Director Steven Spielberg (76) has decided to shoot a scene in his film “E.T.” subsequently changed, referred to as “error”. Years later, the star producer didn’t like the fact that police officers used guns to chase children. In a 2002 20th anniversary remake of the film, he replaced the guns with walkie-talkies. On stage at the TIME100 Summit, he regretted his interference: “I should never have done that. ET is a product of its time. No film should be reworked through the lens we look through today, whether voluntarily or by force .”
“All of our films are sort of a guide to where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world received when we were putting these stories out,” he continued. He therefore positioned himself clearly against reissuing works because the language was perceived as offensive – and in doing so made reference to Roald Dahl, whose children’s books are rewritten into linguistically defused versions without words like “fat” and “ugly”. In Spielberg’s eyes, that was even “censorship”.
The American was dubbed “E.T.” to the master of blockbuster cinema. He recently described the film as “pretty perfect”. The story was released in US theaters on June 11, 1982. The German theatrical release was six months later. More than 140 million people are said to have seen the film in cinemas worldwide.
