Steven Spielberg (53 page)

After Spielberg returned to Hollywood, he turned his attention to “Puck.” The full-body figure was created by marionette maker Bob Baker and the upper torso and head (for close-ups) by Carlo Rambaldi, an Italian craftsman who came to Spielberg’s attention with his facially expressive animatronic title character in the remake of
King
Kong.
Eight people operated the cable mechanisms controlling Rambaldi’s Puck. Spielberg was so pleased with the creature that “he spent a lot of time playing with it,” Rambaldi recalled. “He especially liked the smile; and during the filming, it was he who operated the levers controlling it.” The joyous exchange of smiles between Puck and
Truffaut, Spielberg’s representative of mankind at its most humane, is the film’s emotional climax. “The audience’s reactions to the extraterrestrials will be largely determined by Truffaut’s reactions,” Bob Balaban, who played Truffaut’s English interpreter, observed in his diary. “[Spielberg] wants Truffaut to think of the extraterrestrials as little children. He knows how Truffaut likes little children.” The French filmmaker became so enchanted with Rambaldi’s creation that each day when he arrived on the set and saw Puck, Truffaut would go over and shake the alien’s hand, saying,
“Bonjour!
Ça
va?”

“D
IRECTING
a movie with Truffaut on the set,” Spielberg said, “is like having Renoir around when you’re still painting by numbers.”

Truffaut was one of the directors Spielberg most admired when he was breaking into the movie business. The French filmmaker left perhaps an even more lasting and pervasive imprint on Spielberg’s work than had his boyhood masters Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean. While attending Cal State Long Beach, Spielberg studied such Truffaut films as
Shoot
the
Piano
Player,
Jules
and
Jim,
and
Stolen
Kisses
at art theaters, drawing inspiration from their romantic lyricism, their visual
frissons,
and their graceful blend of playful humor and emotional gravity. Truffaut’s celebration of the communal process of moviemaking in
Day
for
Night
made it “the closest to home for me of Truffaut’s films,” Spielberg recalled. “…
Day
for
Night
brought you into what Truffaut was. And he was the movies.” Their deepest temperamental affinity, Spielberg felt, was their mutual fondness for “working with children, and with adults who act like children…. There was a child inside François Truffaut. Watching him perform in his films
The
Wild
Child
and
Day
for
Night,
I saw that child…. That was the spirit I wanted for Lacombe.”

Even so, Spielberg hesitated to approach him. “I didn’t want Truffaut to say no to me,” he explained. “I didn’t want to insult him by saying, ‘I’d like you to be an actor.’” But after considering such European actors as Gérard Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Lino Ventura, Spielberg finally summoned up the courage to call Truffaut at his home in Paris.

“Steven attracted me,” Truffaut recalled. “I knew his work. I had confidence in him. When he called me in France and said he had written the role especially for me, I didn’t think he was serious. I assumed he thought I spoke English.”

Truffaut protested, “I am not an actor. I can only play myself.”

“But that’s what I want,” Spielberg assured him.

After reading the script, Truffaut accepted an offer of $75,000 to play a character he described as
“un
savant
français.
”
He had no particular interest in the subject matter. When asked if he believed in UFOs, Truffaut replied, “I believe in the cinema.” On other occasions, he declared, “When people talk about UFOs, I tune out,” and “The only close encounters I ever have are with women, children, or books.” Until he arrived in Mobile, Truffaut did not
admit to Spielberg that he had ulterior motives for wanting to be in
Close
Encounters.
He planned to use the experience as research for a book called
The
Actor
(a project he later abandoned), and he used his spare time on location to write the screenplay for
The
Man
Who
Loved
Women.

The endless waiting on the set of
Close
Encounters
exasperated Truffaut, who felt himself losing interest and growing impatient to shoot his own movie. One day during the filming in Wyoming he exclaimed to actress Teri Garr, “It cost $250,000 for that shot they just did with the helicopters. I could make a movie for that.
And
they
did
two
takes!”
But the experience also helped him understand why “the atmosphere becomes so passionate and intimate” for actors working on a film. With all the fussing and coddling he experienced between shots from wardrobe, hair, and makeup people, the actor becomes “like a little baby again,” he mused. A more sobering discovery was that “everybody says many nasty things behind the director’s back.”

