The screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who has died aged 65 of neuroendocrine cancer, had only a handful of credits to her name. But the fact that one of them was E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) guaranteed that her name was enshrined in cinema history. It was in 1980 that the director Steven Spielberg suggested to her the story of a being from outer space who becomes stranded on Earth. Mathison was visiting her then partner, the actor Harrison Ford, in Tunisia during filming on Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. “We were driving through the night across the desert and we started talking about it,” Mathison recalled. “It was just beautiful, empty desert, with this incredibly starry sky. It was two o’clock in the morning, just Harrison and Steven and I. It was very exciting.”
John Sayles had already turned in a draft in which the intergalactic visitor was malevolent, with a beak-like mouth and grasshopper eyes. But Spielberg and Mathison decided the character should be frightened rather than frightening. “He was just someone who got off the bus and didn’t get back,” she said.
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