George Lucas gets all the heat for the Star Wars special editions, but his buddy Steven Spielberg edited one of his most beloved films, too. In the original version of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, government agents are seen holding guns during the stirring bike sequence (a hammer would have sufficed), but in the 20th anniversary edition, Spielberg replaced the firearms with walkie-talkies.
It’s a decision that the Oscar winner has come to regret (and since fixed).
“That was a mistake,” he said during the TIME100 Summit. “I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”
Spielberg doesn’t want other filmmakers to make the same mistake he did. “All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there,” he said.
You got that, the Russo Brothers? You think it’s a good idea now to digitally remove the scene in The Gray Man where the Gray Man does the Six Flags dance, but you’ll eventually wish you hadn’t (I have not seen The Gray Man).
(Via Mediaite)