One Of E.T.'s Most Honest Lines Was Improvised By A 6-Year-Old Drew Barrymore
Drew Barrymore starred in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" when she was only six years old. Nearly 40 years later, her director, Steven Spielberg, appeared on "The Drew Barrymore Show" for a birthday celebration and they reminisced about filming the seminal alien classic. Spielberg recalled that Barrymore "came up with a lot of lines in the movie" as a little girl, including the memorable scene when Gertie first sees the titular E.T. In the movie, she takes one quizzical look at the alien and says, "I don't like his feet."
"She said that during rehearsal, and I said, 'Drew, can you remember to say that when the cameras are rolling?'" he remembered.
The feet observation was Barrymore's genuine response to the E.T. animatronic designed by the renowned special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi. It's not hard to see why she reacted this way. E.T. is the definition of ugly cute with his wrinkled, brown skin and bulbous head with huge eyes. He has short, stubby legs with a pair of splayed-out, bird-like feet with human toenails. He almost resembles a strange mix of a Pug dog and a Sphynx cat. His peculiar looks scared me as a child — so much so that I avoided seeing the film until I was an adult.
What makes this story even cuter is that Drew Barrymore believed E.T. was real. During a 40th anniversary cast reunion on "The Drew Barrymore Show," Dee Wallace, who plays her mother in the film, said, "We found you over there just talking away to E.T. And so we let Steven know. And so Steven, from that time on, appointed two guys to keep E.T. alive. So, whenever you came over to talk to him, he could react to you."
The child in all of us
Barrymore's improvisation is a great example of how child actors' innocence, active imagination, and lack of self-consciousness can make them such fascinating performers. It's one of the reasons why Steven Spielberg consistently uses child actors in his films. His movies are often awe-inspiring stories of the wonder and hardships of adolescence — a pivotal time period that shapes the rest of our lives. Spielberg often views the world through children's eyes and empowers them as nuanced characters with a wide range of conflicts, emotions, and goals.
The director seems far more connected to his inner child than most other filmmakers of his generation. As film critic Leonard Maltin observed in an "E.T." 40th-anniversary featurette, "Steven Spielberg has a gift for getting inside the child in all of us because he has that quality himself." In addition to the "E.T." kids, he drew incredible performances from Haley Joel Osment as a lonely, robotic orphan in "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence," Christian Bale as a hopeful World War II prisoner in "Empire of the Sun," and Ke Huay Quan as the loyal Short Round in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," among others. Watching behind-the-scenes videos of "E.T." with a tiny Drew Barrymore, you can see how Spielberg fosters a supportive and enjoyable atmosphere on set for his young actors, one that perfectly matches their playful, creative spirits.