Just like a movie theater, they had to wait until it got dark for the show to begin. That’s when Arnold Spielberg led his young son outside to stare up into a clear August sky so they could watch falling stars streak down between the constellations.

For anyone moved by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the many other Steven Spielberg films that touched on fatherhood, that night in the early 1950s is where it all began. The director told me so himself.

“I first became aware of the sky when my father pointed out the Perseid meteor shower to me when I was about six years old living in Haddon Heights, New Jersey,” he said in a 2005 interview. “That’s probably the first time I became aware of the sky. My father really held the key to the universe which unlocked my imagination. I give my dad all the credit for that. He was an electrical engineer but he was also an amateur astronomer. He loved reading science fiction, and he led me to these wonderments of both nature and fiction.”

On Tuesday, at the age of 103, Arnold Spielberg passed away, just three years after the filmmaker’s mother, Leah Adler, died at 97. The two divorced when Steven was 19, a separation the filmmaker has acknowledged hit him hard. In addition to the wonders and mysteries of the universe, the other driving force in so many of his stories is a yearning to put a family back together. 

That may be one reason they resonated so deeply with audiences—kids and parents alike—who saw something familiar in even his most fantastical films.

You can see it in the absent father of E.T., leaving young Elliott in search of companionship that bonds him to an odd, lost being who just wants to be reunited with his home. It’s there in the obsessiveness of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, which pulls him away from his family and leads him to leave behind everything he knows. 

Spielberg has said his father was a “workaholic” who traveled frequently in his work for General Electric and helped develop components for early computers. When Arnold was there for him, the impact was profound—like when he gave the boy a movie camera at age 16, and Steven discovered his calling while crafting homemade war films with his neighborhood friends. 

His mother held sway over his imagination as well. He described her as “like Peter Pan” and free-spirited. Her love of music, particularly the original cast recording of West Side Story, inspired his upcoming new cinematic version of the Broadway love story. The absentee dad Robin Williams played in Hook, a whimsical figure who let distraction replace magic, may be an amalgamation of them both.

Spielberg has never tried to hide the personal thread running through his films. “It’s a nagging theme in my work. A theme that also works into films that aren’t as fantastic, like Empire of the Sun, The Color Purple, or Catch Me if You Can,” he said in our 2005 interview for USA Today. “It’s a theme that interests me, that has always interested me.”

It’s there in the bond between Indiana Jones and Short Round in The Temple of Doom, and in Harrison Ford and Sean Connery’s combative chemistry in The Last Crusade. It came up again in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull between Ford and Shia LaBeouf, playing the son the archaeologist never knew. It’s in the scientists who find themselves surrogate parents of frightened young visitors in Jurassic Park, and the little robot boy seeking a family in A.I. Artificial Intelligence. 

“From very early on in my career everybody said that I didn’t ever make personal movies, that I only made these big concept films,” Spielberg told me. “I always felt all of my films were personal because I’ve never made a film where some part of the story didn’t come from some experience I shared with my family.”

Steven had a strained and distant relationship with his father for many years after his parents divorced, and you can see him working out his feelings over their split in many of his early films. Close Encounters could be interpreted as an effort to see things from the father’s point of view, to understand what might lead someone away from those who love and rely on him.

“They’re all landmarks as we get older about how we’re changing and how we see the world,” Spielberg said. “I couldn’t have made Close Encounters of the Third Kind the same way today. My values are different.” A lot changed in him over the years.

“I’ve grown up a lot,” Spielberg added. “I certainly wouldn’t have had the father abandoning his family for the wonders of the universe [today]. I wasn’t a dad when I was 27, 28 years old and made that movie. I’m a father now. It’s very easy to have somebody leave his family to get on a mothership when you’re not a father yourself.”

When he made War of the Worlds in 2005, Spielberg imbued Tom Cruise’s lead character with fatherhood fears. He called that movie the “polar opposite” of Close Encounters. “This is a story about a man who fights for his family,” Spielberg said, even if Cruise’s character doesn’t start out that way. 

“As far as he’s concerned, the biggest child in his life is himself. He sees his kids very infrequently. They live with his ex-wife. He’s able to see them every other weekend, but he chooses to see them only every six or seven weeks. That has created a lot of pain,” the director said. “One weekend where he takes the kids, this cataclysmic event occurs. He suddenly has to grow up fast.”

Even *E.T.’*s big, glowing heart has a hole in it. When Elliott casually mentions his father’s trip to Mexico with his new companion Sally, his mother holds it together for a moment before breaking down in tears. “Damn it, why don’t you grow up?” snaps the big brother. “Think how other people feel for a change?”

Elliott’s journey with his lost alien friend is an effort to prove he can do just that. Can a kid be strong, care for others, and be responsible even if he feels abandoned himself? The answer was yes, for both the character and the filmmaker.

“I’ve often said, and it’s actually the truth, that E.T. put the thought of having children for the first time in my heart. First time ever. Working with the kids in that,” Spielberg told me several years later, in a 2012 reunion with stars Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore for Entertainment Weekly.

Steven has raised seven children. He got married, to actress Amy Irving, in 1985, and then divorced four years later. He got married again, to his Temple of Doom star Kate Capshaw in 1991, and they’ve been together ever since. Over the years, he patched things up with his father, having finally lived some of the experiences he tried so hard to imagine and understand when he was young.

“I’m close with my mom and dad,” he said in 2005. “I’m closer with my mom and dad now than I even was living under their roof. I’ve found different ways of looking at my experiences, in my life and my family.”

When he released the Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies, the filmmaker recalled how terrified he was as a child at the prospect of war between the superpowers, and he recalled his father comforting that anxiety. 

“My dad always said, ‘Don’t worry about this, there’s never going to be a war, nobody is that insane.’ But I never believed it. I actually felt that everybody was insane when I was a kid. And I felt that grown-ups were the most insane people on the planet and would do something as stupid and evil as start a thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union,” he told me in a  2015 EW interview.

“I saw Communist Russia as the enemy, and my father saw Communist Russia as human beings, who were just as scared of us as we were of them—that’s what my father always said.”

Through his camera, Steven Spielberg was forever trying to see things through his father’s eyes.

Every artist or storyteller’s upbringing shapes what he or she creates, but what’s unique about Spielberg’s case is how his search to understand his parents inspired so many movies that brought other families together. 

Think of how many millions of happy childhood memories were made between mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters as they watched his films over the decades. They’re as uncountable as a night full of stars.

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