You'll NEVER Look at Close Encounters of the Third Kind The SAME Way Again!

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Wouldn't it be great if the math, basically, is musical math and they start to communicate with each other through lights, colors, and musical tones?

[00:00:08]>> You remember the five notes. You remember the mashed potatoes. You remember Roy Neary standing in his backyard watching something move across the sky and knowing [music] in the specific way that the film communicates knowing.

[00:00:26]That his life had just [music] been divided into before and after without his permission. You think you know Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So that with your only angel as a guide, they may safely reach their destination. You know the surface of it. Steven Spielberg made a film in 1977 about a man so consumed by an unexplained vision that he destroys his marriage, [music] frightens his children, and tears his suburban life apart at the seams to follow something he can't name. And we made this picture in the spirit of childhood and believing in things that don't make sense. He built it from a childhood memory his father later said had never happened. He handed the ending to an audience that received it as transcendent and irresponsible in roughly equal measure. He then went back and made a different version of it because a studio told him to and spent years afterwards saying publicly he wished he hadn't. 12 facts, five notes.

[00:01:24]The real story of the most personal film Steven Spielberg ever made starts right now. 12. Spielberg built the film around a memory that never happened. The emotional architecture of Close Encounters, the specific quality of longing that runs through every frame, the sense of a man reaching towards [music] something just beyond what language can describe came from a story.

[00:01:47]April 1976 Yes.

[00:01:53]Spielberg's father had told him about a night when the two of them went outside and watched a meteor shower. The memory attached [music] itself to Spielberg's imagination with the adhesive quality that certain childhood experiences have, the ones that feel more [music] real than the events that actually shaped you. He carried it for years and built a film [music] around it. Then his father told him the truth, that the meteor shower had never happened, that the night he had been so certain of had not occurred, that the memory he had treated as foundational [music] was something his imagination had constructed and promoted to fact without [music] his knowledge. Spielberg processed the information and decided it didn't change anything important about what the film was. The memory that built Close Encounters wasn't real. The film it produced is one of the most genuinely felt things in American cinema. The distinction between those two facts is the first thing the movie is actually about. 11. Columbia gave Spielberg everything because of Jaws. The contract Spielberg signed with Columbia Pictures contained a level of creative autonomy American [music] studio system had almost never granted a director of his age and experience. Final cut. Control over casting, the script, the production design, the visual effects, the ending.

[00:03:13]The authority that major studios typically retain the ability to intervene when the film being made isn't the film they agreed to finance was substantially absent from the arrangement. The reason was a single word, Jaws. The film that had just become the highest grossing movie in cinema history had been made by this specific director, and Columbia understood what that meant commercially.

[00:03:34][music] The trust that Jaws purchased was absolute and expensive, and Spielberg used every dollar of it. He made exactly the film he wanted at the budget it required, with the ending he had chosen, without the studio overriding him at any point. The result was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that could not have existed in the form [music] it exists without the contractual freedom that one blockbuster bought for the director who made it. 10, Truffaut learned his lines in a language he didn't [music] speak. François Truffaut was one of the architects of the French New Wave, a filmmaker whose critical intelligence had helped define what serious cinema was allowed to attempt in the late 1950s. He did not speak English.

[00:04:17]Privet. Privet.

[00:04:19]>> [music] >> When Spielberg cast him as Claude Lacombe, the French scientist at the center of the government's contact operation, Truffaut approached performing in a language he couldn't understand with the methodical precision of a director who had spent his career thinking about how performance worked.

[00:04:37]He learned every line phonetically, memorizing [music] sounds without meanings, shapes of words without access to what they said, and delivered them with an authority that [music] reads on screen as complete fluency. He was simultaneously directing his own French productions during the Spielberg shoot, moving between two film sets and two entirely different creative contexts.

[00:04:58]What he brought to Lacombe was something no [music] conventionally cast Hollywood actor would have produced the specific gravity of a filmmaker's [music] intelligence inhabiting a fictional scientist. Nine, the five notes almost sounded [music] completely different.

