With Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg has made his first UFO and alien-focused movie in a long time. It may have been years since his last go-around with extraterrestrials, but they’re not just a fad for him; they’re something he fully believes in.
“I have a very strong, sneaking suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now,” he told a crowd at SXSW’s Friday keynote. (Thanks, Vulture.) While stressing he knows as much as the average person about the subject (aka, not much), he’s certain the planet has aliens and “made a movie” about that hunch. That’s why so much of Disclosure Day’s marketing has been focused on Josh O’Connor’s character wanting to perform a mass reveal of the truth to the world, with others arguing there just have to be other beings that exist in this universe beyond humans.
The filmmaker entered Hollywood hoping to make a UFO movie, which studios repeatedly passed on. As Spielberg tells it, nobody “got it” back then, and aliens were “on the fringes of science of technology”…but after Jaws came out and became a hit, he had carte blanche to make anything he wanted. So he revived his dormant UFO movie, which became Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
If aliens were on the planet, Spielberg understandably thinks it’d shock people, especially the more religious among us, but not to a “lethal” degree. And if he ever got the chance to meet an alien, he’d want to watch movies with them—specifically, his very own E.T., along with It’s a Wonderful Life as a way of showing how humans help each other and push on despite various setbacks.
Just him saying that probably gives you an idea of what might happen in Disclosure Day, but we’ll have to wait until June 12 to find out for sure.
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