Roy Neary, an electric lineman, watches how his quiet and ordinary daily life turns upside down after a close encounter with a UFO.
Became one of the first films to have a "Special Edition" director's cut made when Steven Spielberg wanted to improve his original vision.
Roy Neary:
This means something. This is important.
From Muncie, Indiana (Roy's town) to Moorcroft, Wyoming (outside Devils tower) is 1,250 miles and would have taken at least two full days to drive; yet, Roy is showing arriving at Moorcraft the next day in the late morning. Later, though, we can see the car he is driving has Wyoming plates, indicating that he flew to Wyoming and rented a car when he arrived.
Near the end of the credits it starts to reads as follows: "During the filming of all animal sequences, H.L. EDWARDS, Veterinarian of Gillette, Wyoming, was in attendance at all times to aid the filmmakers and the anesthetist in proper treatment of the animals used, and at no time were the animals harmed or mistreated in any way."
A "Special Edition" version was released in 1980 (3 years after the film's original theatrical release). The original production of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was plagued with schedule and budget problems. Spielberg originally wanted to release the film in the summer of 1978, however, Columbia Pictures (who were undergoing financial troubles at the time) insisted that Spielberg have it ready by November 1977. Therefore many scenes Spielberg had scripted couldn't be filmed as he originally intended due to time constraints. After the movie's huge success, Spielberg asked Columbia to allow him to re-cut the picture and to shoot additional sequences; the studio agreed at the condition that he included new scenes showing the inside of the alien mothership (to entice audiences into the theater again). Spielberg was given a budget of $1.5 million and seven weeks to shoot the new sequences (some of which were shot while he was also directing 1941 (1979)). He had to use a different director of photography (Allen Daviau) because Vilmos Zsigmond was unavailable, and he was able to convince most of the original cast to re-appear, with the exception of director Francois Truffaut (who played French scientist Lacombe) who was on location shooting a film at the time. For years, Steven Spielberg considered the Special Edition the only "real" version of the movie and dismissed the original as an inferior "work-in-progress". According to Columbia, all prints of the original version have been destroyed (apart from a few copies kept in the studio's vault for historical value only). Only the Special Edition had been the version available on video until Criterion became the first company to release different versions of the film in any video format. The following are the differences between the Original Version (O.V.) and the Special Edition (S.E.):
English, French, Spanish, Hindi
$20,000,000 (estimated)
$1,767,758 3 September 2017
$135,189,114
$306,898,466