I’d always push things off till the eleventh hour. And I'd spend a lot of time just looking up at the sky. My parents thought it was strange, but I was a real stargazer. Before I was eight, I got into astronomy. My father was into science fiction; I’ve never cared for it that much, myself.
But I remember one night he got me out of bed at 1 o'clock in the morning to see a meteor shower & I was absolutely fascinated. I wanted to know what put those points of light up there.'Spielberg described this formative experience in another interview years later. 'It was this fantastic meteor shower, like the Perseus meteor shower we have sometimes, and I just remember looking up at the sky and every 15 to 20 seconds, there was this fantastic streak of light across the sky! I think that was my first introduction to the world beyond the Earth, and probably what first impregnated me with the idea of wanting to tell stories not of this world!'
This childhood interest in outer space led to Spielberg becoming curious on the UFO phenomenon. 'I always thought, as a kid and into my 20s and 30s, that there was some truth to it all. Too many similarities in the accounting of UFO sightings.This was before the media embraced UFOs as a cultural pastime or as a kind of alternative religion. You're talking about witnesses who were seeing things in Des Moines, Iowa, reporting the same thing people were seeing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
So I really believed in this whole UFO phenomenon, and I thought it was really interesting that we didn't have to journey to the stars to make our discoveries, but beings from other stars have journeyed to our planet.'
The first draft of what became Close Encounters of the Third Kind was started in 1973, after the release of The Sugarland Express, under the formative title of 'Watch the Skies', as a nod to the final scene of The Thing from Another World.'Watch the Skies' was intended to be a low-budget film, as the big film studios considered science-fiction to be b-movie fare. It wasn't until the runaway success of Jaws, the film that Spielberg took on after Sugarland Express, that he was able to negotiate a higher budget.
The experience of making Jaws had been a major ordeal partly thanks to that film's heavy effects workload, especially the mechanical shark. Yet compared to Jaws, Close Encounters would prove to be, according to Spielberg, 'Twice as bad and twice as expensive as well'.Out of the effects needed for Close Encounters, the aliens were some of its most challenging. The film's title alone, taken from the writings of ufologist J. Allen Hynek, meant aliens had to appear: a 'close encounter of the third kind' was when you saw a UFO's occupants.
Joe Alves, the production designer of Close Encounters (and who Spielberg had previously worked with on Jaws), based the design of the aliens on UFO reports such as the infamous Betty & Barney Hill case. 'I had a lot of pre-production time, a good year on the production before we started shooting so I was sort of messing around with a lot of different concepts, and the alien certainly was one. I made some sketches, naive little sketches, of two little creatures based on articles that I read on how people saw these little things.'Spielberg recalled how the very first attempt to realize the aliens ended in failure. 'The first thing I did was go in search for the perfect E.T. I had the strange idea that they shouldn't be people in costume; they had done that from the dawn of time in Hollywood.
So what I did was, I had a chimpanzee brought to the set. We put the chimpanzee in an E.T. suit and further complicated the test by putting rollerskates on him, because I didn't want the chimpanzee to walk simian-like, but I wanted him to glide smoothly down a ramp.You can imagine the test; a chimpanzee with a large rubber latex head and a little kind of flimsy ballerina costume and large rollerskates, disguised with a kind of dust ruffle so you couldn't see the actual wheels.
We put the chimpanzee on a ramp and the first thing that happened, of course, was the chimpanzee fell and slid down the ramp and it kept making these rather remarkable Charlie Chaplin pratfalls, the chimpanzee was laughing like he had a great time doing this.
At one point the chimpanzee did pull off his head and throw it at the crew. That was his way of telling me, "Find another way."'
After this, Spielberg resorted to having the aliens be actors in prosthetics. John Chambers, famous for his work on Planet of the Apes, was approached but had to decline due to poor health and so offered the job to fellow makeup artist Frank Griffin.
