Mallory Rubin

The effect on the eyeball.

the deer who then morphs into the alien over the face the moment in the hospital where Emily Blunt's face is like visible against the bald head of the guy who's pretending to be an FBI agent exactly incredible pretending to be an FBI agent some of those visuals I thought were like really gripping they were all on the trailers and so actually I was like I think more excited for what the visual palette of the film would be based on the teases and glimpses we got but

That was the extent of it, right?

You don't see that really cool eye effect of that ring of devices and their pupils outside of the moments that we had basically already seen and seen in the posters, et cetera.

On the CGI animal front, and I want to talk just for another minute here about the role that movies and stories play in the film, and especially thinking about that

through the lens of where Spielberg is in his career and thinking about the role of the stories that he has told and wanted to tell and what that unlocks for us, right?

So I think the most generous like read on the CGI that I can attempt to provide is like that the animals are supposed to look strange and uncanny because they're trying to say like this is a child's experience of basically their version of a fairy tale.

So it would look like an animal pulled out of a storybook.

pulled out of the Hansel and Gretel... Right, the gingerbread house.

...gingerbread house that you are walking through the curtain of warm water and the snow that isn't cold on your bare feet into that experience.

I don't, like, mind that.

I think it's, like, slightly distracting, actually, how they look in the movie, the fox in particular.

But I think that that logic kind of holds for me, whether it works for everyone.

The idea that the...

You hit this early, and we've come at it a few times.

Every time I wrote in our doc, abducted slash chosen, because it is, I think, given that so much of the film hinges around the people are the bad ones, the aliens are misunderstood, and let's give them a chance, and oh my God, look at what we're doing to them, but could we do it a different way?

They are, at the end of the day, leading these two children out of their homes, into their ship,

And altering their minds and their very beings in a way that they will not understand for decades.

Yeah.

I thought that one of the most, like, harrowing moments in the movie was, like, because you have the brain scan after the clicking on the broadcast and then the collapse.