An oral history of Contact

Carl Sagan e Ann Druyan – a famous astronomer and the former creative director of NASA, respectively – could never have anticipated the ecstasy and chaos they would encounter when, one night in the 1970s, at the edge of a swimming pool, they decided to co-write a film about an uncompromising scientist on an adventure towards the center of the cosmos. What would it be like if we contacted aliens? What if only one person could experience this? Sagan, Druyan and more than a dozen other writers, producers and directors took nearly two decades to answer that question.

As with humanity's never-ending search for intelligent life beyond Earth, the mission of Contact it was marked by broken hearts, arrogance, intrusive suits and sublime moments. Check out this oral history of Contact, a film that defied everyone and everything.

The problems were immeasurable. At that time, Hollywood was used to a adventurous, and this was the story of a woman who set out on an intergalactic journey while her mate stayed at home. Almost all the screenwriters and filmmakers who played a role in the script de Contact messed up making the protagonist, Ellie Arroway, become more palatable to studio executives. Also, the aliens didn't kill and didn't even look weird, like in the vast majority of science fiction movies.

Even so, Contact has survived numerous script changes, often suffering cuts and brutal changes. Its last version hit theaters on July 11, 1997, in the hands of the director Robert Zemeckis on Jodie Foster of protagonist and Matthew McConaughey as the student of Christian philosophy. Tragically, when Sagan and Druyan's dreamed work debuted, the astronomer was unable to witness its birth.

On the 25th anniversary of the film Contact, Vulture, the digital magazine of the Vox Media group, spoke with several people who worked on the production of the feature. The result of this was this great interview, which you can follow in the translation below, including Zemeckis, Foster, McConaughey, Druyan, Sasha Sagan and the veteran producer Lynda Obst. They disagreed on many aspects of Contact's development, but came to a consensus: Contact was quite an accomplishment, as this is the kind of movie that major studios rarely make, and will likely never make again - as it was extremely intellectual, challenging, emotionally unstable, full of metaphors, and also where no one shoots aliens in front of the American flag. "We used to do that. We made movies that resonated and entertained” said Foster.

Making the first contact

During the nearly 20 years of development, Contact has fallen into the hands of dozens of writers, directors, producers, and executives, all with different ideas as to why Ellie was thrown into the stratosphere in search of intelligent life. For a while, it looked like Druyan and Sagan, who married in 1981, would lose the character forever to suspicious machinations by the studios.

Ann Druyan: The year was 1978. Carl and I were working on the TV series Cosmos. There was a saying at the time that said, “Well, if women are as smart as men, why aren't there any women with the capabilities of Leonardo Da Vinci or Einstein??”. This made us furious. I had just co-written the part of Cosmos that dealt with the Great Library of Alexandria is about Hypatia, the library leader, who was a mathematician whose studies focused on the Diophantine equations, which later became Newton's focus. Her reward for being the great intellectual star of the library in 415 was being ripped from her carriage and having her body ripped apart.

At the time, everyone wanted to do something with Carl. He was a cultural phenomenon. We knew we could get a contract for a book and a movie. We agreed one night, sitting by the pool of our little house in West Hollywood, that we would make a story in which not only would a woman be the intellectual heroine, but also, as in the Gilgamesh tradition, she would go on a journey while the man would stay in House.

Lynda Obst, producer: Nora Ephron was one of my best friends and also my mentor. She hosted the biggest dinner parties in the world, and this was a particularly special one in 1974. I remember Nora saying as soon as I arrived: “Lynda, I want you to meet Annie, she likes baseball as much as you do.” We soon became very close.

Ann and Carl met at that party too. When they were working on Cosmos, that was my first year as an executive producer. I was extremely unhappy and out of touch with everything that was real and important to me, but I was excited that they were going to spend a year in Los Angeles.

Druyan: Somewhere between 1979 and 1989, Lynda came to us and said, “You should write a movie.“We came to an agreement that I would do the emotional stuff and he would do all the scientific and technical stuff. We switched pages every day as we pieced together the story. Our daughter, Sasha, was 2 years old at the time.

