CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

IN 1991, WHEN asked to select a single “master image” to sum up his work, Steven Spielberg didn’t choose a shark, or a fedora’d archaeologist or a bike flying across the moon. Instead he chose something simpler: a shot of a little boy opening his front door to see the blazing orange light from a UFO bursting in. In picking the image from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, the director recalled “that beautiful but awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. And he’s very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.” Promise or danger in light: it is what Spielberg’s cinema has been subsequently built on.

The moment may have come from one of the young Spielberg’s earliest memories, being guided up the aisle of the Adath Israel synagogue in Cincinatti, Ohio, towards a red, candlelit Ark Of The Torah — hidden behind curtains. Spielberg wrote the image into the script as young Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey) opens the door to let extra-terrestrials in before the aliens launch a full attack on the Guiler household, wrenching him away from his horrified mother, Jillian (Melinda Dillon).

Guffey was a last-minute casting choice discovered as filming was under way. Spielberg had Zack Bowman in mind until his producer, Julia Philips, spotted the angelic Guffey while picking up her niece at preschool. Spielberg brought both children on location to Mobile, Alabama for a screen test. Guffey won out.

Not to confuse the four-year-old, Spielberg shot Guffey’s scenes sequentially. The alien abduction was filmed in a dilapidated farmhouse in Fairhouse, just outside Mobile during the summer of 1976. By now, Spielberg had built up a rapport with his young star.

“He was like a big kid, almost like a big brother,” says Guffey, who now works in financial services. “It was, ‘Hey, let’s hang out, let’s have a good time.’ It was him giving me gifts and taking me for a ride on his motorcycle. He never treated me like a kid per se. He interacted with me continually and explained things.”

In this instance, the director told Guffey that the kitchen was about to go bat-shit crazy so that he wouldn’t be scared, placing the boy’s mother on the other side of the door for reassurance. It’s an image that has reverberated around not only Spielberg’s career but also around any science-fiction film looking for a shorthand to communicate wonder, terror or both.

Spielberg said of the shot: “For me, that was very symbolic of what only a child could do, which is trust the light.” His first use of his signature ‘God light’, he’s been trusting it ever since.

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