**
I am your father.
I've always loved science fiction in every form...
...out of the shadow
like a gray snake. And now it's another one,
and there's another one and another one.
...for the power of its ideas...
It works!
...and for the big questions it asks.
"What's out there in the universe?
How will the world end?
Will our technology destroy us?"
Dead or alive, you are coming with me.
...and above all...
It's alive!
..."What can we learn from these fantastic stories?"
So, who wants to say, "Action," you or me?
You, go on. Okay. Action!
I think I always have been a sci-fi fan.
What's possible? What's gonna happen?
That's kind of like seeing in the future.
It's just boom! Right at you. Wshoom.
Science fiction shows you all the possibilities.
At that point, it's beyond science fiction.
It's a statement about humanity.
We'll do things that we cannot even imagine today.
But it's great entertainment.
Exactly!
This is a whole genre that's just exploding
because it's so much more fun than a lot of the other genres.
So badass and cool and empowering.
You're constantly saying, "What if?"
And if you're not saying, "What if?" you're a fool.
Anything is possible.
Ray Bradbury and Arthur Clarke
and Robert Heinlein.
That was it. I was hooked.
The concept of the universe is so mind-boggling.
And then there's also that line of science fiction fantasy.
I think monsters tell us everything about ourselves.
Science fiction is just that special to me.
And we love it, and we can't get enough of it.
And so we can't stop.
**
You've done, I think, over your entire oeuvre,
between directing and producing,
you've done many films about first contact
or invasion. Mm-hmm.
Was that what was inflaming your -- your young imagination?
My father was the one that introduced me
to the cosmos. Right.
He's the one that built, from a big cardboard roll,
that you roll rugs on... Mm-hmm.
...he built a two-inch reflecting telescope.
Oh, cool.
And then I saw the moons of Jupiter.
It was the first thing that he pointed out to me.
And I saw the rings of Saturn -- around Saturn.
And I'm six, seven years old when this all happened.
And so, for me, the cosmos --
You -- You spent a lot of time staring at the sky.
A lot of time looking at the sky.
Woke me up in the middle of the night.
It's scary when your dad walks into your bedroom,
and it's still dark, and he says, "Come with me."
Your dad took you out to watch a meteor shower?
It was the Leonid shower. Yeah, right, right.
And he took me to a knoll somewhere in New Jersey,
and there were hundreds of people lying on picnic benches.
Yeah, well, that scene is right in "Close Encounters."
Absolutely. It's the same scene.
I put the scene in "Close Encounters." Yeah.
And I got out there and we laid down on a knapsack --
his Army knapsack.
And we looked up at the sky...
Oh, how awesome.
...and every 30 seconds or so,
there was a brilliant flash of light
that streaked across the sky. Wow.
And I just remember, you know, looking at the sky,
because of the influence of my father, and saying,
"If I ever get a chance to make a science fiction movie,
I want those guys to come in peace."
I got a call from my agent, saying, "There's a job.
Steven Spielberg is directing a movie.
It's called 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.'"
I said, "Excuse me?"
So, I have this audition coming up,
so I practice a little bit
of what I think will help me get the job.
And Steven says, "Well, we'd love you to do this movie.
You'd be François Truffaut's interpreter.
The only thing is,
we just need to hear what your French is like.
Is your French good"?
I said......
None of them spoke French and they said,
"Great, you've got the job. Your French is terrific."
Have you recently had a close encounter?
Close encounter with something very unusual?
Who are you people?
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
had an original title called "Watch the Skies."
And if you're a real science fiction buff,
you know where that comes from.
Every one of you listening to my voice, tell the world.
Tell this to everybody, wherever they are.
"Watch the skies."
So, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind,"
its original title built a bridge back
to that 1950s classic science fiction film,
"The Thing from Another World."
Happy B-b-b-birthday,
you, uh, thing from another world, you.
Oh! Thank you!
The character of Richard Dreyfuss in "Close Encounters"
is really interesting because he is not a hero.
