How Harrison Ford Accidentally Saved ‘E.T.’

Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg are one of Hollywood’s most famous duos. They worked together on four huge Indiana Jones movies, and each one helped make their careers even bigger.

But while most people remember them for Indiana Jones, there’s another interesting story about how Ford and Spielberg helped each other, this time, in a completely different movie. In fact, Harrison Ford played a key role in saving Spielberg’s 1982 classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, from almost never being made.

Spielberg shared this surprising story during an interview at the 40th-anniversary screening of E.T. at the TCM Classic Film Festival, which was reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

He revealed that the movie might not have happened without Ford’s help. Back in the early 1980s, Spielberg had most of the story worked out, but he still needed a screenwriter. He thought of Melissa Mathison, who had written The Black Stallion, and believed she would be perfect for the job.

“I pretty much had worked out most of the story, and I needed a writer to write with me or, hopefully, write it based on the story,” Spielberg said.

At first, Mathison turned him down. She had decided to stop writing and wasn’t interested in taking on a new project. But Spielberg didn’t give up.

At the time, he and Harrison Ford were filming Raiders of the Lost Ark in Tunisia, and he asked Ford for help. Ford loved the idea of E.T. and decided to talk to Mathison himself.

“He talked to her, and she came to me the next day and said, ‘OK, you got Harrison so excited about this. What is it that I missed?’ I think I hadn’t told her the story very well because I told her the story again, and she got really emotional, and she committed right there in the Tunisian desert,” Spielberg explained.

Thanks to Ford’s encouragement, Mathison agreed to write the script, and the collaboration between her and Spielberg turned out to be amazing. Mathison created some of the movie’s most unforgettable moments, including the famous line, “E.T. phone home,” and the alien’s special power of telekinesis.

The work on the script even happened while Raiders of the Lost Ark was still being filmed. Spielberg recalled that they would spend a couple of hours each day working on the story while Mathison wrote pages and brought her ideas back to him.

“We would spend two hours a day for five days, and she would go off and write pages and come back. There were so many details for the character that Melissa brought into my world from her world,” he said.

Sadly, Mathison passed away from cancer in 2015, but before that, she and Spielberg worked together again on The BFG. Her writing was always full of wonder, and Spielberg’s vision helped bring it to life on the screen.

The story of E.T. shows that sometimes it’s not just talent or hard work that makes a movie succeed—sometimes it’s about the people who believe in it and each other. In this case, Harrison Ford’s support was what helped make one of the most beloved movies of all time possible.

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