Sasha Sagan: The first memory I have is of gigantic whiteboards, and they would always say to me: “Don't you dare touch it."

They were in love. I would walk into the dining room and see them – this is the perfect example of a scary thing for any teenager, but now that I'm an adult, I see how beautiful the scene was – kissing.

Druyan: Obviously we were stoned while writing Activated. He would do a scene where he tipped his imaginary hat to me when he was very satisfied with something he had written. When I read that bit, I could only jump on it and scream. For me, that was the greatest moment of happiness.

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Sagan and Druyan finished their Activated work in 1980. In 1982, producer Peter Guber, then head of Casablanca Records and Filmworks, bought the rights and took it to Warner Bros. And there he stayed, for seven years, in a period of hellish development.

Druyan: The 110 pages we made felt very much like a screenplay. But unfortunately, it didn't become a movie project for a long time.

Fruits: I was working on Casablanca to Peter guber, when he bought the rights to Contact. When I left the company to start mine, he kept developing it – or something. He passed it on to several wrong directors – one of the ones I remember was the sentimentalist of Robert Harling, a screenwriter and director of romantic comedies.

Peter changed the heart of the idea. In Ann and Carl's vision, the protagonist would be a radio astronomer who was looking for signs of other civilizations in space. Peter had changed into a scientist who abandoned her son and went in search of him – where she was supposed to be looking, not the stars. THE misogyny bordered on unbelievable.

Peter did his best to distance Contact from Carl. Carl and Annie were demanding precision in the science demonstrated in the film, but Peter wanted to invent science, so he hired an engineer named Gentry Lee, who used to work for Carl on the first Cosmos, and was overjoyed to join his first film and justify any something Peter wanted.

Meanwhile, Sagan and Druyan wrote the book Activated, which became a best sellers. And in a happy twist of fate, Warner Bros. fired Contact Gruber and hired Obst as a producer in 1989, with James V. Hart next to the script.

Fruits: The first thing I did was get Carl back in Contact after Warner Bros. took the film out of Peter's hands. I was doing something else for Warner Bros. and they told me "could you help us with a project called Contact?” I laughed too much. They didn't know that I had originally produced it.

James V. Hart, writer: I kept saying no. I didn't care how much they wanted to pay me. I thought it was a very complicated adaptation. It wasn't like the sci-fi movies of that time: there were no aliens, spaceships or Earth invasions.

I found out that seven other writers had worked on the project. I said, "Okay, send me some scripts.” The only thing they had in common was that Ellie Arroway entered a spaceship that was going to the center of the galaxy for a contact with extraterrestrials. One of them had her son on board.

Fruits: In my opinion, the biggest mistake of all was that they didn't understand that it was possible for a woman to dedicate her life to the pursuit of knowledge instead of her children and her husband.

Druyan: It went something like this: there were a lot of people who wanted to turn her into a conventional woman.

Hart: I finally asked: “Has anyone talked to Carl about the adaptation?“And no, none of them spoke to Carl – none of the directors or writers before me. Because of that, Lynda scheduled a weekend so our families could meet. That weekend we found the movie in the book. It was mostly about the relationship between father and daughter.

History: One thing I really just noticed is how much of a father-daughter story that was. I'm going to start crying now.

Hart: In the book, this did not exist. They had no emotional connection. To the credit of Carl and Ann, they said, “Well let's create this.” We worked another year on those drafts.

Then George Miller came to direct in 1993.

Fruits: We then started development with George Miller for a few years. He told Carl and Annie that they should decline to be part of the script at some point.

Druyan: On December 4, 1994, we had a conference call after he read our version of the script, and, for the first time, he had embraced the material. That was a moment of great joy for me. Afterwards, I was getting a massage at the hotel, I was lying on the table, thinking, Our puppy is good. Carl is good. We created something that a renowned director finds valuable. Then the phone rang. I got up from the massage table and answered the phone, it was Carl's doctor saying that his blood test results had come in and he had been diagnosed with a fatal disease. That was the beginning of a two-year journey to find a way for Carl to survive.