He's not a good dad. He's not a good husband.
He gives up everything to seek out this idea
that there is life on other planets.
He's just an absolute, everyday guy
working for the power company.
And he has an inexplicable experience
that he cannot deal with.
And when that thing flies over his truck,
his life is changed.
Characters are kind of ripped apart.
It's definitely suggested that his obsession with aliens
is really harming his kid and his wife.
Well, I guess you've noticed
that something is a little strange with Dad.
I can't describe it.
This means something.
But it raises the question
of how far would we be willing to go
to communicate with aliens.
I understand why we're always criticized for it,
but I'm also greatly relieved
that there are people in this world
that will listen to that voice inside them and pursue it.
You felt compelled to be here?
Yeah, you might say that.
But what did you expect to find?
An answer!
That's not crazy, is it?
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
did something different with aliens.
Instead of having aliens just as mostly fearsome monsters
who only wanted to drink our blood or rule us,
it said there's a lot of amazing stuff out there in the universe,
and you're gonna walk away awestruck.
And Steven knew just how to create
a reaction of wonderment, happiness, and awe
at the same time.
There is a scene in "Close Encounters"
when something has landed.
Cary has to open this door
and look and see these amazing things.
Steven had a number of people from the movie
dress up in giant costumes --
a rabbit costume, a mouse costume.
And he said, "Okay, Cary, now open the door."
And Cary opened the door.
And you could see the wonder in his eyes --
the excitement, the happiness.
Toys!
I think science fiction as a genre
has definitely always had a kind of social,
political, cultural message
that's generally contained in the stories that are written.
You know? It's not the normal world,
but it's dealing with the things that we deal with in our world.
And that's the playground that science fiction plays in.
- I have seen it twice. - Have you?
And cried both times. Mm-hmm.
I think it's a very emotional experience,
a very beautiful one.
I think it's probably the most important film
of the last 20 years.
It is a movie written by a director and writer
who is searching for meaning in his life.
He's a very introspective person.
And I think he needed to make a movie
that provided some kind of answer
to, "What's the meaning of life?"
In a way, this isn't a movie
so much about the aliens themselves.
What it's really about is us.
You know, how are we going to feel
when we become aware of a life bigger than ours?
What would we do?
Are we willing to do what Richard Dreyfuss did?
**
Are we better people than Roy?
Or maybe Roy is a better version of us.
**
You really created a kind of almost
alternate spirituality or alternate religion.
Yes, and an infinite superior civilization
is going to find the best of you
and is going to pull the best of you out of yourself.
Right.
And you will present the best part -- parts of yourself.
As Lincoln said, "the better angels of your nature."
Yeah, exactly.
And that's what goodness does.
You know, good doesn't inspire evil.
Good, you know, propagates a greater good.
Right. And that's what I thought
that the best science fiction does.
I think one of the most important things as a filmmaker --
at least of the kind of awe-and-wonder-type stories
that we're both attracted to -- is to stay that kid.
Part of that means fighting off the natural urge of cynicism
as we take everything in. It's a battle.
Yeah. It's a battle for me.
It continues to be a struggle for me... Yeah.
...to want to look on the -- the bright side.
More than any other genre,
science fiction is the great "What if?"
What would happen if we woke up tomorrow
and there were spaceships larger than cities
hovering above us?
Evil alien disasters are exciting
because we get to vicariously live
through our fears of annihilation
while comfortably sort of eating popcorn.
**
The alien-invasion movie is absolutely a metaphor
for the human's darkest side.
The invasion of aliens destroying our planet
is us destroying our planet.
One of my favorite alien-invasion narratives
is actually a classic episode of "The Twilight Zone"
called "To Serve Man."
Aliens arrive, and humans are, like,
"Oh, what are you here for?"
And they're like, "We want to serve you."
We are here to help you.
Later, humans sneak onboard the aliens ship
and find a book there.
"To Serve Man." I hope so.
And eventually, they translate it
and find out it's a cookbook.
It's a cookbook!
