Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Steven Spielberg look to the stars in EW’s “Disclosure Day” cover shoot —see the photos

Steven Spielberg is still watching the night skies.

Nearly 50 years after dazzling audiences with the alien extravaganza Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the legendary filmmaker is back with a new sci-fi adventure, Disclosure Day. The film stars Emily Blunt as meteorologist Margaret Fairchild and Josh O’Connor as programmer Daniel Kellner, a pair of protagonists drawn together by mysterious, otherworldly forces.

In Entertainment Weekly‘s cover story on the film, Spielberg and his collaborators — including Blunt, O’Connor, stars Colman Domingo and Colin Firth, and screenwriter David Koepp — reveal how they balanced science fiction spectacle with humanity and heart. You can read the full Disclosure Day cover story here, and check out all our exclusive photos of Blunt, O’Connor, and Spielberg below.

01 of 08

Is seeing believing?

Despite his lifelong fascination with outer space, Spielberg has yet to experience a firsthand encounter with alien life. “I haven’t seen a UFO, and I’m a little upset by that,” he says. “Because of all the people who haven’t seen UFOs — I’m the guy that made UFO movies like John Ford made Westerns! And yet I haven’t seen one for myself.

But the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial filmmaker still has faith. “Based on a preponderance of visual evidence and testimony, I have no doubt that we have been visited by off-world species since Roswell in 1947,” he says. “I was less a believer [before] because I always said, ‘I’ve got to see one to believe one,’ but now there’s too much circumstantial evidence.”

02 of 08

Good morning, Kansas City

To prepare for her role as Missouri-based meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, Blunt heavily researched reports of real-life UFOs (now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs).

“I watched pretty much every congressional hearing, documentary, and docuseries under the sun preparing for this,” Blunt says, noting that the testimonies she studied feel “inarguable” to her. “They were so authentic and so deeply shifted and moved and completely absolute about what they saw. There was nothing wavering for them. And I was really floored by that — by this kind of sense of peace they had.”

03 of 08

An unlikely action hero

O’Connor isn’t too big on action movies and recognizes that he’s not the first actor who might come to mind when casting a pulse-pounding thriller.

“I’ve never played a role like it before. I would argue it’s not obvious casting,” he says. “I wanted to step out and do something different or out of my comfort zone. There’s a number of things about Daniel Kellner that’s out of my comfort zone — jumping on trains and the action aspects. And then I’m deeply dyslexic, and he’s a mathematic genius.”

04 of 08

The language of disclosure

Blunt’s role in the film required her to deliver extensive dialogue in both Korean and Russian, so she spent months training with dialect coaches for each language.

“I would get the teacher to record it for me, like, ‘What if you’re angry? What if you’re scared? How would you say it? What if you’re trying to reassure someone?'” the Edge of Tomorrow star recalls. “I remember my Russian teacher going,’ Oh, you want me to act now? Okay!’ So I was like, ‘Well, how would you say it if you were yelling at your husband?’ And then she’d record it like that for me. And that’s all I listened to. I don’t think I listened to music for months. It was just Russian and Korean.”

05 of 08

Blowing the whistle

O’Connor’s preparation focused on exploring his character’s psychology. “He’s kind of your everyday guy,” he says of Daniel, his computer programmer protagonist. “He’s not Tom Cruise, but he is doing Tom Cruisey things at times, so there were questions about, who is he, and what’s his driving force?”

As he tried to ascertain why Daniel felt compelled to become a whistleblower, the Challengers star landed on a sense of ethical duty as the character’s ultimate motivator. “He feels very strongly that we need to disclose this information, and therefore it’s almost like an act of activism, essentially,” he says.

06 of 08

A question of empathy

Spielberg wants his latest film to explore the woes of contemporary society —as well as how world-changing news might impact our attitudes toward one another.

“At the core of Disclosure Day is the question: Where has all our empathy gone?” Spielberg reflects. “Would an actual disclosure day reunite what’s divided, or begin to repair what’s broken in this siphoning away of empathy? And I think that was the personal link for me. There’s more focus in this story on human connection than even the eventual and hopeful connection between an off-world civilization and the human species.”

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07 of 08

Ordinary people

For Blunt, Spielberg’s fixation on everyday characters is a refreshing change of pace compared to other blockbuster projects.

“I think in my experience reading these kinds of big, massive movies, you have often got characters who are maybe a little more generalized or palatable or easy to pin down,” the Quiet Place actress says. “But Steven likes misunderstood people, restless people, ordinary people in over their heads. I think he likes people who are longing for a connection or a sense of belonging. And I think he likes using characters like that because they’re relatable.”

08 of 08

Keeping it real

O’Connor appreciates how Disclosure Day‘s intentionally clumsy action scenes help humanize the film’s characters.

“There’s a messiness to the getaways, and there’s a messiness to the action that I really love,” he says. “Traditionally, you go with the unlikely hero — but this is the real hero. People don’t know what to do in their situations, and people fall over because they’re afraid they’re going to die.”

Disclosure Day soars into theaters on June 12. Read EW’s full cover story here.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly