Monday, August 31, 2009
crew members of E.T
* Henry Thomas as Elliott, a lonely ten-year-old boy. Elliott longs for a good friend, whom he finds in E.T. Elliott adopts the stranded alien and they form a mental, physical, and emotional bond.
* Robert MacNaughton as Michael, Elliott's football-playing 16-year-old brother who often picks on him.
* Drew Barrymore as Gertie, Elliott's mischievous seven-year-old sister. She is sarcastic and initially terrified of E.T., but grows to love the alien.
* Dee Wallace-Stone as Mary, the children's mother, recently separated from her husband. She is mostly oblivious to the alien's presence in her household.
* Peter Coyote as "Keys", a government agent so dubbed because of the key rings that prominently hang from his belt. He tells Elliott that he has waited to see an alien since the age of ten.
* K. C. Martel, Sean Frye and C. Thomas Howell as Greg, Steve and Tyler, Michael's friends. They help Elliott and E.T. evade the authorities during the film's climax.
* Erika Eleniak as the young girl Elliott kisses in class.
Spielberg auditioned more than 300 children for the roles.[5] Having worked with Cary Guffey on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he felt confident in working with a cast composed mostly of child actors, rather than young adults.[6] Robert Fisk suggested Henry Thomas for the role of Elliott.[7] Thomas, who auditioned in an Indiana Jones costume, did not perform well in the formal testing, but got the filmmakers' attention in an improvised scene.[6] Thoughts of his dead dog inspired his convincing tears.[8] MacNaughton auditioned eight times to play Michael, sometimes with boys auditioning for Elliott. Spielberg felt Drew Barrymore had the right imagination for the film after she impressed him with a story that she led a punk rock band.[7] Spielberg enjoyed working with the children, noting that the experience made him feel ready to become a father.[9]
The major voice work for E.T. was performed by Pat Welsh, an elderly woman who lived in Marin County, California. Welsh smoked two packets of cigarettes a day, which gave her voice a quality that sound effects creator Ben Burtt liked. She spent nine-and-a-half hours recording her part, and was paid $380 by Burtt for her services.[10] Burtt also recorded 16 other people and various animals to create E.T.'s "voice". These included Spielberg; Debra Winger; Burtt's sleeping wife, who had a cold; a burp from his USC film professor; and raccoons, sea otters and horses.[11][12] Burtt would later go on to provide the voice for the main character in Wall-E. The character's form of speaking has a similarity to E.T.
Doctors working at the USC Medical Center were recruited to play the doctors who try to save E.T. after government agents take over Elliott's home. Spielberg felt that actors in the roles, performing lines of highly technical medical dialogue, would come across as unnatural.[9] During post-production, Spielberg decided to cut a scene featuring Harrison Ford as Elliott's principal. The scene featured Elliott being reprimanded for his behavior in science class, and saw Elliott's chair being levitated while E.T. was levitating his "phone" equipment up the staircase with Gertie.[7]
