'Contact' defied Hollywood norms and made it big anyway. For this oral history, rachel_handler spoke to nearly two dozen people involved in its making, including Robert Zemeckis, Jodie Foster, and Matthew McConaughey
“I think people were surprised by the amount of resonance,” says Jodie Foster, who plays Ellie Arroway in Contact, of the movie’s reception. “We used to do that. We used to make movies that were resonant and were entertaining.” Photo: Getty Images This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
I. Making First Contact Over the course of its nearly 20-year development process, Contact fell into the hands of dozens of writers, directors, producers, and executives, all of whom had different ideas about how and why Ellie should be shot into the stratosphere in search of intelligent life. For a while, it looked as if Druyan and Sagan, who married in 1981, might lose the character forever thanks to some craven studio machinations.
Ann and Carl met at that party, too. When they were working on Cosmos, it was the first year of my being a movie-development executive. I was miserably unhappy and dislocated from everything that was deep and real to me, but I was so excited they were coming out to stay in Los Angeles for a year. Druyan: Of course we were stoned while writing Contact. He would do this thing where he would remove this imaginary hat from his head and tip it to me when he was really pleased with something that I wrote. When I read something he wrote that I loved, I would just jump on him and scream. To me, it was the highest form of happiness.
Peter changed the hook of the idea. Ann and Carl’s hook was a radio astronomer who’s looking for signals from other civilizations to see if there’s anyone out there. Peter changed it to a woman scientist who had abandoned her son and who goes looking for him — where she should be looking; not at the stars. It was so misogynist it was unbelievable.
James V. Hart, writer: I just kept saying no. It didn’t matter how much money they were going to pay me. I thought it was a very difficult adaptation. It wasn’t the sort of sci-fi movie that was being made at the time: no aliens, no spaceships, no invasion of Earth. Hart: I finally asked, “Didn’t anybody talk to Carl about the adaptation?” No one had ever talked to Carl — none of the directors that had been onboard ahead of me or the writers. So Lynda designed a weekend where all of our families got together. That weekend, we found the movie inside the book. Mainly, it was around the father-daughter relationship.
II. The Strange Film That Could Have Been In 1994, Sagan was diagnosed with myelodysplasia, a rare bone-marrow disease. He and Druyan “tried everything we could” to keep him alive for the next two years, including three bone-marrow transplants, chemotherapy, and radiation. Around this time, Contact development moved ahead under Australian Mad Max director George Miller, who envisioned a “stranger” film that never made it to the screen.
George Miller declined to comment for this story. In a 2015 interview with Collider, he described his version of Contact as less “safe” and less “predictable” than Zemeckis’s movie. He likened his script to another Matthew McConaughey movie , Interstellar. “I’m not saying it was going to be 2001,” he said, “but it was much, much less force-feeding exposition.”
Obst: His script was terrific. Then I gave it to George, and he liked it, but he wanted to keep working on it. So we had our big contretemps: “George, are you going to make this movie this year?” And George was like, “Probably, if the script is there.” And the studio executives said, “Well, we think the script is there.” And he says, “Well, I don’t think it’s there yet.”
Obst: It was very painful for George. It took him a long time to shoot a big movie again. I think it’s a tender spot in his history. Obst: He didn’t really want to have much of a working relationship with me, I think, because I worked so closely with George. I got credit on the film in arbitration. Warner Bros. had already put Michael Goldberg’s name all by itself on so many TV spots and trailers and what have you. They had to go back and change that. There was enormous resentment for me for getting credit because there was a belief that I didn’t really do anything.
Druyan: I always had this secret fantasy of actually seeing the George movie. But Bob was extremely welcoming of our input. This is not a diss of him in any way.III.
Foster: I think, more than any character that I’ve ever played, Ellie Arroway is the most like me or at least the most like how I think I should be seen — how I see myself or something. She is as deep emotionally as she is prodigious intellectually, and that has caused her to live this kind of solitary life. I wouldn’t call it lonely so much as I would call it solitary. You know, it’s sort of deliciously lonely.
Sagan: The way that Jodie plays Ellie, it just reminds me of my dad so much. She managed to really capture this genuine desire to know if there’s anybody else out there — not to believe but to know. They said Jodie wanted to meet me. I was really nervous. We sat and talked. It wasn’t even really about the script. I just could tell she was watching me like a hawk. Zemeckis later told me that she was studying me to see my movements and things to see what she could take so that we could be similar. I guess I tucked my hair behind my ears a lot, and that’s where that movement came from when she’s looking at the satellites and she tucks her hair.
McConaughey: I’ve never taken an acting class. I stepped into the role of Wooderson in Dazed and Confused and worked for three weeks. I didn’t know what acting was, but I seemed to have instincts for it. The day before Time to Kill opened, I had 100 scripts I would have done at the drop of a hat, and 99 were “No.” Then the weekend after Time to Kill opened, all of the sudden it’s like, out of those 100, 99 were “Yes.
