There are actors who don’t like watching their own work, but it’s seldom that you hear about directors who don’t like to watch their own movies. When you have a resume like director Steven Spielberg‘s and are responsible for decades of culturally iconic movies, you would assume he would have no problem revisiting some of his own classics. Recently, Spielberg revealed in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that he generally doesn’t like to watch his movies, except for E.T.: The Extra-terrestrial.
In a clip posted on the Twitter account of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Colbert lists off some of Spielberg’s work on TV, which consisted of a lot of older shows when he was at the beginning of his career, and asks what advice Spielberg would give to that younger version of himself.
Spielberg starts to ponder an answer, “I think there’s always things that I…this is why I don’t look at all of my movies after I’ve made them. I’m not Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard having screenings of her own silent movies for herself, you know? So, I don’t look back that often. But every once in a while, I’ll see a movie with my kids. Cause I wanna accompany my kids when they see E.T. for the first time. I don’t want them to see E.T. without dad sitting there. Especially the scary parts at the beginning. Sometimes I see things that I intended to do that I didn’t do. Sometimes I see things that would’ve been a better idea…that I’m now seeing all those years later. But for the most part, E.T. is a pretty perfect movie.”
Colbert would agree with a humorously downplayed, “It’s pretty good. Pretty good film.” Spielberg, then continues, “It’s one of the few movies that I’ve made that I can actually look at again and again. I’m not gonna name what they are besides E.T., but there are five or six films [from his filmography] that I can watch again, but I don’t usually do that.”
It is understandable from a director’s standpoint how one can be so critical of their movies that it’s difficult to watch. Spielberg had, one time, made a “special edition” of E.T. where he replaced the puppet with a CGI version and infamously replaced the guns of the FBI with walkie-talkies. Then, even Spielberg had to backtrack and restore the original version when he realized that there is no messing with perfection.