I think we use aliens to portray our dreams,
our wishes, our desires, what we wish we could be.
Most often, I think we use aliens
to portray our fear of the unknown.
And in doing that, we see all these aliens invade.
"Independence Day" really captured
all of the things I had dreamed as a child.
And part of what I wanted to do
was bring regular guy to science fiction
that's really not happy about his planet being invaded.
Welcome to Earth.
The movie needed a moment
where we thought that we were dealing with an enemy
beyond our capabilities.
At the time, the idea of the White House
was an image of strength, of power.
Today, we are doing the explosion of the White House.
Roll camera.
The White House explosion was always in question.
We had it in the script,
and it was a very important visual for us in the movie.
But the studio was very skittish about it.
They said to me, "Roland, you're German.
you don't understand.
You cannot blow up the White House."
And I remember Roland saying, "So, you mean,
it would be very controversial and everybody would
talk about our movie. And that's bad, why?"
So, yeah, it stayed in the picture.
And action!
We were trying to give a feeling of helplessness.
No one ever thought, in those days,
that giant landmarks would blow up the way they did.
This was pre-9/11.
The image of the White House blowing up
was the tipping point for "Independence Day."
I remember, I was sitting in the theater.
I was a couple rows behind a guy.
And the White House blew up.
And the dude said, "Oh, man! That's bad. That's bad.
That's -- Oh, man, that's bad."
He said, "Girl, that's bad, that's bad."
"Independence Day" actually tries to allude
to a lot of classic science fiction,
both as a way to appeal to the fans
but also as a way to give audiences anchor points
for interpretation.
From HAL, the computer...
Good morning, Dave.
...to the bubbling clouds
with the spaceship hidden inside of it from "Close Encounters,"
we added a line for Jeff Goldblum
as he's escaping the spaceship.
Must go faster, must go faster.
That's directly from "Jurassic Park."
Must go faster.
The computer virus is a nod to "War of the Worlds,"
where the actual virus kills the aliens.
You can't make a movie about an alien invasion
without tipping your hat to "War of the Worlds."
It is the godfather of all alien-invasion movies.
"But in the early years of the 20th century,
this world was being watched closely
by intelligences greater than man's
and surely drew their plans against us."
Hello, I'm Orson Welles.
And I've been quoting from another Wells --
no relation -- H.G. Wells,
the distinguished novelist, historian, prophet,
who was also the great master of science fiction.
H.G. Wells was a British writer
at the beginning of the 20th century
who was one of the most significant
early science fiction writers.
He was also a very accomplished science writer
and used science fiction to explore
what he considered to be important ideas.
Mr. Wells, have you any solution
for the very unhappy state of affairs
that is facing the world today?
It seems to me that many things besides the pound
are threatened with collapse.
"War of the Worlds" is a story, I think,
which Wells intended to be a confrontation with ourselves.
What would happen if a society or a civilization
with superior technology and superior weapons
decides it wants to take over a civilization
with less advanced technology?
He was writing in the 1890s,
when Britain had been doing this in India,
it had been doing it all over the world.
He's saying, "How does it feel when it happens to you?"
"War of the Worlds" is such a perfectly pure
alien-invasion story.
You can just kind of pour out the old fears
that somebody else was using it to talk about
and then pour in the new fears that you're experiencing now.
By 1938, Orson Welles is applying it
to this threat of Nazism and the impending war.
Might be a face.
Good heavens, something wriggling
out of the shadow like a gray snake.
Now it's another one and another one and another one.
They look like tentacles to me.
By the 1950s, we've got the atomic threat.
The aliens now represent what will happen
with nuclear destruction.
This type of defense is useless against that kind of power!
And then you fast-forward
to Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds"
in which there's more of a sense of post-9/11 catastrophe.
Get down! Get down! Get down!
Is that the terrorist?!
I wouldn't have done "War of the Worlds"
had it not been for 9/11,
because "War of the Worlds" is analogous to 9/11,
an event in our American culture and in the global,
you know, history of -- of -- of you know, terrorism.