[00:05:12]John Williams sat at a piano and began generating options. The brief was specifically a short musical phrase functioning as communication between human [music] and alien intelligence, carrying enough emotional information to suggest both contact [music] and invitation, simple enough to be immediately memorable and distinctive enough to be unmistakable. Because the idea of music was just something I thought, well, mathematics is a way of communicating with perhaps another species from off the planet.

[00:05:40]>> He wrote approximately 350 variations before Spielberg [music] selected the sequence in the film. The number is not an exaggeration. It reflects Williams working with the systematic thoroughness of a composer who understood the right answer existed somewhere in the range of possibilities, and that finding it required generating enough material to make the comparison meaningful. Each variation carried a different register, some more ominous, some more playful, some more ceremonial, some that would have pulled the film's emotional meaning in directions that changed what the audience felt at contact. [music] The five notes chosen had a specific quality of openness. The others didn't have a sound that felt like a question being answered rather than a statement being made. Eight, Devil's Tower [music] was a production nightmare. The sequences at Devil's Tower, Wyoming, the film's climactic location toward which every character and plot thread is pulled, [music] were not filmed under controlled conditions.

[00:06:43]Devil's Tower is a functioning national monument with regular tourist traffic and permit restrictions [music] that a film production cannot override by virtue of having a large budget. The weather was not cooperative.

[00:06:55]>> [music] >> The logistics of moving equipment to a location simultaneously open to the public created operational challenges the production's planning hadn't fully accounted for. The physical scale of what was being filmed, the massed crowd, the military infrastructure, the effects sequences integrating with the practical location required coordination under genuinely difficult conditions that the finished film gives no indication of.

[00:07:20]The sequences that appear effortlessly otherworldly, carrying a quality of open sky and vast scale, and something approaching the sacred, were achieved through sustained practical problem-solving in conditions that were never, on [music] any given day, fully under anyone's control. The film looks inevitable. The production was not.

[00:07:39]Seven, Dreyfuss was coming apart during filming. Richard Dreyfuss has been honest about the period in which Close Encounters was made in a way that removes the need for inference. He was dealing with substance related difficulties during production, not as background context, but as the actual condition in which the performance was being made day after day on a set demanding things that required his full [music] functional capacity. The character he was playing was a man coming apart whose grip on his ordinary life was loosening while something inside him pulled in a direction he couldn't resist. The desperation in Dreyfuss' performance of Roy Neary, [music] the specific quality of a person who knows he is losing something he should want to keep and can't stop, >> [music] >> was not produced entirely by the script and direction. It came from somewhere the script and direction were accessing [music] rather than creating. What the camera found in him during those months was real [music] in ways that went beyond craft. The performance is good as it is partly because the distance between the actor and the character was smaller than either of them would have chosen. Six, Spielberg made a version he didn't want and said [music] so publicly. Columbia Pictures came to Spielberg in 1980 with a request carrying [music] the institutional weight of a studio that had financed a film and considered itself entitled to a continued commercial relationship with the material. They wanted a special edition with new footage, [music] specifically what the original film had deliberately withheld, the interior of the mothership. The space beyond the door Neary walks through, the answer to the visual question the film had [music] spent two hours building and refused to answer. Spielberg shot it, cut it in, and released the special edition in 1980. Then he spent the following years saying in [music] interviews and in home video packaging that he preferred the original, that the version without the interior was the version he had made and stood behind, that showing what was inside was what the studio wanted and leaving it unseen was what the film required. The special edition exists.

[00:09:43]Spielberg's preference for the version that didn't show it is [music] documented repeatedly across decades.

[00:09:48]Both things are true and the tension between them has never been resolved.

