00:00That little boy, he's still here, inside of me.
00:05You ain't 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 those 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
00:40or 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.
01:10But obviously E.T. It felt like E.T. was the one, you know,
01:14it's hard to say it's not that when it is, but it is also not.
01:17But 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.
01:27Yeah.
01:28You know, I hope, you know, I've seen those same comments that say,
01:31they're just making E.T. too.
01:32I'm like, well, hold on. I'm not literally making it.
01:34It's very different.
01:35We're not literally making E.T. too.
01:37But I have seen them and I hope when they see it,
01:40they 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,
01:53a lot of the films and TV that I'd seen around.
01:56And all the game, I think what we were excited by was telling a story
02:01about trying to reconcile with that,
02:03like using all the stuff that we couldn't let go of
02:09to tell a story about not being able to let 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
02:23and ride it through whatever, however many years,
02:25was that I don't think I'd seen before a story about,
02:31about not just saying don't grow up or not just saying being Peter Pan is great,
02:37but 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
02:45who was trying to hold wonder and responsibility in equal measure,
02:49that the best people we met in our lives were people
02:52who seemed to hold that, hold those two concepts really well in their life.
02:56I think the story was one thing that you're seeing begin with.
02:59And then I think that the story of these moments
