.”

The script called for the aliens to behave “like children let loose in a toy factory,” flying through the crowd of scientists and curiously stroking Dreyfuss, Truffaut, Hynek, and others with their long, willowy fingers. Judging from Jensen’s production drawings, those scenes might have appeared too bizarre or frightening for a movie portraying aliens as benign, ethereal creatures. But Spielberg’s biggest concern was that such extended scenes with aliens “bordered on the ridiculous” and “would destroy the credibility that I had hopefully achieved.”

“Unfortunately, the aliens didn’t look real,” Zsigmond says. “Steven told me, ‘The only way we can do this is to overexpose them, so we can hardly see them.’ I overexposed two and a half stops, but the lab screwed up the dailies and printed the whole scene with nothing in it—white, no details. Julia Phillips came down to me, panicking: ‘Vilmos, you ruined it. We have to shoot it again.’ I was really insulted that they went to see dailies without me. I said, ‘Show me the dailies.’ I saw from the lab information that they didn’t print it right. I said, ‘Tell the lab to print it eight points darker.’ We had to wait twenty-four hours. The next day the dailies came back, and it was just perfect. Steven said, ‘Thank you.’”