[00:09:52]Five, the ending divided the audience between transcendence [music] and abandonment. The final sequence asks the audience to experience Roy Neary's decision to board the alien ship on arrival, the fulfillment of a vision that consumed and destroyed his ordinary life. The moment when what he has been striving toward finally reaches back. A significant portion of the audience in 1977 [music] and since has received it exactly that way. Another significant portion has received it as a portrait of a man who abandoned his wife and children without explanation or apology and was rewarded by a film presenting that abandonment [music] as transcendence. Both readings are supported by what is on screen. Neither is wrong. Spielberg has acknowledged across years of interviews that his perspective on [music] the ending shifted after he became a father and that the man who made the film and the man who watched it a decade [music] later with children of his own were not in complete agreement about what Neary had done. Four, the [music] film entered real government conversations about UFOs. The depiction of government behavior in close encounters, the concealment of extraterrestrial contact, the secret installation, the civilian witness dismissed [music] and discredited by official channels was not received purely as science fiction by everyone who watched it. The film was screened privately for NASA members [music] and discussed in contexts having nothing to do with cinema inside and around the institutions responsible for America's official position on unidentified aerial phenomena [music] and in communities of researchers working on UFO disclosure from outside the government. The framework the film used was drawn from the real work of Dr. J. Allen Hynek and the actual history of Project Blue Book gave the fiction a credibility that pure invention [music] wouldn't have carried. Close Encounters didn't just reflect the cultural conversation about government and extraterrestrial contact. It shaped the terms of that conversation for years after its release, [music] establishing a visual and narrative grammar for official concealment that subsequent disclosure discussions kept returning to whether they intended to or not. Three, the mothership consumed the budget. The model that descends at the end, the craft the film spends its entire running time building toward, was not [music] a routine effects achievement within normal 1977 science fiction production parameters. It was an object of obsessive practical construction that consumed resources creating genuine financial strain across every other department. The effects team was working at the absolute edge of what practical model photography could deliver. The scale, the lighting design, the density of detail that makes the mothership read as something vast and real rather than a model on a stage. They achieved it. What they built set the standard [music] for science fiction visual effects in the practical era, holding until digital technology made the comparison irrelevant. [music] Every dollar the mothership consumed was unavailable to something else on a production with multiple competing demands. [music] The film ends with the most expensive object in it. Everything preceding the ending was made under the pressure of knowing what the ending was going to cost. Two, the film was built from real [music] UFO research. Bob Balaban's interpreter character, the civilian linguist attached to the government's contact operation, present at every significant moment, was drawn from a real person. [music] Dr. J Allen Hynek was an astronomer who had served as scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official UFO investigation program, and who developed a classification system [music] that included the phrase that became the film's title, Close Encounter of the First Kind, Second Kind, Third Kind.

[00:13:33]Hynek's framework was not fictional, it was the actual taxonomy a real scientist constructed from years of documented cases and Spielberg built the film's scientific credibility on that foundation. Hynek himself appears in the film in a brief cameo near the end, present at the moment of contact visible if you know to look. The man whose real work named the film is standing in it when the thing he spent his career investigating finally happens on screen.

[00:13:59]Spielberg put [music] the source inside the story. The fiction was built on a foundation that the man who laid it was present to see completed. One, Spielberg made it and then couldn't fully defend it. Close Encounters is the film Spielberg has most consistently identified as his most directly autobiographical, the story of a man whose inner [music] life is more real than his external responsibilities, whose obsessive imagination overrides the ordinary claims of family and obligation. The director who made it was 29 and had not yet become a father. He understood [music] Roy Neary from the inside, the pull of the vision, the inability to explain it, the willingness to [music] sacrifice what you have for something you can't name. He made the film from that understanding [music] and it is one of the greatest he has ever made. Then time passed. He had children.

[00:14:48]He watched the ending from a position he hadn't occupied when he shot it as a father rather than [music] a son and what he saw was different from what he had put there. He has said across enough interviews that he could not make that film today, that the ending he designed as transcendence reads differently now.

[00:15:03]Spielberg built a monument to wonder from a memory that never happened and an ending he can no longer entirely defend.

[00:15:09]The film survived both. If this changed how you hear those five notes, subscribe. They're still out there, still playing.