The strange movie that could have been

In 1994, Sagan was diagnosed with Myelodysplastic Syndrome, a rare disease of the bone marrow. He and Druyan tried everything possible to keep him alive for the next two years, including 3 bone marrow transplants, chemotherapy, and radiation. During this period, the development of Contact continued with George Miller, the Australian director of Mad Max, who imagined a “strange” film, which never made it to the screens.

Jodie Foster, Ellie Arroway: For George Miller, the film was completely different. It was an incredibly long – 200 page thing. It was madness. It looked something like the movie Lorenzo's Oil, or even with moments there Eraserhead.

Druyan: George Miller was the first person who noticed that the film needed to be out of the box, and not follow the classic Hollywood blockbuster formula. He participated in seminars with the military and social movements on what a traumatized world would be like, as we think it would be, in the event of a real contact situation.

It was weirder – since that was the idea. The universe is strange. There were hit-and-run scenes that didn't seem to be on the right track, but they served to direct the story and had the power to expand the viewer's consciousness.

George Miller declined to comment on this story. In a 2015 interview with Collider, he described his version of Contact as less "safe" and less "predictable" than Zemeckis's. He compared his script to another film by Matthew McConaughey, also produced by Lynda Obst, Interstellar. “I'm not saying it would be 2001, A Space Odyssey, but it would be a much, much less forced exhibition.”

Hart: George brought Boy Meyjes, an amazing screenwriter, who worked on the script with him. I didn't want Lynda to switch me. Still, she had every right. I made a very complicated adaptation. And I think the studio was disappointed, as the script was heavy and mathematical.

Menno Meyjes: Uncredited Screenwriter: I think I met George at a barbecue. I gave some ideas that were kind of loose, even kind of subversive. I remember what they are, but I won't say here, as I would be crucified in the blink of an eye.

All I know is that the next moment I was on a plane to Sydney.

Hart: Menno Meyjes' work was sensational. He brought that thing from the outside world: he amplified the media, the terrorist threat. They didn't exist in the book, I made them up.

meyjes: I was sent away before Geoge. Everyone loved the draft except Jodie.

“I had loved both versions. Maybe one day we might make Activated in a different way.” Said Jodie Foster.

Fruits: George was happy with Menno's work, but the studio was not. So they called in Michael Goldenberg, who did a draft before Menno.

Michael Goldenberg, screenwriter: That was a draft that made everyone happy, the studio, Jodie and got the project moving again. A constant problem was Ellie as a character – no one understood her, so they didn't sympathize or connect with her. But I was that kid, like Carl, who lived alone and read a lot of science fiction and wanted to transcend mundane circumstances. I saw that in Ellie as a character.

Fruits: Your script was wonderful. Then I gave it to Geroge, who liked it but wanted to make changes. Then we had our biggest setback: “George, are you doing the movie this year?” And he was like, “Probably, if I have the script.” Studio executives said, "Well, we think we have a script." And he replied, "I don't think we have yet."

The studio organized a decisive mega meeting. Byron Eric Kennedy (died 1983), George's original producer, told his friend that "they are bluffing". Meanwhile, I was saying, “George, they're not bluffing.

He walked into the meeting with a complex diagram of how he wanted the script. And the execs asked, "George, are you committed to starting shooting the movie next Christmas?" That was the moment of decision. We all prayed for him to say yes, but he said no. I remember sinking into my chair.

Druyan: George was fired. Warner Bros. I wanted yours blockbuster. They wanted to put it on the release schedule. But of course, we weren't even close to that, as George handled all the dealings in his own way. And now he wasn't there anymore.

they already had the Robert Zemeckis in production the next day. I think they already knew what would happen when they gave George the ultimatum and had him ready as a backup producer if they needed to.

