on July 17, 2024, 11:07 am
Steven Spielberg: I shouldn’t have edited E.T. for modern audiences
Hollywood director says classic works of art are ‘sacrosanct’ and he regrets the ‘censorship’ of his 2002 anniversary version
Craig Simpson 27 April 2023 • 8:07pm
Steven Spielberg has spoken out against censorship of “our cultural heritage”, as he expressed his regret over editing guns out of the film E.T.
The integrity of works of art is “sacrosanct”, the director said, cautioning against changes being made to classic films.
Such works are part of “our cultural heritage”, he said, and should not be subjected to censorship to fit with modern sensibilities.
The American Oscar-winner’s comments come after the revelations that numerous classic works of literature have been edited to remove offensive terms.
For a 2002 anniversary cut, Spielberg had altered the footage to give federal agents pursuing E.T. walkie talkies instead of firearms, but he has recently admitted during an interview with Time: “I changed my own views.”
He said: “That was a mistake. I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.
“I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that.
“All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.”
He added: “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”
His comments come after Disney attempted to address contentious themes in its own back catalogue by adding content warnings over racial stereotypes to films such as Dumbo and Peter Pan.
Earlier this month, The Telegraph revealed that Penguin Random House had removed racial terms deemed offensive from PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels and added trigger warnings to the front of new editions.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Poirot mysteries were similarly purged of racial terms by Harper Collins, with entire passages removed.
New editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels were also revealed to have been edited to avoid causing offence and the children’s works of Roald Dahl had been rewritten to remove terms such as “fat” and “ugly”.
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