The movie quickly rocketed past Star Wars to become the highest-grossing film of all time, a record that stood for more than a decade until Spielberg broke it himself with 1993’s Jurassic Park. Released 40 years ago on 11 June 1982, it didn’t take long until the little alien with a big, glowing heart was everybody’s new best friend.
“A special friend who rescues a young boy from the sadness of a divorce.” That special friend would become the titular star of Spielberg’s next film, ET the Extra-Terrestrial. “It was a childhood fantasy to tell the story of a best friend,” Spielberg explained in a 1996 documentary. At night, however, his mind kept returning to the loneliness of his own childhood, the imaginary friend he’d created to cope, and the pain he’d felt when his parents split while he was a teenager.
The director, just 34 and with hits like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind already under his belt, was in North Africa shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark, the blockbuster adventure that would launch the Indiana Jones franchise.
In 1980, in a tent somewhere in the Tunisian desert, Steven Spielberg sat painfully alone.
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