ALIEN ENCOUNTERS OF THE FRIENDLY KIND

PRODUCTION DESIGNER JOE ALVES TAKES US BEHIND THE SCENES OF STEVEN SPIELBERG'S 1977 SCIENCE FICTION CLASSIC 

- OLIVER PFEIFFER

REALLY FOUND MY FAITH WHEN I heard that the government was opposed to the film. If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening,” director and self-proclaimed UFO fanatic Steven Spielberg once said, regarding the impetus for making his 1977 epic Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

Originally envisaged as a low-budget sci-fi movie titled Watch The Skies that was inspired by his childhood memories of witnessing a spectacular meteor shower, Close Encounters ultimately took its philosophy and elongated title from the 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry.

Written by astronomer and former UFO skeptic turned advocate Dr J Allen Hynek, the book stated that a Close Encounter of the First Kind was a UFO sighting with no evidence; the Second Kind was where a UFO leaves physical evidence, and the Third was when actual contact was made. Appropriately, Spielberg hired Hynek as a scientific consultant to lend legitimacy to proceedings.

Drawing on elements of his 1964 UFO home movie Firelight, Spielberg wrote this very personal project himself. It focuses on frustrated father Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), an electrical engineer whose confrontation with a UFO overturns his everyman existence. Suddenly, Roy’s inner child is unleashed as he becomes strangely obsessed with recreating the inexplicable vision of what turns out to be Devils Tower, a unique geological formation.

“I was told, ‘You need to find a strange-looking mountain,” Joe Alves, the Oscar-nominated production designer on Close Encounters tells