Spielberg-Truffaut: The Ultimate Close Encounter
With Close Encounters turning 45 in 2022, I examine the fraught relationship that developed between the director and a second lead who just happened to be an icon of cinema...
A version of the piece appeared in The New European.
How do you follow a film like Jaws? The 1975 picture had created the phenomenon of the summer blockbuster and set the bar pretty high for its director, the 29-year-old Steven Spielberg.
While the execs set about scratching their chins and tallying up the box-office receipts, the Ohio-born filmmaker was in no doubt what he wanted to do next. Back in 1964, the then 17-year-old Steve Spielberg – as he liked to be known back then – had directed his first film.
Firelight was a science-fiction drama inspired by the novels of Arthur C Clarke and B-movies such as Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, which had cost its director the princely sum of $600. Thirteen years later, Spielberg was determined that his next film would be the one he would have made in 1964 if he’d had more than just paper-round money to play with.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind would wind up costing $20 million, an extraordinary sum for 1977. And even with all the kudos he had accumulated from Jaws, Spielberg only got to make the film thanks to his hooking up with Michael and Julia Phillips, the (soon-to-be-ex) husband-and-wife team responsible for Taxi Driver and The Sting.
Being the hot director of the day did have a few perks, mind you. For one thing, Spielberg was free to hire Douglas Trumbull, the effects wiz responsible for the ‘Jupiter & Beyond The Infinite’ sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And when it came to casting the pivotal role of French UFOlogist Claude Lacombe, the filmmaker was adamant that the only man for the part was the guy responsible for such cinematic masterpieces as The 400 Blows and Jules Et Jim. Spielberg had set his heard on Francois Truffaut – the filmmaker at the forefront of the French New Wave.
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