Truffaut was not entirely immune to that temptation. In one of the many letters he wrote from Mobile to friends in France, Truffaut reported, “Like every actor in every film ever made, I’ll find myself saying, ‘He never directed me, no one ever told me what to do,’ and, in fact, it’s both true and false. In any event, I find it very amusing to watch another director at work, and despite the huge differences (to give you an idea, his favorite French directors are [Robert] Enrico and [Claude] Lelouch), to discover all kinds of points in common, or rather reactions in common. In any case, he really isn’t pretentious, he doesn’t behave like the director of the most successful film in the history of the cinema
(Jaws),
he’s calm (outwardly so), very even-tempered, very patient and good-humored. This film of flying saucers means a great deal to him, it’s a childhood dream come true.”

At first Spielberg felt “intimidated” having Truffaut in his movie. Truffaut reassured him, “I will be the easiest person you’ve ever worked with—either in the cast or on the crew. This actor will not have ideas. I will perform your ideas.” Truffaut not only was true to his word, but often seemed to know what Spielberg wanted without being told. Sometimes Spielberg deliberately refrained from giving Truffaut any direction at all, such as in the sublime moment when Lacombe says good-bye to Puck with hand signs and “that expression on his face when he almost laughs at the gentleness of it all.” Truffaut’s personality also made the character “much more intense than he was originally written,” Spielberg acknowledged. “He’s still a man of peace … still a man-child, but he has a great deal of cunning and enthusiasm.”

Although he had warned Spielberg that he could not be asked “to laugh or cry on command like a professional actor,” Truffaut found that “several times during the shooting he made me surpass myself. He directed me so as to make me come out of myself. Thanks to that, I discovered a real pleasure as an actor. I behaved like every actor in the world who, as soon as the take has been shot, turns to the director to find out if he is satisfied. And every time I achieved the result Spielberg expected, I was satisfied.”

Truffaut’s benign facade concealed a sly and sometimes waspish guile. He
finally let his frustration boil over in rage against Julia Phillips, telling
The
New
York
Times,
“The picture started with a budget of $11 million and now I think it is up to $15 million, but that is not Spielberg’s fault. It is the fault of the producer, Julia Phillips. She is incompetent. Unprofessional. You can write that. She knows I feel this way. Sometimes it was so disorganized that they had me show up and then do nothing for five days.” At the behest of the furious Phillips—who seethes in her book, “Of all the dead people I know François Truffaut wins the prick award hands down”—Spielberg played the good soldier, writing a letter to the
Times
expressing his disbelief that Truffaut could have made those “rather unkind remarks.” Implausibly arguing that the highly experienced and sophisticated French director must have been ignorant of the production’s unique technical challenges, Spielberg went on to claim, “I’ve never had such constructive and consistent support from a producer as I have had from Julia Phillips, and I know that Columbia Pictures concurs.” Rather than being grateful, Phillips complained that Spielberg’s letter was “weaker than I would have hoped.”

Truffaut expressed contrition of a sort in an interview with
The
New
Yorker:
“Jeanne Moreau once told me, ‘On every picture, you must love everybody except the one who becomes the scapegoat.’ I followed Jeanne Moreau’s advice. I made Julia Phillips, the producer, my scapegoat. Every time I find something not to my liking, I say I am sure it is the fault of Julia Phillips.”

W
ITH
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind,
Spielberg pulled off the remarkable feat of making a deeply personal film on a grand scale within the Hollywood studio system. Even more remarkably, he was able to communicate his personal vision to a huge worldwide audience. “This is probably the most collaborative art form in the world,” he wrote in an
American
Cinematographer
article paying tribute to his crew on
Close
Encounters.
“There is no such thing as [an]
Auteur.
Without all these people movies simply are not made.” And yet Spielberg managed to use the talents of all those people to realize the dream implanted in his mind as a boy in Phoenix when his father roused him from bed in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower.