As Frank Griffin recalled to Cinefantastique, it was via him that the Burman Studio wound up getting involved with Close Encounters. 'Originally, I was going to do the show with Eddie Butterworth, who is a really brilliant sculptor and makeup artist; but after we got about three or four days into it, that dissolved. Eddie wanted to go do something else—plus we didn’t have a lab. I was determined not to use the lab on the studio lot because I knew the background over there and I figured our work would be all over town before we got the picture started. So that’s how Tom Burman came into it. I needed a big lab; and he and his brother. Sonny, had one.'Essentially, while Griffin would design the aliens to Spielberg and Alves' wishes, the actual production of the prosthetics fell to the Burmans. However, it was at this stage that the aliens started to prove troublesome, partly thanks to Spielberg's indecision!
'Everything was always sort of abstract. He’d have all these sketches and he’d say, “I’d like a little bit of this, and a little bit of that,give me a little bit of that eye, and a little bit of that nose.” So we’d end up working from bits and pieces of maybe eight different sketches.The original concept for the head looked sort of insect-like, almost like a cricket or an ant’s head. Mike McKracken was our sculptor at the time, and it would take him about a week to come up with a rendering. Then we’d take it over to Spielberg and he’d say, “Well, that’s almost right, but I still feel it should be this or that.’’
(...) So we never got a firm yes or a firm no—it was always “a little bit of this; a little bit of that.” Gradually it evolved into something we called Casper, because it looked like Casper the Ghost, but it changed again, even after that.
We were on the show a good two months before we got the final go-ahead from Spielberg, but we never had a firm blueprint. And once they left for Mobile, we never saw Spielberg again until Tommy (Thomas Burman) went down with the finished heads.
The aliens were to be played by children, which slightly complicated matters; child actors are already difficult to work with, but this was going to require the kids to wear heavy alien masks! Thomas Burman explained in Cinefantastique;
'We needed an impression of the children who were going to wear the heads so we could come up with something that would fit each child exactly, because these things were going to be a little heavy and the kids had to support them. To give the articulated heads a bit of individual personality, we made three versions, all slightly different.David Ayres, my brother (Sonny Burman), and I each sculpted one, based on Mike McKracken’s approved design. Sonny’s and mine were duplicated to bring the total to five. We sculpted those heads over the castings we made in Mobile, and then made outer surface molds in a dental stone material — we needed those so we could use foam rubber, which requires a certain amount of curing time in an oven at about two hundred degrees.
After we took the molds out, we had to lay a layer of clay on the inside, and then take another mold of the inside of that, so that we now had the outer skin and a mold for the armature that the skin would fit over. We made the armature out of fiberglass and used it to mount all our mechanics -servo motors and whatnot, to run the eyes and everything. This would then sit directly on the kid’s head like the liner in a football helmet.'
However, Spielberg was not impressed with the original alien heads, causing not just a heavier workload for Burman but also an unpleasant altercation with the film's producer, Julia Phillips.
'It took us three months to finish all the heads; and when we did, I took them down to Mobile and showed them to Steve Spielberg and he didn’t like them. He thought they looked too scary and he wanted something softer and more gentle-looking.And that really put me in kind of an awkward position. I was representing the heads, and yet I'd had nothing to do with the design or concept. Frank Griffin had done a couple of film tests with them and they’d been accepted at the time, so it wasn’t Frank’s fault. It wasn’t anybody's fault. I guess Steve Spielberg just had a change of mind once he got on the set.
But when Steve Spielberg didn’t like them, Julia Phillips panicked. She jumped all over me anti was going to sue me for twenty million dollars, and on and on and on. She was really abusive. I’d spent some time in the Marine Corps, so she wasn’t catching anybody for the first time, you know. I mean, this woman really came down on me heavy, and it just took me totally by surprise. Under any other circumstances, I’d have probably just walked out the door, taken my plane ticket, and come home. But I liked Steve Spielberg and I believed in the project; and I knew they were in a fix. So I just told her I’d see what we could do about it and what kind of corrections we could make.
I came back with my brother (Sonny), and together we remade every one of those heads. The background masks only needed minor changes, so we were able to get by with just modifying our previous molds. But we had to re-do the articulated heads completely. Sonny and I sculpted several versions and sent Polaroid pictures to Spielberg by airplane.He called back and told us what changes he wanted made and gave us the okay. Fortunately, the mechanisms were already made, so it was just a matter of reskinning them—putting another look on the outside. We did the whole thing in about ten days, working day and night straight through.'
