They were replaced with walkie-talkies in the 20th anniversary re-release.
Steven Spielberg says he made a mistake editing guns out of his 1982 film E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial in an anniversary edition of the movie.
Upon first release, the film’s theatrical cut includes a scene of police officers chasing young kids with firearms. Spielberg edited the guns out for the 20th anniversary re-release of the film in 2002, replacing them with walkie-talkies.
“That was a mistake. I never should have done that,” Spielberg said at the Time 100 Summit. “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.
“E.T. was a film that I was sensitive to the fact that the federal agents were approaching kids with firearms exposed and I thought I would change the guns into walkie-talkies… Years went by and I changed my own views.
“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.”
The moderator of the interview being conducted brought up the recent news about Roald Dahl’s works being edited to feature more inclusive language.
“Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever!” Spielberg joked before adding: “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”
Steven Spielberg thinks E.T. is a perfect movie
Last month, Spielberg told Stephen Colbert that there’s only about “five or six” of his own movies he can re-watch over and over again, with one in particularly standing out. He then stated that he thought E.T. was the perfect movie – “It’s one of the few movies I’ve made that I can actually look back at again and again.”
The 76-year-old also mentioned that his 1977 flick Close Encounters of the Third Kind was his most personal film and was evocative of the trauma he faced in his own family.
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