Absolutely. And -- And -- And --
And America is not a country that's used to being attacked.
The last time we were attacked like that was Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor, yeah. And you --
You managed to turn it into a family drama
that pulled everybody together.
Yeah, it was one that said, "We have to make this
a story about a single dad who doesn't really even
care about his kids. Right.
And somehow this event has to make him care
about his kids more than he ever cared about himself.
Right. And so that became the nucleus.
This idea of the perils of encounter
that H.G. Wells started in his "War of the Worlds" novel
is an idea that has really fascinated us ever since --
the idea that everything we know
could be destroyed in an instant.
And then, all of a sudden, Hollywood played into that
through the sci-fi genre with a lot of movies
in which these aliens are coming to destroy us
in very sort of overt, bombastic ways.
And like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers,"
in a much more subtle, subversive type of way.
They're here already! You're next!
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers"
is a lot scarier, in some ways,
than your aliens swooping in from the sky,
"War of the Worlds"-type of battle,
because you don't really know who's an alien, who's not.
Is that me?
"Invasion of the Body Snatchers"
is about a conspiracy
in which people are being replaced
by aliens from outer space
and generating new versions of themselves
in pods that take them over.
But something is missing.
They don't have your individuality
or maybe some other kind of human spark
that make us most spectacularly, magically human.
It's 1956,
and certainly the film has been talked about
and considered in relation to the threat of communism,
the lockstep kind of ideology
where everybody had to be the same.
The term at the time was "creeping conformity."
Who hasn't felt that,
where you're just talking to somebody,
and they're not them?
And you know, you're looking at them saying,
"You're not the person I know.
You've been taken over."
Is that him? Yeah.
Really it's sort of like a metaphor.
Do you really want to feel or do you not want to feel?
Would you rather just go through life
living in that gray area,
with no real expression for himself?
Jack! Jack!
Jack!
Science fiction enables us
to deal with that fear and that terror,
and that is subconscious motivations,
without getting too close to home.
It's a powerful metaphor, and it's an awful warning.
They're coming! Listen to me!
You're next! We're in danger!
Please, listen to me! Something terrible!
They're already here!
You're next!
Do you take it as read that aliens exist?
Or -- Or is it a wait-and-see kind of thing?
I think, for me, I think any statistical analysis --
if you're going to go by statistics
and you look at Carl Sagan looking at the idea
of what are the mathematics behind
"Is there life on other planets?" --
those same statistics are going to tell you
that, yes, there have been civilizations that possi--
if there have been -- if there is intelligent life out there.
But I also think
that one of the hardest things to wrap your head around,
in terms of our place in the universe,
is if we are intended to connect with other planets
or other civilizations, they're so far away.
There is some chance that in the next few decades,
we will get the signal from some spectacularly distant,
spectacularly exotic civilization.
And everything on Earth will, as a consequence, change.
**
Holy...
Carl Sagan was so consumed with the idea
that there was life elsewhere, it drove him to write
a fabulous story about it in "Contact."
What Carl really was about was communicating.
He thrived on how people and how species and how tribes
and how cultures communicate.
That was his thing.
'Cause was going to communicate with the stars.
Communication becomes one of the most important themes
in science fiction. At the same time,
it becomes one of the most important puzzles
in science fiction.
In "Stanislaw Lem Solaris,"
we're faced with a sentient ocean.
What does Solaris want from us?
Why do you think it has to want something?
In "Star Trek," an amorphous cloud.
I do not understand.
And in Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End,"
communication can be tough, and the aliens look like this.
There is no need to be afraid.
One of the best stories about alien communication
in modern science fiction is Ted Chiang's
"Story Of Your Life,"
which became one of the best science-fiction films
of the last few years, "Arrival."
**
Now, that's a proper introduction.
I really loved "Arrival,"
because it was all about communication
and how many times communication was just thrown out
before you see it work.
It's so impressionistic, right?
I mean, it's hard work to bring to the screen.
I thought that brought its unique challenges.
