As Spielberg confirms whether ET was ‘slimy or dry’, we enter a new age of the celebrity interview | Film

For the most part, Steven Spielberg has avoided most of the indignities of the modern day press tour. He hasn’t had to subject himself to any spicy chicken wings, or summon any witticisms when presented with a cloche-covered sausage roll. Unlike many other celebrities, he hasn’t chosen to promote Disclosure Day by answering softball questions while simultaneously fashioning a Lionel Richie-style clay approximation of himself for YouTube. For this he should be applauded.

Instead, Spielberg has spent this promotional cycle on something more suited to his stature. A maestro tour, if you will, on which he gets to position Disclosure Day against a body of work that is second to none. Publications have run long oral histories about his entire career. He was a guest during the prestigious final week of Stephen Colbert’s talkshow. He was interviewed by the New York Times about the exact texture of ET’s skin.

That last one really did happen. A clip of the interview has gone mildly viral, featuring interviewer Rachel Abrams straight-out asking Spielberg “Was ET slimy or dry?” before suggesting that this is a decades-old conundrum that had long foxed everyone she knows. To his credit, Spielberg answered the question with tremendous gusto, if a little bewilderment. “ET was a little moist but never slimy,” he replied, after shaking his head. He then explained that, while “ET was only dry when he got sick”, it would be wrong to call him slimy. Xenomorphs are slimy, he pointed out. “ET never had tendrils of drool.”

Now, why Abrams asked this question is another matter. The good faith interpretation is that Spielberg has spent the last half-century in the public eye, and been interviewed so many times that he has developed a tendency to become something of an anecdote jukebox, reeling out the hits unprompted. This is something that afflicts only the truly famous but it can be debilitating. There are, after all, only so many times that a person can hear Ringo Starr’s “I thought it was you three” story.

Viewed from this perspective, there is real value in extracting genuinely new information from A-list celebrities. The fact that ET is now canonically moist maybe adds something to the cultural conversation that wasn’t there before? If so, the question deserves to be commended. However, if Abrams just asked a deliberately dumb question to the director of Schindler’s List because she knew it would get clicks, then that is another matter entirely.

We must also question why the subject arose in the first place. Abrams’s justification that it was in the public interest, since it had long been a discussion within her social group, rings a little false, because presumably everyone in her social group has eyes and can see perfectly well for themselves that ET isn’t slimy. It’s right there! All through the film! We know what texture ET’s skin is because ET is a visible character throughout the entire movie. As everybody knows, ET’s skin is clearly pleather or pleather-adjacent, like the skin of a Mediterranean grandmother. There is certainly no slime there. If there was, then the film would have included a scene of Drew Barrymore skidding about in ET’s slug trail, or the climatic hug scene between ET and Elliott would have ended with Elliott looking down at his slime-covered clothes and tutting, “These were new on today.”

But none of that happened so we can reasonably ascertain that ET isn’t slimy and this was a stupid question to ask. Still, the new media landscape loves nothing more than a replicable format, so perhaps this is something we’ll see more of in the future. For all we know, the New York Times is working on a series called Famous Auteurs Answer Self-Evident Questions as we speak, and this time next week they’ll drag Martin Scorsese in to ask if Jake LaMotta had 12 ears, or Paul Thomas Anderson to ask if Daniel Day-Lewis is secretly a mouse. For the avoidance of doubt, I hope this happens.