UFOs & OAPS

LIVING SPACESHIPS HELP TO SAVE AN APARTMENT BLOCK IN 1987'S QUAINT SCI-FI BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED.WE CAUGHT UP WITH DIRECTOR MATTHEW ROBBINS

- SIMON BLAND

ET, THE GOONIES, GREMLINS - back in the '80s, Amblin Entertainment carved out a pretty solid niche by placing kids into otherworldly situations and spinning their stories into cinematic gold.

However, looking back at the early output of Steven Spielberg's pop-culture-sculpting movie powerhouse, one title stands alone for taking the opposite approach.

Released in 1987, Batteries Not Included switched the formula by swapping kid heroes for pensioner protagonists and pairing them with a bunch of cute, metal UFO visitors. In a crumbling New York tenement, we meet Frank and Faye Riley (played by real-life couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy), an elderly couple whose apartment building and "mom and pop" diner are under constant threat of demolition from pushy developers and their ruthless lackeys.

With Faye's health rapidly deteriorating and closure slowly creeping in, all looks lost for this quaint corner of the Lower East Side - until the building's colourful cast of residents are visited by a bunch of beady-eyed flying saucers (nicknamed The Fix-Its) that bring a hearty dose of hope and a new lease of life to Frank and Faye's twilight years.

For director Matthew Robbins, it was the project's mixture of the mature and the mystical that initially piqued his interest. It started life as an episode idea for Spielberg's TV series Amazing Stories, pitched by filmmaker Mick Garris. The Jaws maestro quickly spotted its big-screen potential, enlisting Robbins and Brad Bird - future director of The Iron Giant - to flesh it out into a full feature.

"I was drawn to the prospect of working with senior actors that had to be very much the centre of the story," Robbins tells SFX.

"We hadn't yet cast Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy but the idea of that couple, their sentimentality and also the worry of Alzheimer's and making that a key part of the story, spoke to me.