And I thought they succeeded in a really cool way.
Ted Chiang's original story,
"Story Of Your Life,"
is that we are contacted by an alien race, the heptapods.
And they seem to want to exchange information with us.
One of the things I wanted to do with my story,
that I hadn't seen in a lot of other science fiction
was to actually depict the process
of learning an alien language,
when you actually have to painstakingly
work out vocabulary and grammar.
Okay, this is where you want to get to, right?
That is the question. Okay.
"What is your purpose on Earth?"
This is the question we're all trying to get to,
and crossing that language barrier
may mean the difference between the end of the Earth
and the dawning of a new idea.
**
What does it say?
"Offer weapon."
The distinction between tool and weapon
becomes crucial.
It turns out, of course, that what they intend
is not at all a weapon but a tool -- in fact, a gift.
And the gift is their language.
And so it becomes a story
not so much about an alien invasion
but about communication, about two species
trying to connect with each other.
The key part of it is that this is nonlinear --
there's no beginning and no end.
All the elements are there,
and you see it immediately as a whole.
In fact, you see your whole life laid out in front of you.
And the more she understands their language,
the more she understands their consciousness.
And because their consciousness transcends time,
she starts to remember the future.
The aliens in "Arrival," they are a way of talking
about a radically different mode of cognition,
different ways of thinking,
different ways of looking at the universe.
There's an age-old question of how language relates to thought,
and how language might influence thought.
You know, I was doing some reading about this idea
that if you immerse yourself into a foreign language,
that you can actually rewire your brain.
Yeah, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The movie explicitly references
something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
What it says is, your language creates habits of speech,
and those habits of speech
translate into habits of thought.
And so your language makes you habitually think
in certain ways,
which have a significant impact on the way you see the world.
The question is, how much?
I believe that our language
absolutely does inform our reality and shape it.
I would think that the way that the heptapods' language
really reshapes Louise's experience of time
is an extreme of that.
But I do believe that the language
that we constantly recycle in our own world
absolutely shapes our reality and can be our own prison.
What I find beautiful about the end of "Arrival"
is that Louise knows
that her future is going to bring a lot of pain and joy
if she falls in love, if she has a baby,
and when that baby dies.
She knows she's going to make mistakes
that are going to drive her husband away,
and yet she chooses that pain.
It's this idea of knowing that what you're about to do
is going to bring you pain,
but knowing that the happy moments
are going to be worth it.
And that's a really beautiful thought.
I talk to kids, and they say, "Well,
where'd you get the idea for all those aliens?
Where'd you think that up?"
I said, "Well, go to the aquarium.
You're going to see them all there."
That's what I did on "Avatar." Yeah.
I took the ocean, I took all my diving,
and I just brought it into --
To me, that's one of the most brilliant things in "Avatar."
One of the biggest problems you have in science fiction,
with movies -- they don't have it in books or anything --
but in movies, you have to create a real world,
and it's a real world that doesn't exist.
It's really, really hard, and it takes a long, long time.
Right. Because you've got to create
something that's truly unusual and different,
but familiar so you believe it.
Yeah.
And so, after a while, it can fry your brain.
But now that we've got digital technology,
you can think of anything.
**
I always find the morphology
of the anatomy of aliens interesting.
You know, science fiction writers,
they're like these imagination engines.
That's what they are.
Maybe they have four limbs as we do.
Maybe they look like a spider,
which seems to be a very popular choice.
Maybe they look like an octopus or a squid.
I always like to look at nature,
but when coming up with any creature,
it's always, you want to create some kind of,
like, aspect of reference.
Where are you coming from?
What is this creature going to evoke?
It's not just about biology,
but it's about our own psychology, as well.
And that's our job, is to --
is to give tactility to the creatures
so that you evoke the desired response,
whether it's one of awe, joy, or love or what it might be.
Obviously, you can make them very friendly
by giving them big eyes and big foreheads --
the cute features that we see in modern humans.
But aliens that are scary to human beings
seem to always be slimy and reptilian
for that revulsion response.