David Ayres recalled the experience of filming the child actors in the alien masks. 'We started out with about a hundred of the little girls, but they dwindled down to about fifty after the first day or so. A lot of the kids were complaining about not being able to breathe in the masks, and some of the mothers were getting uptight because their kid only got a peanut butter sandwich when some other child got cheese.
And then the kids got tired of putting on the masks and the hands and they had padding all around to make them look less human and more cartoon-like. They couldn’t see out the eyes. Instead, they had to look out the little nostrils on the mask, and the mouth. Some of them could not get used to it, but the ones that did would just pinpoint their vision through one hole, and then they could move it around and get a wide scan of everything. You could sec them cocking their heads, and it looked very real. We finally ended up with about thirty-five kids.In order to get them acclimated to the costumes, we had them practice doing things with the heads on. There was a dancer down there who’d been hired to work with the kids, and she’d have them do jumping jacks and shaking their fingers, kind of programming them for the shooting. She was there, more or less, to mother them all; but she used to drive us crazy, because she’d keep going around to the kids saying: “Are you feeling all right? This costume must hurt. Doesn’t it?” And the kids arc going: “Well, I don’t know. Yeah, I guess it kinda does.” And we’d be going around trying to keep her quiet so she wouldn’t go talking the kids into anything.
Thomas Burman explained in detail the process behind the alien masks. 'Once we got the concept down, we had to make two kinds of heads. One was a closeup head that had to be articulated, the eyes had to be able to move up and down, and from side to side; and the mouth had to move.
We built five of those; and since we couldn’t expect the children inside the suits to trigger all the mechanisms by themselves, we designed them to be operated remotely with a small model airplane radio control set. Then we had about sixty background masks that were just slip rubber masks and sat on the kids heads.We did the basic modeling in wax, because it has kind of a high polish; and then we had plaster molds made. We made three different sizes for different sized kids. Except for the eyes, which were vacuum-formed plastic, the entire mask was just cast out of rubber, with rubber filler added to make it a little stiffer, so they weren’t too flexible.
They were originally cast without mouths because Spielberg wanted the creatures to have no mouths; but it turned out that the kids needed them to breathe, so we ended up cutting them in after we got down to Mobile. The skin was covered with a clear polyurethane to give it a kind of odd shiny texture, and then painted'.Frank Griffin remembered how the mechanized masks also provided a new set of issues for the children wearing them.
'For the articulated heads, Spielberg told us he wanted the eyes to track naturally, and follow you; but he also wanted the eyes to be able to move separately. It happened to be really busy that year and all the good effects guys were tied up; but fortunately, we were able to get Del Rheaume. He was working on hydraulics and stuff for The White Buffalo at the time, but we were able to get him to moonlight with us for awhile at night.Now, Del is really clever, but once he got into it, even he said it would be impossible to build a system where the eyes could move independently and then be able to lock back into a tracking system, at least if you wanted to make it small enough and light enough to sit on a child’s head. We finally ended up using a model airplane radio with two controls.
He could do just about anything with those eyes that a human could do, but they wouldn’t move independently. What one eye did, the other had to do. Human eyes tend to cross or spread as distances close or separate; but once those eyes were fixed, they were fixed which meant you had to maintain a certain distance from the heads or else the eyes would get kind of a staring look. We shot some test footage at Columbia, but the little girl they had in the costume couldn’t even keep her head up, it kept flopping forward or to the side.And some of those guys at the studio would say: “Why can’t this little girl hold her head up? It can’t weigh more than four or five pounds.” So I said: “Figure body weight. The head’s probably ten percent of her gross body weight. Could you hold up twenty pounds on your head all day?”
So we decided to use little boys for the closeups with the articulated heads, and use the little girls for the full-figure shots to maintain the unisexual look. They picked out six or seven boys down in Mobile, and Tommy and I flew down there around March or April to take head impressions of them.'
Griffin elaborated on the aliens' 'unisexual' look, as well as how the makeup department had to work alongside the wardrobe team.