Robert Zemeckis, director: I've always been a big fan of Carl Sagan. I loved the series Cosmos that he did on PBS. I knew when the Activated book came out. But to be honest, I was never a fan of alien movies. I never called Design of aliens – how could anyone know what they look like? A sketch showed the sky open and the aliens appeared to prove to Ellie that their journey had been real. And I just said, "No, thank you."

So I went ahead. Then I did another movie, then I did Forrest Gump. Then Contact came back. The fact that the script came after the release of Forrest Gump probably solidified the idea that I would be in charge of the creative part of the film. I wouldn't do any more movies without the final cut again.

Fruits: He didn't want to have a working relationship with me, I believe it's because I worked very closely with George.

Golderberg: Jodie was very insightful. She had notes. She had the three of us get together in a room and decide what kind of movie it would be – I didn't know at the time how good it was, to be quite honest.

Carl and Annie did a new script draft. We met in Seattle while Carl was being treated. Robert was kind to him. The things that were really important to them – they were balancing the things they needed for a two-and-a-half hour movie.

Hart: It was clear to me that when I saw the script that was going to be shot that Goldberg had done an excellent job of incorporating Menno's script into the draft. It was not possible to see until the script was written how much of the work Carl, Ann, Lynda and I had done was incorporated into the text and even expanded upon.

I was credited in the film as one of the screenwriters. Warner Bros. had only featured Michael Golderberg's name featured in TV commercials and trailers. However, they had to change everything. There was a great feeling of resentment, as many believed that I had done nothing.

goldenberg: I remember being devastated. Like, it was my first big movie. I felt like his owner. But that is already in the past.

Hart: Menno was not credited. And that always bothered me. We watched the movie together.

meyjes: I can't say I sat there with a bucket of popcorn and said to my wife, “Honey, tonight is going to be fantastic.” I watched it and kind of thought, “What the fuck?

Zemeckis: All I know is that Michael Goldenberg worked his ass off.

Foster: In a weird way, I saw two possibilities for Contact. One followed an artistic and philosophical path. The kind of human disconnection we live from this highly technological everyday life. And also the questions of faith, and if faith can repair that connection, or else that would be the role of science. The other possibility was a film down to earth, bringing NASA and everything we know about the cinematic experience that Robert Zemeckis can bring.

Druyan: I've always had this secret desire to see George's movie. But Robert's vision matched our vision well. I don't want to insult you in any way.

Fruits: I think Zemeckis did a great job. But I wish I could see George's movie.

A rare type of character

How to solve the problem that was Ellie Arroway? Who in Hollywood had the reach to play her, the intellect and empathy to understand her? Who was she based on anyway? And what actor could match her with the philosophical virtuosity of palmer joss? And did he need to be attractive?

Fruits: There were people vying for Ellie. Julia Roberts I wanted to do. George Miller flirted with Uma Thurman for a moment. But there was no one that was as perfect or that we were all as excited about as Jodie.

Foster: I didn't need to take a test. I had already won two Oscars at that time. (Defendants (1989) e The Silence of the Lambs (1992)).

William Fichtner, Dr. Kent Clark: It's hard to describe, but there are certain roles whose actors are perfect for the role, and they couldn't be played by anyone else. And this is such a case.

Zemeckis: Working with Jodie was what attracted me most to the project.

golderbeg: I remember her telling me once, “Make Ellie uncompromising! Don’t be afraid to make her uncompromising.” A lot of actors want to be understanding, they want to be kind. And that was the most impressive: “Make her tough and difficult and short-sighted, in her own way.”

Matthew McConaughey, Palmer Joss: Jodie is no fool. She is very direct. I've known her well enough to know that she has a great sense of humor, but Jodie doesn't joke. I think that speaks for her longevity. You don't become an institution and stay one and stay relevant and in such demand for so long if you're sucking up to what you think the industry wants from you.

Foster: I think that, unlike any other character I've ever played, Ellie Arroway is the most like me, or the most like what I should be seen as – how I see myself or something. She is deeply emotional as much as she is a prodigy of the academic world, and this has caused her to live a lonely life. I wouldn't say she went alone, but lonely, you know, the good kind of being alone.