In literature,
you can sort of describe something in vague terms.
You know, maybe H.P. Lovecraft would say
that, "I gazed upon its visage, and it sickened my soul,"
or whatever he would say,
but that's not really a real description.
For an artist, you have to bring that to life.
And I think the single artist
who has most successfully defined
this importance of the look of a creature,
in my opinion, has got to be H.R. Giger,
who designed the original Xenomorph.
**
I was industrial designer.
It helped me very much to design a creature.
The Xenomorphs have a fantastic basic design
that employ all sorts of psychosexual imagery,
as well as death imagery,
and you know, the phallic head and its life cycle
that basically starts with rape.
What the hell is that?
When I first met Ridley Scott,
he pulled out all these drawings.
It was a very sinister world,
and not a world I'd ever seen in a film.
In fact, I remember thinking,
"I don't see how you can make a film look like this."
If you look at Ridley's movie,
you know, it hasn't dated.
And I think that plays to a lot of strengths
of Giger's design for the alien.
You know, it's really a man's life's work
that Ridley got to take and put onscreen.
I feel pretty strongly that you created
the best alien movie in history.
Most beasts are not very good. Yeah.
Or repetitions of other creatures that we have seen.
Films have been ruined by showing the beast finally.
As Steven did in "Jaws," the shock was exclusive
to two or three frames, like that.
Yeah, yeah.
"Our biggest problem will be to make this work," I said,
"because I haven't got digital.
It's all going to be a guy in a suit."
We didn't have any of that stuff back then.
No. But in this, he's present.
I can't cut around him. Yeah.
I have to see him. But you did it.
With your eye and your taste, and you recognized the value
of Hans Ruedi Giger's psychosexual bio-mechanoid.
Yes, the trick there is one picture from necronomicon.
Oh, from Giger's book. It's the profile.
This is the painting of the alien
that Ridley Scott wanted to have for his film.
It was like showing me a dirty postcard.
He said, "Look at that."
I went, "Holy good God!" Yeah.
And from that, the person that drew it
said they were uncomfortable by it.
It was obscene. I said, "Obscene's good."
Yeah.
Disturbing and obscene is very good.
Sexually disturbing is very good.
Yeah. Play the fear. Play the fear.
The film was all about evolution of fear.
Most of the Xenomorphs combined both masculine
and feminine sexual characteristics,
and that's terrifying to us
because one of the ways we make sense
of the monstrous and of others
is by trying to map them in some way
that matches our own understanding of existence.
And one of the key ways that we think about humanity
is in terms of gender.
It's the first question we ask when we hear a new baby is born.
The problem with the aliens is that they blend together,
the two, and so are no longer understandable and controllable.
Now put your hands on the dome
like you're stroking it.
Remember, like, that Giger thing?
Ridley met Badejo Bolaji at a pub.
He was an art student. He was about 7'4".
His limbs were so beautiful and exotic
that he already looked like he was from another world.
The days when Bolaji came in, we didn't hang out with him.
He is the unknown.
And it's a really a combination of strange beauty and elegance
and sex and violence
that I think make the Xenomorph a great monster.
For me, what was, and still is,
beautiful about science fiction
is, could you have the big, giant summer blockbuster package
but be diving into serious religious or political
or social concepts
that sparks people to get together
and to communicate and evolve?
And anytime you can actually do that,
I think that, you know, we've done our job.
Aliens get to be the carrier
for some of our guilts and fears
around the treatment of other people.
For some folks, it's easier to identify with the aliens
than with the main characters.
Come on! Get out! Get out!
Come on! Get outside! Move!
In "District 9," you have aliens
who are stranded on Earth and become refugees.
They become stranded above the city of Johannesburg,
which has this whole history of apartheid.
And it's done like it's a documentary.
I thought that was brilliant.
They're spending so much money to keep them here,
when they could be spending it on other things.
But at least -- at least
they're keeping them separate from us.
And I think they must fix that ship, and they must go.