'The heads were painted to match the costumes the kids would be wearing. Spielberg wanted tight clinging body stockings without any visible seams, so that in the back-lighting, you would never be sure whether the aliens were wearing something or if they were nude.His original intent was that they look very unisexual. That’s one of the main reasons he wanted to use little girls so there would be no obvious sexual organs of any kind. They tried shooting midgets; but of course, that didn’t work, so they went back to the little girls.
Wardrobe spent about three or four months looking for a fabric they could use, and finally ended up with a four-way stretch cloth, which tends to cling quite well; and once they finally decided on a color, they gave us a swatch of it and we’d try to match it.'The aliens were meant to have long, spindly fingers, which also provded daunting to the makeup team as Griffin explained. 'The hands turned out to be a real problem. We went all over town trying to find a good animator and finally ended up at a place called Show Craft.
They made one mock-up hand for us, and it was really nice because the fingers could contract and flex and everything. But it took a long time to get into them because you had to strap them quite a way up the forearm in order to get a good firm movement.So I said to Steven, “By the time you get those heads and those hands on fifty kids, the first ones are going to want to be getting out to go to the john or somethingand you’ll never get a shot.” Plus, the cost was just prohibitive. It was going to come to like five or six hundred dollars a pair.
So Tommy took an impression of one of the kid’s hands, and from that we made a false hand out of something called methyl methacrylate, which is used in dentistry: when it dries, it looks almost like bone or teeth. It had long, spindly fingers and we made it so the first joint covered the entire finger of the child’s hand; and we put springs and levers in between so that by manipulating their fingers, the kids could bend all the succeeding joints.We had one pair made, but it took a little strength and the girl they had testing it just wasn’t strong enough. We discussed it all with Spielberg again, and finally ended up just making the hands out of slush rubber. They were inanimate and fit on like gloves. The kids could move them a little bit with their fingers, but that’s about all.'
Bob Balaban also felt the suits were unconvincing. 'One of the problems that I remember was that the rubber hands...were just these rubber hands with long finger! When they (closed their hands) you could kind of see the rubber crinkling up at the edges and it was hard to do. And the facial expressions weren't so great.'
Thomas Burman felt that this was a disservice to the hard work the makeup department had done on the picture, especially as the little alien sequences had taken so much effort to film.
'They were originally supposed to shoot only two days with the aliens, but they ended up shooting eight. They worked those little kids for twelve hours a day and paid them almost nothing. I think they got something like $25 a day. But the little girls never complained.I had little girls climbing all over me two or three of them; sometimes as many as five. would walk out on the set with the children hanging all over you. It was really tiring for them, and it was tough to keep their energy levels up.
But they were better than the little boys. We brought the boys in because we felt they would be stronger than little girls, but it turned out that girls actually have more stamina at that age than boys do. The little boys faded out almost immediately.I hadn't really wanted to get that involved in it, right from the beginning, but ended up very deeply involved and a little angry. The irritation was that after coming back and working around the clock like that out of some sense of responsibility I didn t even get screen credit on the show. Columbia even put out a statement disclaiming that I had ever worked on it.'
'My concept was to have a single extraterrestrial come out of the ship. It would be maybe twelve to fourteen feet in height. Very thin and gaunt and almost transparent. If you’ve ever seen pictures of embryos, they have very thin skin and tissue and you can see the veins and organs inside. I wanted to make this being just like that. Sort of humanoid, but delicate and transparent so you could see his heart beating inside and the blood rushing through his veins, and you could see him breathing and watch his muscles work. (...)
We would probably have had to build it in miniature, maybe four or five feet tall. It was sort of a complicated articulated puppet concept not a puppet hung by strings, but a puppet operated by thin rods from behind, with all the moving parts isolated away from the being itself, so it wouldn’t just be full of solenoids and valves and hydraulic actuators and stuff.'While Spielberg rejected Trumbull's offer as it would be too expensive, it was clear that Spielberg was impressed by the concept enough that the film's second alien, realized as a more conventional puppet, would reflect Trumbull's 'embryo' concept.
Instead the task fell to Bob Baker, a puppeteer who had worked under George Pal's Puppetoons and later set up his own company, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Bob Baker specialized in making puppet shows for children, but he was eager to take on the job.'Joe Alves gave me a call in October and asked if we could build something according to a design. I said sure. He told me he couldn't say very much about it, but he’d drop off the designs. I was out of town when they arrived, but when I got back, I looked at them and thought, “Gee, I'd really love to do something like this” they were really kind of way out.