I wasn't very good at math, and I'm not sure I'm good at many things, but one thing I sure did was this prodigious connection to human behavior and this ability to compartmentalize — to be able to examine something while I was at it. was feeling. That's part of Ellie and it's something that connects me as well.

History: Ellie's character is my parents' son. They created it together.

Druyan: She was named Eleanor because of her Eleanor Roosevelt, which they both loved. “Arroway” came to be the real name of the philosopher Voltaire, but written differently. All because of the idea of ​​the literal translation of the name, Arrow which is arrow, and Way which is path – after all, she would travel like an arrow towards the cosmos.

She was not based on Jill Tarter, I didn't know her, which I respect and adore, until years after I finished my part of the writing. But there is convergent evolution here. Since she was one of the scientists that we introduced Jodie to, so she was comfortable in the role of a scientist.

Fruits: There's another scientist who thinks it's about her too. But I don't think I should name her. It would be very controversial. But believe me, there's a great planetary scientist who thinks it's about her. This was because we spoke to several scientists at the beginning of the project about how they dealt with the isolation that science brought.

History: The way Jodie plays Ellie reminds me a lot of my dad. She managed to capture the genuine desire to know if she has anyone out there – not believe it, but yes. know.

Fruits: Ellie reminds me more of Annie than Carl. I think Annie was more influential, but she won't say that.

Hart: Jodie was channeling Carl. I realized this only when she was watching the movie for the third time and said, "She's playing Carl."

Jena Malone, Young Ellie: The role was introduced to me as "They're looking for a young Jodie Foster, and you would be perfect." I think Anjelica Huston said nice things about me.

They told me that Jodie wanted to meet me. I was nervous. We sat and talked. It wasn't about the script. I can tell she looked at me like a hawk watching prey. Zemeckis told me after she was studying me, she wanted to see my moves and things we could have the same. I think I ended up tucking my hair behind my ear several times, and she did this same move when she was looking at the satellites.

Hart: We created a romance between Ellie and Joss that wasn't in the book. I couldn't see Joss as a religious person.

Fruits: Back then, it was kind of mandatory to have a romance. Palmer was a spiritualist thinker in the book – which called for a person to be a little older and wiser than America's big star. But what Warner wants, it has, and Matthew was excellent. You cast Matthew in the movie and he automatically calls out to someone.

Zemeckis: He's a piece of bad way, huh? He had that Texan edge to his voice. I thought it was perfect.

Foster: He was quite young. He'd only done Time to Kill. And he held strong to his Texan roots, and I loved that about him — the fact that, even as a young man, Hollywood would turn him and cast him into the falsehood of the industry.

McConaughey: I never took acting classes. I walked into Hollywood in unconscious youth and worked for three weeks. I didn't know what acting was, but I seemed to have the instinct for it. at the premiere of time to kill, I had 100 scripts that I would do without even thinking about it, and 99 answers I received were “No”. The next second, out of nowhere, out of those 100, 99 were “Yes.”

I went on a 22 day spiritual retreat in Peru. I have always been a believer. I spent some time of my life thinking about becoming a monk. I came back, and that's when I decided to do Friendship e Contact. Rather than choosing to be the lead role in the films I was offered, I wanted to choose which story I felt was necessary and worthwhile to tell? It was like a philanthropic choice, I dare say. The fact that it was proposed as a paradox between science and religion, between science and belief, between science and faith, was a subject I had been interested in all my life. I wrote papers about it in college. My belief has always been that science is the practical pursuit of God.

I didn't take a test. I met with Zemeckis. Then I think I ran into Jodie. She would approve of whoever played Palmer. Then I was offered the role.

Zemeckis. They were great together. They had real on-screen chemistry.

Foster: There was this new and interesting thing on the screen – an erotic connection, but totally intellectual.

McConaughey: Everyone who has ever been in a relationship in their lives knows that it is possible to be intimate in many ways. With Jodie and I it was through an intellectual confrontation.