Hello, hello. Hello, hello.
We follow a government bureaucrat, Wikus.
Okay.
This is Wikus Van De Merwe from MNU,
and we are here to serve you an eviction notice.
He is forced to become an alien
and see what it's like to be put into one of these camps
and to be cast out of human culture.
He is oppressed.
He is spit on.
He's turned into a government experiment.
We shot in Johannesburg,
and the shacks that we shot in were real people's homes.
All of these shacks around here, all of these residents were moved somewhere else in JoBurg,
which is exactly what happens to the aliens in the film.
Writing District 9
set in South Africa
it never could have been any other way.
It was terrible, terrible. Like I get goosebumps even talking about that.
Xenophobia was just at its peak at that time --
South Africans attacking people from Zimbabwe
that were fleeing their country
and coming down looking for work.
They were putting tires around their neck
and lighting them on fire
because they were taking their jobs,
and they were doing that where we were going to shoot.
That, to me, was the most sobering moment,
to know that this world and this fantasy
that you've been writing actually is happening.
Hang on.
Stop it, stop it!
For some viewers, it's going to seep in
that a lot of the things
that are being done to these aliens
are exactly what humans do to each other.
Many of us come from communities
that have been marginalized or already eliminated.
So science fiction becomes a powerful
means of talking about that,
particularly when it's doing so deliberately.
Somebody has been pulled out of the vehicle.
It looks like a human being.
It is the story
of an oppressor becoming the oppressed.
And ultimately, in my mind,
it's a story of him gaining his humanity
only after he ceases to be human.
I think that's
what science fiction at its best does.
It -- It asks those questions.
It asks, "What is it to be human?"
and, "Are what we call aliens much more humane than we are?"
Probably the best example is, in "Avatar,"
humans are clearly the invading, colonizing, raping,
pillaging, destroying species.
And it's framed that way explicitly in the story.
One of the ideas that "Avatar" plays with
is how the story of an alien encounter would look
if told from the point of view of the aliens.
I think that if I would have approached Neytiri
as an extraterrestrial,
I don't think I would have ever tapped into her heart.
I needed to look at humans as the foreign creatures,
as -- as -- as the tainted species
that comes here to take.
This story is so simple, and it's been told before
and we've seen it before.
But I just needed to go back to the past.
And that was the most humble journey
I ever embarked on as an artist,
trying to build a character.
As Grace, I got to play a human
who also exults in being in her avatar
and in living on the planet as a Na'vi would.
Jim Cameron has created Pandora with its indigenous people,
the Na'vi,
as well as this amazing collection of other species.
And they live in a primeval world
which is colonized by a corporation,
not even a country.
It's so powerful because it is a reflection
of, in fact, the way humans have conducted themselves,
over the centuries, all over the world.
No!
When we're shooting that scene,
Jim wanted us to dig deeper.
We were just crying out for a fallen tree,
but it wasn't deep enough.
It wasn't as if this tree was your uncle,
was your grandparent, was your mother.
It's an extension of your body,
and he wanted to see that anguish
because at that point,
what the humans are doing on the planet is wrong.
And they're not welcome.
By that time in the story,
we're all part Na'vi.
That scene is really the moment, I think,
that the audience is completely disengaged from the humans.
And we no longer feel like we have any sympathy for them.
**
I think authors try science fiction specifically
because there's something that's making them angry
in their current culture or in their political climate,
and this is a way for them to shine a light
on what it is that has them so frustrated.
**
"Close Encounters" led to -- led to "E.T."
Mm-hmm. Which I think of
as kind of "Close Encounters II,"
the more personal -- but you --
I think of it the same way.
It seems like you took many of those themes --
those first-contact themes --
and just made it very kind of family-centric.
"E.T." was never meant to be
a movie about extraterrestrials.
It was meant to be a story
about my mom and dad getting a divorce.
Ah, right.
And so I started writing a story.
Not a script per se, but I started writing a story
about what it was like
when your parents divide the family up
and they move to different states.
