Steven Spielberg’s Biggest Regret Is a Masterclass in Restraint

Steven Spielberg is arguably the greatest director of all time and has given us some of the best movies of all time.

He's also solidified the look of Hollywood with images that travel the world, like the silhouette of a flying bicycle, to the terrifying sight of a shark fin cutting through the water, and a girl in a red coat walking through the Jewish ghetto.

But Spielberg's biggest regret is something he wishes he hadn't shown the audience. The director has openly discussed one creative decision he was forced to make that he later called a mistake: showing the interior of the alien mothership in the 1980 Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The story of this scene is a crucial lesson for every filmmaker who faces pressure to compromise on their vision.

Let's dive into it below.

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The Reveal Of the Unknown

In the original 1977 theatrical cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film ends perfectly, bathed in the wonder of the mother ship's arrival. When Richard Dreyfuss's character, Roy Neary, walks up the ramp to join the aliens, the camera holds on the glowing light, and then the ship departs. The mystery is preserved.

However, when Spielberg went back to Columbia Pictures a couple of years later, he wanted some additional funds to finish scenes he had rushed.

The studio was all for helping him...but had one condition: they wanted a shot revealing the inside of the alien ship to use for marketing.

As Spielberg told Far Out Magazine, “I was trying to get Columbia to let me finish the movie the way I wanted it to be finished, but they were having big financial problems in 1977, and they needed the film to come out during Christmas,” Spielberg said in the 1997 documentary The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

He continued, “I was hoping to come out the following summer because I couldn’t make Christmas. But they kept insisting, ‘Not only must you make Christmas, because our whole company is at stake and we’re all counting on this film. You have to make November.’ So I had no choice.”

“After the film’s success, I went back to Columbia a year and a half later and said, ‘Now let me finish the film the way I had always intended to. I wanna recut certain scenes, and I want to shoot more sequences.’ And then they said to me, ‘We’ll give you the money… if you show the inside of the mothership. Give us something we can hang a campaign on.’ And so I compromised and had Richard Dreyfuss walking inside the mothership.”

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The Big Regret

This compromise haunted Spielberg. He stated: "I never should have done that, because that should have always been kept a mystery, the inside of that ship."

Lucky for Spielberg, the saga doesn't end there, because he went back to Close Encounters in 1998 with a Director’s Cut of the film, and took out the interior scene of the mothership.

The mothership scene isn't the only time Spielberg has regretted digitally altering his work. In 2002, for the 20th Anniversary edition of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, he famously replaced the guns carried by federal agents with walkie-talkies to make the scene more family-friendly for a new generation.

He later expressed deep regret for this, too, arguing that a film is a "signpost of where we were when we made them" and that he should "never have messed with the archive of my own work."

Summing It All Up

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