Foster: He did kind of have the “girl’s part,” and I think that was refreshing, honestly, for him. Traditionally in literature, women stay home and men travel. We stay home and think about family, and we have interior lives that, in some ways, explorers don’t have. We got switched. Ellie Arroway is an explorer, she’s a navigator, she’s Galileo. He is the thoughtful one who stays home and talks about the interior life.
The Socorro satellites that appear in Contact. Photo: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Foster: I wanted it to feel real. There was no way that I was ever going to have the kind of knowledge that real scientists could have. There was a lot of research that I did that I did not understand, but somebody very smartly bought me children’s books about science and black holes.
Carl was there once during production. He came and gave us a lecture about the cosmos. He wore a little turtleneck, and we got to ask him questions. That’s the kind of checking he did. We can’t say that it’s accurate that there’s a wormhole or that if they were another intelligent society, that intelligence could read our memories and our minds and come to us in whatever corporal form they chose, that this life formed at the center of the galaxy could turn itself into a hologram of her father. It could be speculative, but it couldn’t break the laws of physics.
McConaughey: I can’t imagine saying that line because that would have undercut who I was. That was a lie. I can’t go on and lie on my character. To play a character who believes at the end “Oh, my God was too small” is different than saying, “Oh, God’s backyard is bigger than I thought.” V. The Robert Zemeckis Show The story of Contact was difficult enough to film on its face: building and exploding fictional spacecrafts, traveling to the center of the galaxy, imagining an alien in human disguise on an intergalactic beach. To capture it all, Zemeckis shot at the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico; in Arizona; on location in Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., Newfoundland, and Fiji; and on nine soundstages in Los Angeles.
Ken Ralston, visual-effects supervisor: I like working on Bob movies because a large percentage of it — I’ll just say 40 percent of it — seems impossible. Even when something doesn’t look like a visual effect on the page, it can turn into one. So I figured, We’ll do this project. We’ll jump in head first. We’re either going to succeed and it’ll be a great way to let the world know what Sony is capable of or we’re going to blow up in a fiery crash.
I just had this fever-dream idea: I went to the camera and visual-effects team and I said, “Try to imagine that the actual lens of the camera isn’t a camera; it’s a mirror. It’s the mirror from the medicine cabinet, and she’s chasing it to get the medicine.” That’s actually what the shot looks like. When you cut to the mirror’s point of view, everything in the set is reversed. The staircase is on the wrong side; her face is flipped.
Foster: The whole movie was also weather cursed. Socorro was where all the big telescopes were, and if you wanted the telescopes to be facing in this direction and not in that direction, you had to apply years ahead of time. We were able to jump the line and do it eight months ahead of time, but then the weather fucked us up and we were behind. When we went to Puerto Rico, we had terrible storms with mudslides. When we went to D.C., we had just bitter, bitter cold for all these exterior scenes.
Druyan: We wanted to populate the novel with mythic figures who kind of predate the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world. This guy who is so rich he doesn’t even live on the Earth anymore; he’s just watching us the way our ancestors imagined the gods were. Zemeckis: I had a lot of wonderful meetings with Carl, and we had a lot of debates about the design of the machine, which I don’t think he really liked. He said it reminded him of a carnival ride. But I’d keep saying, “Carl, you never described it in the book, and you can’t describe it to me now.” So the machine was basically all my design.
Foster: All of science fiction is about our own fears and desires. It’s not really about what’s possible or real. Goldenberg: I got a call: “We need dialogue for this scene.” But her whole sort of narrating what’s going on — I wish I’d cut it. It would’ve been more powerful if it was just silent because her face is just so powerful there.
Malaysia Latest News, Malaysia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Nuclear power can help the democratic world achieve energy independenceNuclear power can help the democratic world achieve energy independence, says energy researcher N_Mazzucchi
Read more »
This Funeral Home Is Going Viral Because They Compost Human Bodies Into Nutrient-Rich Soil, And Wow, It's Remarkable'It's like the Earth-friendly alternative to burial and cremation.'
Read more »
Photographs of Colombia's Indigenous Kogi communityThéo de Gueltzl captures the population's spiritual relationship with nature and the earth.
Read more »
A Man Who Fell To Earth: Decentralized Software is Here to Stay | HackerNoon'A Man Who Fell To Earth: Decentralized Software is Here to Stay' cc: oct_network web3 nfts
Read more »
NASA: Swarm of Tiny Swimming Robots Could Look for Alien Life on Distant WorldsNASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing an intriguing concept that would allow potential planetary missions to chase interesting clues in subsurface oceans. Someday, a swarm of tiny robots the size of cellphones could whisk through the water beneath the miles-thick icy shell of Jupiter’s m
Read more »