When I was shooting "Close Encounters,"
and when I did the scene of the little alien
coming out of the mothership
and doing the Kodaly hand-sign signals
to François Truffaut, it all came together.
I thought, "Wait a second.
What if that alien doesn't go back up into the ship?
What if he stayed behind, or maybe what if he even got lost
and he was marooned here?" Yeah.
"What would happen if a child of a divorce
or family of a divorce... Right.
...with a huge hole to fill, filled the hole
with his new best extraterrestrial friend?"
Exactly.
One of my clearest memories,
in terms of an early alien film, is watching "E.T.," of course,
which was written by Melissa Mathison.
She told me, actually, that the original script
did not have him dying,
and that when my dad passed away,
she was so impacted by that,
that she sort of felt
that she should write that in for me, in a way,
or for kids who had suffered loss,
and make it more than a light affair.
Mom?
Spielberg made a point of designing E.T.
to be as empathetic-looking as possible,
to the point that he had his designer, Carlo Rambaldi,
look at pictures of elderly people from the Depression
and try to figure out what made these people
look empathetic and wise and sad.
And then he said, "Can you mix in
a little bit of Albert Einstein?"
It was very important that E.T. be a face
that would earn your respect and earn your fondness.
Right.
I didn't want a cute little character
that would come out of the gate
making the whole audience in unison go,
"Aww." "Aww."
That's the last thing I wanted.
So that why I think filmmakers
sometimes have to play tricks when they portray aliens,
to give them humanlike features,
in order to evoke that kind of feeling of empathy from us.
And the reason I was hired for this job
is because I have real long, thin fingers,
which is my father's fault.
Initially, I was hired just to do close-ups --
making the communicator, turning pages in a book,
touching the plant.
Go down to the dirt underneath
and dig a little bit. Let me see you dig a little bit.
And then, the first night,
he kind of fell in love with my hands,
I guess, is the only way to put it.
Caprice, there's the scissors.
Reaching the scissors.
He felt that the combination of the animatronic creature
and live hands was the perfect formula.
The hand movement, you know,
was something that created a sense of engagement,
gave you something to focus on
when you're looking at this strange body,
and above all, it gave you a sense
of how human beings could project onto the other
without any negative consequences.
I want to see you really hug.
That's perfect, Henry. I love that,
with your chin resting on E. T. Okay.
The last hug in the movie
is one that's very special to me.
Come.
This was the opportunity that I actually got to hug Henry.
When Henry is saying goodbye to E.T.,
I am absolutely sobbing.
Then he's crying, and I'm crying.
This is what broke my sister up.
I had not warned her that it was gonna have a sad ending.
She recalled the fact
that when our mother used to comfort us,
it was done in the same way
that E. T. comforts Elliot at the very end.
So, it's not really a pat,
but it's a kind of a stroke-pat at the same time.
She said she was hysterical.
They almost had to take her out of the movie theater,
she was crying so loud.
So, let me ask you point-blank.
Do you think now, with your experience
and your view of the world,
that aliens exist?
I -- I wanted to believe.
I felt I earned the right to see a UFO.
I made "E.T." I made "Close Encounters."
My goodness, I kept waiting for a sighting.
I have never had a sighting.
I've met hundreds of people who have.
You know they want to stay away from you as far as they can...
They stay away from me.
because they don't want to empower this myth
that you're actually a precursor of an alien invasion.
Well -- You know about this myth, right?
I've heard about this myth. That you've been --
I know. It's insane. That you've been intentionally
softening us up for decades now.
Well, look, you know, I stay away from sharks.
But I don't want to stay away from UFOs.
And yet I've never, ever had the experience.
Well, as a science fiction writer, that's easy to solve.
This used to be, like, a really hot tourist place...
And then they left!for the UFOs.
And then they realized
that they were getting photographed too much,
so they just embargoed it, right?
I can almost buy that.
It would almost help me believe
that aliens did come here at one time.
That's a great place to go out.
Thank you, my friend. Okay, thank you.
Thank you, Jim.