This absolutely blows my mind, but I still think it’s hysterical.
To promote the Indiana Jones BluRay release, Steven Spielberg recently spoke at an LA screening of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. And despite the fact that George Lucas is one of his best friends, the director admitted that digitally altering his childhood classic, E.T. was one of his worst decisions:
“For myself, I tried [changing a film] once and lived to regret it…Not because of fan outrage, but because I was disappointed in myself. I got overly sensitive to [some of the reaction] to ‘ET,’ and I thought if technology evolved, [I might go in and change some things]. It was OK for a while, but I realized what I had done was I had robbed people who loved ‘ET’ of their memories of ‘ET.’ If I put just one cut of ‘ET’ on Blu-ray and it was the 1982, would anyone object to that? (The crowd yells ‘NO!’ in unison.) OK, so be it. (Huge applause from the audience)”
And what about Lucas’ constant changes? According to Joblo, while Spielberg doesn’t agree with Lucas, he’s a good friend and if that’s what he wants to do to his films, that’s his business.
Respectable enough…
Luckily, Spielberg said that both the changes made for the E.T. DVD release and the RAIDERS DVD release will be undone for the Blu-ray release.
Another amazing and humbling fact: while he is considered to be one of the greatest directors of all time, Spielberg can only watch maybe one of his films straight through:
“Of all the movies I’ve ever made, RAIDERS is maybe the only one I can watch from beginning to end…Same with THE LAST CRUSADE – those are my two favorites in the series,”
No TEMPLE OF DOOM…?