Foster: He more or less got the role of the young lady, and I found that interesting, honestly. Usually it is the woman who stays at home while the man goes on a journey. We stay at home and think about the family, we have this private life that explorers don't have. We exchange. Ellie Arroway is the explorer, she is the navigator, she is the Galileo. He's the serious guy who stays at home and thinks about life.

McConaughey: "I'm the guy with the apron, but without the apron." It was that phrase that gave me the idea to do Palmer Ross, he's a bit of a renegade. It gave Robert a leeway with his hair, or a shirt button.

Zemeckis: The only thing that made me nervous about Matthew was that he really got into the character. He wanted to give him a giant lumberjack beard. But I said, “I don't understand what would make him like this. After all, he is the guy who talks to the press.” It was then that he gave up.

Your God is Too Small.

After nearly two decades after Sagan and Druyan were by the pool, Contact filming began on September 24, 1996. As Sagan did, Activated grapples with endless questions of science and faith. These questions bothered the cast and producers a lot, and they all got into intense debates about DEUS, the universe – even over some lines that sounded like sacrilege.

Foster: I wish it was real. In a way I would have the knowledge of a real scientist. Much of my research I didn't understand, but a very smart person bought me a children's book about science and black holes.

Fichtner: I have a degree in criminal law in Buffalo. I worked my ass off, but man, I made an astrophysicist. Robert Zemeckis I wanted everything right, and there were a lot of people who really understood that.

Fruits: At the beginning, we held a series of workshops with experts from different fields. There were Christian theologians who spoke to us about Joss and the meaning of apocalyptic thinking. Jill Tarter told us about radio astronomy. We wanted to get the science and religion debate right. We wanted scientists to win, but we didn't want religion to lose.

Foster: Honestly, it was basically computers. Nobody really understood them at the time. I remember my first day with Gerry Griffin, who was the Apollo 12 flight director. “I don't understand anything. What am I doing here?" He would sit and explain to me, even after 25 minutes I didn't understand anything. Robert came in and said, “Okay, enough. You will press this key and then this one.” I wanted to understand, but I couldn't.

Carl was in production. He gave us a lesson on the cosmos. He was wearing a turtleneck shirt, and then we asked him questions.

McConaughey: We become a captive audience while Carl Sagan took us to the beginning of time. If I remember correctly, it was like, “If you take a watch and look at it two-dimensionally, it's in the far left corner of the top of the clock's number five. That's our galaxy we're in. It is always expanding, and there are many universes.”

I was immersed the entire time. Everything he said filled me up, and made me more of a believer than I already was. He finished and said, "Therefore, God does not exist." And I said, “Wait. You made me believe even more in the existence of God, and you end your speech like this?” And he replied. “Yes, and I would love to discuss it.”

Fruits: Carl never messed with characters, but if he had a sentence that wasn't true or that could be tweaked to become true – he was always checking the science. An example of this, Ellie would initially travel through a black hole. Carl sent his book to Kip thorne, the world's leading expert on black holes. He did some calculations and said, “they are traveling through a wormhole.” It was then that Carl rewrote that part of his book.

That was the kind of check he did. We don't know if it's right to say that there's a wormhole or if there's another intelligent society, the kind that could read our memories or minds, and see in whatever bodily form it wanted, and also that this life form coming from the center of galaxy could transform into the protagonist's hologram. We could speculate at will, but without ever breaking the laws of physics.

Druyan: What Carl and I wanted was for Eleanor Arroway were skeptical. But then she would have this experience where she would see her father in Heaven, and what a cool way to change something inside her. Since she literally believes she saw her father in Heaven.

We wanted Palmer Joss to realize that his God was small – He wasn't big enough for the universe, and science reveals that. But Matthew didn't want to. I didn't want him to become Richard Dawkins, but I wish I had made him say, “My God is too small.”

