Spielberg, Who Regrets Cutting ‘E.T.’ Guns, Says Don’t Revise Old Works
Steven Spielberg, one of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers, has weighed in on a cultural debate about whether to change books, films and television shows to make them more palatable to contemporary sensibilities, calling such revisions “censorship.”
Most of the discussion in recent weeks has been about publishers excising references to the race and physical appearance of characters in the work of deceased authors like Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and Ursula K. Le Guin. But film and television directors, including Spielberg, have also made revisions to published work.
Spielberg said in 2011 that he regretted replacing the guns that federal agents carried with walkie-talkies in the 20th anniversary edition of “E.T.,” and he later brought the guns back for its 30th anniversary release. The director went even further on Tuesday at a forum sponsored by Time magazine, condemning all such alterations to artwork.
“No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are either voluntarily or being forced to peer through,” he said, adding that all movies were “a signpost of where we were when we made them and what the world was like.”
Source: The New York Times