So I had a meeting with Steven Spielberg, who has a very imaginative mind. He was going along ninety miles an hour: “Can you do this? Can you do that?” And I'm saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” So it was decided then that we'd build one prototype puppet for three or four others that would be built on a much larger scale. After the meeting, George Jensen made up a full-scale drawing for us to work from. The thing that intrigued me about this figure, in the beginning, was that there was no way a human being could have dressed up in a suit to play that part. So body has those kind of proportions; and there wasn't any way you could stretch the human body, even through trick photography, to make it look like that.'
Bob Baker explained further about how the marionette was made. 'There were four of us who were really involved with the figure: Roy Raymond did some of the internal metal things on it; Ho Kusudo helped me make the arms, which were very complex; Dino Williams did all my plastic work; and I guess I kind of lived with it the most of everybody. It’s one of the few things in the last few years that I've really wanted to be part of, and do as much of myself as possible.
Our alien was about five feet tall, with long arms and legs and torso, and with a head that sat on the end of a very long neck which came forward in a kind of lazy “S." We didn't want to scare people with it. but we wanted to give it the look of maybe an evolved human being; and so we made it as though things that were no longer needed within the framework of the body were being eliminated. Everything was mental, they no longer needed such things as feet, so we had no feet on it. It was kind of a transitional being. The epidermis was constantly regenerating, leaving the body and trailing off behind. And you could see inside the creature and watch his heart beat and see him breathe, the whole chest cavity would go up and down.His temples would pulsate and you could see the brain moving inside. And all this was done with strings and springs and wire a little bit of everything. Also, in the beginning, they wanted to have light beams coming out of the eyes. So we came up with a little battery-powered light that we beamed through a prismatic device when the eyes moved, the beam moved with them.
But I guess Spielberg thought that was a bit too theatrical by the time he got around to shooting it, so he didn't use it. In fact, most of the things we built into our puppet weren't really visible on the screen.'
Bob Baker's marionette would also prove to be a victim of Spielberg's fickleness, as he instead became more enamoured with the idea of the main alien being realized as a mechanical puppet by Carlo Rambaldi. However, months later Spielberg had a change of heart and decided he did want to use Bob Baker's marionette in the film alongside Rambaldi's creation.
The marionette was filmed in a miniature version of the mothership set, to give the idea that the alien was inhumanly tall. As Bob Baker recalled, this was months after the puppet had been originally constructed, and so it needed to be quickly refurbished before filming.'We had only two days notice to shoot; and unfortunately, the puppet had been hanging around so long it had dried out. Originally, the skin was nice and pliable but just the air hitting it had made the thin plastic we used sag and get brittle. We had to practically re-do the whole thing; tighten it up, replace some parts, and re-glue. It was a real bugger. And we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to get the same smooth actions again. If we’d known how little they were going to use of it, it would have been no problem. It was capable of doing a lot more.
The marionette had from twenty-five to thirty strings - it varied, because some were removed or added, depending on the shot. And stringing it was a sonofagun, because we had to use such fine line. I had eight puppeteers on the thing, any fewer and the controls would have been ungodly complicated, because there were so many parts and the strings were so long. Then we had two people on the floor. Sometimes we needed to hold the figure down so it wouldn’t sway, so we’d put strings on from below that they could steady it with.There was a special catwalk built for us above the set; but unfortunately, the carpenters who built it didn’t understand what they were doing and they positioned it so it was almost impossible for us to work off either side of it. And then the sound stage was filled with diesel smoke, and our eyes burned and we couldn’t see what we were doing. Everybody had gas masks on, and Doug Trumbull would be down below yelling things up to us that we couldn’t understand; and we’d be yelling things back to him that he couldn’t understand. The whole thing was really pretty funny, and it's surprising it came out as well as it did.
When we built our alien, the plan was for it to walk forward, bend down with a very deep bow, and gesture toward the ship with his arm. We were able to do very beautiful hand and head movements, and even in its grotesqueness, it seemed a sympathetic character to us. We were very pleased with the work, especially since it was just a small prototype.