Fruits: This was what Carl really believed of people who thought that God would not have put other intelligences in the universe. He was a little God. But a God who conceived different forms of life – that was a great God.

McConaughey: I can't imagine saying that phrase that demeans everything I believe in. And that is a lie. I can't lie for my character. Playing a character who ultimately believes that "Oh my God is too small" is different from saying, "Oh God's backyard is bigger than I thought."

Zemeckis: I would totally agree with Carl, he didn't like the phrase: "It would be a terrible waste of space." Since literal words mean nothing. It's like a bad joke.

Druyan: While the script went from hand to hand and the book went to others, there was more of an outsider feeling than an insider. I remember talking a lot about noble gases – the kind of things that make scientists look a little crazy. We felt that this sort of thing reflected on those who didn't understand what it was like to participate in an electrifying conversation with two scientists.

Zemeckis: We tried to make the whole thing as believable as we could. I'm not so sure NASA would have a red button to abort the mission like we did. But I know they can stop counting if something goes wrong in the last few seconds. Almost like a suicide pill? I don't know. But if they did something like that, they could deny it. Like, what were those four guys who went to the moon going to do if the moonship didn't work? Do not you think?

The Robert Zemeckis Show

The Contact story was difficult enough to film: creating and exploring spaceships, traveling to the center of the galaxy, imagining an alien masquerading as a human on an intergalactic beach. To capture it all, Zemeckis recorded in Very Large Array, near Socorro, New Mexico, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Washington DC., newfoundlandin Fiji islands, in sound studios in Los Angeles. During filming, the actors and production members wondered directly if God really existed, was he vengeful, and cursed the production of Contact?

Foster: Robert is a lovely, nice and optimistic being. He's very calm. Nothing can make him angry.

Zemeckis: I don't care about anything. Making a movie is like taking a leap of faith, right? You spend all the money and all the time. As was explained to me at the very beginning of my career by George Lucas, movies are binary: either they work or they don't.

Foster: One unusual thing about seeing him work is that every day he would come to the set and create a cinematic problem. He'd say something like, "I want to feel like the camera and Ellie are traveling through time together, and I want her to connect, but I still want viewers to have a sense of movement." And everyone was like, "Okay, that's it." it's impossible". And he said, “You know what? We are going to make it work.”

Ken Ralston, visual effects supervisor: I like working with Robert because a large percentage – something like 40% – seems impossible. Even when something doesn't look like a visual effect on the page, it can become one. Then I understood, “we are going to do this project. We are going to be pioneers. Either we're going to be hugely successful and this will be a great way for the world to know what Sony is capable of or we're going to fail miserably.

David Morse, Theodore Arroway: Zemeckis always has scenes in his movies where you think “What do you mean?”

ralston: The mirror scene, for starters. You would never expect anything special in that scene where a little girl finds her father dying and runs to the closet.

Zemeckis: The girl had to go upstairs and get her father's medicine, right? So you can just record the scene and everyone will understand, or else you wonder, “how can we do this in a whole new way?”

So I had this idea: I went to the camera and special effects people and said: “try to imagine that the camera lens is not the camera, but a mirror. It’s the mirror with the medicine cabinet, and she’s looking for you to get the medicine.” And that's what the recording looked like. When you cut to the mirror's point of view, the whole set is inverted. The stairs are on the wrong side, her face is inverted.

ralston: I remember how many times Robert Presley, our steadicam cameraman, had to climb those stairs backwards. He was exhausted.

Malone: I think few movies are technically proficient. They put everything together, nothing is premeditated. I love how people really try to make a good recording on set.

ralston: Robert is definitely his own worst enemy, that's because he does everything for the movie. I've seen him freak out, and he knows it. He goes crazy. He loses control. Swear too much. In Castaway I've heard him say it's his own fault.

Foster: The whole movie was cursed by time. In Socorro, where the telescopes were, if you wanted them to be turned in a specific position, you had to ask a lot in advance. We got ahead and ordered eight months ahead of schedule, but bad weather fucked us up, and delayed everything. When we went to Puerto Rico we had a lot of storms and mudslides. In Washington DC it was bitterly cold in all the external scenes. It was absolutely the worst movie atmosphere I've ever been in my life.

