Akira Kurosawa once said that not having seen the cinema of Satyajit Ray is like existing in the world without ever having seen the sun or the moon. That is the kind of tribute that does not need a superlative added to it.
Ray died on April 23, 1992, at the age of 70. But April 28 is a good day to talk about the chapter of his life that most people outside Bengal and serious film circles never hear: the time he wrote a science fiction screenplay that a young Hollywood appeared to quietly borrow, and the dignified, almost painful silence with which he responded.
In 1967, Ray wrote a complete script called The Alien, based on his own 1962 Bengali story about a spaceship landing in rural Bengal and an extraterrestrial befriending a village boy. Columbia Pictures was set to co-produce it and Ray spent five weeks in Hollywood developing the project before a middleman’s erratic behaviour caused the whole thing to collapse. The script, however, did not disappear. Ray himself believed it had been circulating in mimeographed copies throughout America for years.
When Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial released in 1982, people who knew Ray’s work were stunned by the parallels. The childlike alien with a large head and spindly limbs. The bond with a young boy. The authorities are hunting the creature. Even what many consider the most iconic scene of E.T., the bicycle soaring across the sky, had a corresponding moment in Ray’s script. His friend Arthur C. Clarke called Ray after watching E.T. and urged him to write to Spielberg about the similarities.
Ray’s response was quietly devastating: “Sometimes I feel I ought to do something about it, but I can’t do anything by correspondence. Besides, he can deny it. What he has done is ruin my chance of making the film because then people will say it came from Spielberg.”
He never sued. He never made it a public spectacle. He simply kept making masterpieces.
He received his Honorary Oscar at his hospital bed, presented via video by Audrey Hepburn, and called it the best achievement of his movie-making career spanning over four decades. He passed away just weeks later.
What is worth remembering is that Ray was not just a filmmaker. He composed the music for his own films, designed his own typefaces, wrote beloved detective fiction, and edited a children’s magazine until his final days. He remains the only Indian filmmaker to have received top prizes from two of cinema’s Big Three festivals.
On April 28, consider everything the world received from this man, and then quietly consider everything it still owes him.