If we’d gone on to build the others, as originally planned, they were going to be eight-and-a-half feet tall and we’d have had more volume to work with and could have gotten even more into it. But they didn’t want anything very complicated at this point, anyhow.We only did about six different shots, each done a couple of ways and I think there were about three major set-ups. We started pretty early in the morning, and by about eight o’clock that evening, we were done.
Carlo Rambaldi gained Spielberg's attention thanks to his mechanical effects work on the 1977 King Kong, one of Rambaldi's first jobs on an American picture. Rambaldi explained how he got the Close Encounters gig, as well as his design process for the friendly alien.
Steven Spielberg contacted me in January and asked me to come to the United States to discuss an extraterrestrial creature that he needed for Close Encounters. When we met, he told me he wanted something about four feet tall, with a very large head and a slender body, but he gave me no actual designs. So I went back to Rome to develop my concept.I felt that, though humanoid in form, the extraterrestrials would be at least ten to twenty thousand years more advanced than humans, so I designed the head proportionately larger. But with their increased reliance on pure intellect, they would have a decreased need for such senses as hearing and smelling, and so the ears and nose and other facial features would become much less prominent.
And because of their extreme technological orientation, I felt they would no longer smile broadly as we do on earth; but since they would still retain certain emotions, I gave them a slight smile. Also, as the brain expanded, other parts of the body would take an opposite course. The need for muscular movements would diminish, and so their limbs would become thinner and longer.I prepared several sketches of my design and sent them to Spielberg. He said it was exactly what he wanted. We made a contract agreement over the phone and I started to work.'
Carlo Rambaldi's alien puppet was filmed months after the original footage with Thomas Burman's mostly rejected aliens. Rambaldi explained further;
'I sculpted the form of the creature first in clay, and then made a positive and negative mold. In the negative part, we fused a special polyurethane skin, which was about a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and very realistic. Like human skin, it even changes color when pressure is applied to it.This was fitted directly over a skeleton framework of aluminum and steel. The skull was made of fiberglass, with pieces cut away for the concealed mechanisms used to move the eyes and create expressions.
All of the movements were accomplished with flexible cables. Each was connected to a mechanical joint or muscle and ran down through the body and out at the feet. The cables connected to levers, and by manually moving the levers, the cables operated just as human tendons would.By manipulating the levers controlling the head, for instance, the cables would either push up or pull down on the mechanical muscle next to the skin to create a facial expression. I prefer using a mechanical system rather than an electronic one because I think the human hand is capable of producing a more natural and subtle movement.
Also, there are certain places in the body where it would be impossible to install electronic devices, even though miniaturized, because of limited space. For example, I could not have implanted an electronic device in the elbow of the extraterrestrial and yet retained the natural flow of the creature.
When I came back to the United States in March to receive my Oscar for King Kong, I brought my work with me. I also brought Isidoro Raponi, one of my four assistants from Rome; and along with Dick Cobos, an American makeup specialist, we finished it up at Columbia Studios.
The extraterrestrial had fifteen cables, one for each required movement. It took seven just to operate the facial expressions, and another five to create the arm and hand signals. Esophagus and chest movements we accomplished by pumping air from cylinders in through tubes. We also constructed a walking mechanism which would allow it to take two steps, but that was not used in the film.Steven Spielberg was very pleased with my extraterrestrial. In fact, he spent a lot of time playing with it. He especially liked the smile; and during the filming, it was he who operated the levers controlling it. All together, it took eight people to operate all the mechanisms and we practiced with it for almost a week before shooting to get it perfect.'
While the wildly differing alien designs were due to trial and error, Spielberg rationalized it years later with a very simple explanation that fitted the film's optimistic tone.
'We live on a planet with so many different races and colours and cultures, so I wanted to show that on the alien world there's also different races. There's the race of the long willowy aliens, and the race of the short bulbous head aliens, and there was the race of the very skinny alien. I wanted to show that like here (on Earth), there are different races there.'Sources:
- The Making of 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'
- Cinefantastique Vol 07 No 3-4 (1978)
- Steven Spielberg: A Biography (Joseph McBride, 1997)