That incident was adapted by Spielberg for the scene of Roy Neary, fresh from his first UFO sighting, excitedly awakening his family and taking them on a (futile) nocturnal quest to share his otherworldly encounter. Spielberg’s depiction of the Nearys’ dysfunctional family life also is filled with echoes of his childhood experiences. Far from celebrating suburban conformity, as his detractors often accuse him of doing, Spielberg offers a bleak view of suburban life in
Close
Encounters,
depicting it as a place of quiet desperation, a plastic purgatory from which Roy Neary longs to escape. Roy’s unimaginative wife, Ronnie, reacts to his interest in UFOs with hostility, thinking he has gone mad. Her incomprehension and abandonment of Roy, while an understandable
reaction under the circumstances, helps the audience sympathize with Roy’s decision to leave his family behind for a new life in outer space. Along the way, Roy forms a temporary new “family” allegiance with fellow UFO believer Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon). The anguish Jillian experiences over the extraterrestrials’ abduction of her small son, Barry (Cary Guffey), makes her kin to all the other Spielbergian mothers forcibly separated from their children, from Lou Jean Poplin in
The
Sugarland
Express
to the Plaszów forced-labor camp inmates in
Schindler’s
List.

Ronnie, who mockingly addresses her husband as “Jiminy Cricket,” is an unhappy homemaker whose emotional and intellectual horizons are bounded by the walls of her messy tract house. Spielberg’s depiction of Ronnie is no mere plot expediency, but a reflection of his youthful animosity toward mother figures. In a 1990 documentary on the making of
Close
En
counters,
Spielberg expressed second thoughts about his depiction of Ronnie, recalling that he cast Teri Garr after seeing her in a coffee commercial: “I said, ‘A homemaker—makes great coffee!’ I was young, naive, and chauvinistic…. She was the bad guy in the movie, in a sense. She’s not
really
a bad guy, she’s somebody who’s trying to preserve her family and save her family from the kind of insanity she’s assuming Dreyfuss is experiencing, and doesn’t want her family to be tainted by this.”

While a more emotionally mature Spielberg might have had more empathy with Ronnie, the raw pain suffusing his depiction of the Nearys’ chaotic household might have been diluted as well. As played by the “alter ego” of the thirty-year-old bachelor filmmaker, Roy is a child-man unprepared for the responsibilities of marriage or fatherhood. It is not until he drives his family away by symbolically regressing to an infantile state—shaping a mountain out of mud in his living room like a toddler playing with his own waste—that Roy finds a way to escape from his oppressive surroundings. When his Disneyish dreams of “wishing upon a star” are fulfilled by his ascension into the womb of the mother ship, Roy is symbolically reborn, like the astronaut at the end of
2001.
Escorted aboard by the tiny childlike aliens to whom he seems both brother and father, Roy, in Spielberg’s description, “becomes a real person. He loses his strings, his wooden joints, and … he makes the most important decision in the history of the world.”

With Roy Neary, the “Peter Pan Syndrome” takes on cosmic dimensions. Some of the film’s detractors argued that Spielberg is simply glorifying the abandonment of a family by an irresponsible father. Calling the film “a hymn to regression and emotional retardation,” Stephen Farber wrote in
New
West
that “if the ordinary world had some attractions, if Roy’s family had a strong emotional hold on him, the ending would have been richer and more meaningful.” While that argument is true enough as far as it goes—“I couldn’t have made
Close
Encounters
today,” a more paternal Spielberg said in 1994, “because I would never leave my family”—such criticism tends to reduce the film to a mundane level of meaning and underestimates the degree to which Spielberg succeeds in convincing us that Roy’s alienation is justified.
Farber himself points out that
Close
Encounters
reworks an archetypal American myth defined by literary critic Leslie Fiedler as “The flight of the dreamer from the shrew—into the mountains and out of time, away from the drab duties of home and town.” The existential dreariness of Roy’s Middle-American life, and his family’s utter inability to comprehend his spiritual yearning for a more beautiful and fulfilling existence, are conveyed with considerable emotional force.