Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter ofE.T.
This person was bent over, picking stuff up off the ground.
I asked, What are you doing?
Credit: RALPH GATTI/AFP/Getty Images
Everywhere you looked on the ground there were fossils and seashells and all kinds of things in the sand.
I said, Who are you?
And she simply said, Im Harrisons friend.
Bruce McBroom
And I said, Well, what do you do?
She told me, Currently, Im a failed writer.
I began to laugh and she began to laugh.
Then I said, What have you failed at?
Then I started asking her a lot of questions aboutThe Black Stallion.
She said No, no, no.
Im retired from writing now.
I need to find another way to live my life.
She heard it and said, Thats really sweet and interesting, but Ive retired.
Harrison said, Sounds like Melissa…
I asked, Can you help me?
He said, Let me talk to her tonight.
She started to brainstorm with me and added all kinds of new ideas to the mix.
And thats when I knew that I had a partner.
Melissa was back in the writing game.
She would put everything on cards.
She went away for six weeks and wrote the script.
When I finally read the script, I pretty much said, I could shoot this movie tomorrow.
We tweaked it and we changed just a little bit of the third act.
At one point, E.T.
Those were some of the very few changes.
Of all the movies Ive ever made,E.T.went through the least amount of revision.
Melissas heart was just glowing over that movie.
And the same darn thing happened 30 years later when we started our second collaboration onThe BFGby Roald Dahl.
The main difference was I didnt have to talk her into writing this one.
She had started writing it even before I came on board and had done three drafts before I started.
It was the same energy and ease of conversation that happened all over again.
Melissa didnt know she was sick at the beginning.
We made the entire movie ofThe BFGfrom beginning to end that way, and watched it and changed it.
I didnt ask what the personal reasons were.
And one time she was absent [for] four days.
Then she came back and she seemed perfectly okay again.
So her health issues came as a surprise to all of us.
I feel her presence more than her absence.
Im really going to start to hurt when that fades and I start missing her again in my life.
I could speak for many of her closest friends were all still in disbelief that shes gone.
She could relate to kids better than anybody I had ever met.
You get on their eye level and you simply fall into conversation with them.
I think she understood the natural habitat of childhood.
Melissa was all about discovery.
And childhood is all about daily, even hourly, even minute-by-minute discoveries.
Melissa was like a kid when she was making these little breakthroughs.
Like how to tell a story, or how to find the right line of dialogue.
Or how to find sea shells in a desert.
As told toAnthony Breznicanon Nov. 25, 2015.
Mathison and Spielbergs final collaboration,The BFG, opens on July 1.
