Watch Online HD on HDtoday. Firelight is a 1964 science fiction film written and directed by American filmmaker Steven Spielberg at the age of 17.[3] This is Spielberg's feature film directorial debut. The film follows a mysterious alien encounter and invasion; Spielberg would return to the subject with Firelight as inspiration for his third major film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.[4]: 24  Only three minutes and forty seconds of footage from Firelight has been made public, and very little of it survives. Spielberg has called it "one of the five worst films ever made."