00:00That little boy, he's still here, inside of me.
00:04You are Petey?
00:07No, no, no, I am, I am, I am Petey!
00:10One popular thought online was that your pitch for the film was,
00:13what if E.T. returned when Elliot was an adult?
00:16Oh, that's not far from it.
00:17Okay, that was going to be my question. How accurate was that?
00:19But it was also, it was a little bit broader than that.
00:23It was like, what if you were chosen as the special kid by that magical friend?
00:27So, for me it was like, there was Free Willy, Harry and the Hendersons, Mac and Me.
00:32You know, all these films that sort of had, you know, Beethoven.
00:37All these films that had this magical friend who taught you,
00:41or brought you out of your shell, made you sort of like things about yourself,
00:45gave you confidence and then left or disappeared.
00:48What if, you know, usually those films end with, I've got it now.
00:52But what if you didn't? What if you were like, hold on, where are you?
00:56You know, come back and keep going.
00:59Yeah, what would happen to that person who couldn't ever let it go?
01:02Oh, I love that. And I've got Beethoven, what a throwback.
01:05Well, it was everything, you know, anything and everything.
01:08Yeah, it was, I could name 30 of them, but obviously E.T.
01:11It felt like E.T. was the one, you know, it's hard to say it's not that when it is,
01:16but it is also not.
01:18But it was more that that was the one that most represented the myth.
01:23Yeah.
01:23And it felt the one that an audience would most get.
01:28You know, I hope, you know, I've seen those same comments that say,
01:31they're just making E.T. 2.
01:32I'm like, hold on, I'm not literally making it.
01:34It's very different.
01:35We're not literally making E.T. 2.
01:37But I have seen them and I hope when they see it, they get what we're trying to do.
01:45Well, I love all the stuff that I was seeing about nostalgia,
01:50but it felt like it was living there, a lot of the films and TV that I'd seen around.
01:56And all the games, I think what we were excited by was telling a story about trying to reconcile with
02:03that,
02:03like using all the stuff that we couldn't let go of to tell a story about not being able to
02:11let go of that stuff.
02:14And there was something really that felt a bit fresh and exciting about that.
02:18And then more exciting, which sort of kept making me want to make it and ride it through whatever,
02:24however many years, was that I don't think I'd seen before a story about not just saying don't grow up,
02:34or not just saying being Peter Pan is great, but also not saying you've got to grow up,
02:39telling a story about trying to juggle them both.
02:42The line we had when we were writing it was we wanted to do a character who was trying to
02:46hold wonder and responsibility
02:48in equal measure that the best people we met in our lives were people who seemed to hold those two
02:55concepts really well in their life.
