A film executive recently informed me that you can’t have a decent kids’ film without making children cry and though I would normally beg to differ, I had to nod in agreement in the hope of landing a directing job for a book adaptation he wanted to bring to the screen. In hindsight, it was clear I wasn’t going to get the job given his constant need for reassurance that I wasn’t going to try and hijack his kids’ project and darken it to my own ends. The irony is that I wanted to go even softer than him and not make anyone cry since I being traumatised by ET as a nine-year-old, which we discussed in that job interview, but I can’t if he owned up to crying or not. The only other time I cried in the cinema was at a much older age than nine, when Aunt Lucy turned up at Paddington’s doorstep at the end of Paddington 2, which really caught me by surprise at the time, especially as my eyes remained dry during all manner of onscreen human turmoil over decades of film viewing. Whereas the latter tears were wept from the joy of reunion, ET was confronting us with the primal fear of loved ones falling seriously ill and dying, which Spielberg escalated to an agonising pitch. The rammed ABC Cinema in Reading’s Friar Street (now replaced by a Novotel) went deathly silent when ET was presumed dead. At that point of distraught resignation, someone in the audience erupted with a devastating Friday night belch, which instantly changed the atmosphere. The audience was split between those who found the belch funny, those who found it uncouth and those who found the mixture of amusement and revulsion funny. A few seconds later and ET suddenly came to life again, but I think the mystery man who belched knew the audience’s limits better than Spielberg and got in earlier to lighten the mood, as many of us were genuinely suffering prior to that.

Before I even knew what a film director was, ET himself is what made me want to see the film, especially after seeing all the merchandise in the run up to Christmas in 1982. I didn’t know who any of the actors were, but this was back in the day when it was much more common for creatures or monsters to sell a film without relying on an A-list cast. For genre fans, the hidden star of the film was the special effects and animatronics maestro Carlo Rambaldi who helped bring the loveable alien to life. It’s also worth noting that in the year before ET, (Spielberg’s family-friendly take on divorce), Rambaldi made a much less endearing creature for Andrzej Żuławski’s more hysterical take on divorce, Possession, which ended up being lumped in with other ‘video nasties’ in the early ‘80s and subsequently banned in Britain

As a kid, I loved all the moments with ET, but as an adult, I tune in more to the aftermath that comes from parents separating, which, if Spielberg went in closer or further, could have become a not too distant relative to Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage or more precisely, Scenes from After a Marriage, but I hear The Fabelmans fully ventures into that territory. I bought it on DVD, (the Lynch cameo and the 8mm was enough to entice me) but I’m still yet to actually watch it.

Dee Wallace truly excels as a mother struggling on her own and given the tonal balance between genre and drama, she carries it off effortlessly, which makes one wonder why she never quite broke through into bigger or more serious films. I once ended up in a car with Ms Wallace when guests from the Sitges Festival were driven to Barcelona Airport. Festival drives to an airport with other guests don’t always go smoothly and I one director fixing me with a hard, aloof stare that plainly read “don’t talk to me” when I asked him about his films in the backseat of the car, but Dee Wallace was very gracious and personable, giving me just the right dosage of anecdotes without giving too much away. As for Spielberg, my first and only time in front of the camera was for his film Munich in 2005. There was an open call for extras (now referred to as ing Artists or SAs, if you really want to sound professional) and I ended up playing a barman during a scene where the protagonist almost gets seduced by what they call a ‘honey trap’. I was only on the set as an extra for two nights and kept myself to myself, as all barmen in disreputable ts do, but I observed enough about Spielberg to notice that he usually made the effort to walk up to his actors and talk to them face to face. That method seemed much more in tune with getting the best out of actors rather than yelling from behind the camera. I tried my best to adopt that way of working as much as I could, only it wasn’t always practical. I one shot from The Duke of Burgundy in which Monica Swinn, seen from a first-floor window, shows the protagonist that she’s not a neighbour to be messed with, which involved me running down the stairs, rushing outside to give my thoughts to her, rush back in and run up the stairs again to Nic Knowland behind the camera. After a few takes that involved me running down and up those stairs all the time, I eventually went for the easier option of just opening the window and yelling my instructions. I can’t if there are any shots in ET from first-floor windows that might debunk my one-off observation on how Spielberg works, but regardless, it is a great film, and I can’t help but think it’d be even greater if it screened as part of a Rambaldi/divorce double bill with Possession.