E.T was inspired by the divorce of Steven Spielberg's parents
'E.T.' was inspired by the divorce of Steven Spielberg's parents. The 75-year-old director was at the helm of the 1982 sci-fi fantasy film - which told the story of a boy and his siblings who befriend an extraterrestrial dubbed E.T who has been left behind on Earth - and claimed that the end scene made him think of his parents Arnold and Leah, who divorced in 1966, and had been working on a script about it when he decided to make it into a story about children. He said: "What if that little creature never went back to the ship? What if the creature was part of a foreign-exchange program? What ...