McConaughey: I don't remember if I was cursed. But it looked too wet to me.

ralston: A second group went to Newfoundland, to the Gros Morne National Park to engrave beautiful fjords as the background of the second machine in Hokkaido. We were shooting in helicopters and the weather was horrible, it snowed like crazy. Couldn't see anything.

Foster: There was a scene with a lot of extras – almost like a Comic-Con, where everyone was dressed up, but they were in the desert, like the Burning Man. The day passed and they had to change the film, – since it was a 35mm film – they ended up exposing everything. So they had to go back and record it all over again. The guy who exposed the whole movie by accident, who was an assistant cameraman, ended up getting fired. Tragic.

So in one scene, I had to talk to someone, turn around and get on the jet. But the door was shorter than me, and every time I hit my head. So I had a giant bump on my head. I had another big scene where I had to run up a hill, and I ended up getting stung in the neck by a bee. It was possible to see in the film: the red marcona on the neck and the bump on the head. Seriously, this movie was slightly cursed.

Zemeckis: I don't think we had any difficulties during filming.

The problem with the Machine

Zemeckis and his team used poetic license to bring Contact to the big screen. For example, Ellie wouldn't be listening to radio waves, she would be looking for visual signals. One of the main discussions about the story between Sagan, Druyan, Zemeckis, Goldenberg and Ralston was: What would the machine that would take Ellie into space look like?

Druyan: The machine came directly from my work with pre-Socratic philosophers and the history of science and the irrationalization of the number two – an obsession of the ancient Greeks – and the Euclidean patterning of solid geometric shapes and how, as seen in Cosmos, you could reach another dimension by taking a three-dimensional cube and projecting its beautiful angles with light into the fourth dimension. We wanted the ship to be super simple.

Zemeckis: I had several wonderful encounters with Carl, and we discussed a lot about the appearance of the machine, and I think he didn't like it. He said it looked like a carnival allegory. But I said, "Carl, you never described her in the book, you can't do that now." So the machine was all my idea.

ralston: There are some scenes that the machine doesn't... seem as real as we wanted. These are quick scenes, I learned from George Lucas years ago: you can get away with a crazy scene if everything is choreographed really well and the viewer can't see what we see.

goldenberg: I discussed a bit with Robert about the wormhole trip scene. Robert was direct: “In real life it would just be a cut, you would get there by now. There would be no journey.” And on the physical side of it, he's right. But I thought I needed a journey. I'd say, "It's like going to the Fantastic World of Oz without the tornado ride." We asked Carl what she should see during the journey.

Zemeckis: Ellie's journey through the wormhole is completely arbitrary. Something like, "Okay, it's going to be the way Robert Zemeckis said the trip would be." It was like a little musical scene: “Okay, we're going to stop here and we're going to go there; Lets do this."

Foster: All science fiction is about our fears and desires. It's not about what's possible or real.

Morse: I believe it took us two weeks to shoot the scene. I'm always impressed by the scene, as I know she was alone. She had to create that whole emotional scene.

Foster: It was like three weeks with me alone on a blue background. This makes you not want to make a movie with a blue background again, that's for sure.

McCounaughey: A screen does not react to you. So we just end up thinking, “Does this sound as dumb as it sounds to me?”

golderbeg: I took the hint: “we need dialogue for this scene.” But it was the scene with her narrating what happened – I wish I had cut it. It would have been more powerful if it was just silence, as the character's face conveyed a lot of strength.

Foster: We did a lot of things, and I talked and moved backwards. So I had to learn the dialogue backwards, and then do the scene. “They should have sent a poet”

Zemeckis: We shapeshifted Jena there too.

Malone: I had to sit with a frame on my head and a tennis ball on top of my head. I couldn't move. I remember that I wasn't satisfied, it was all very technical, I couldn't do it perfectly, but in the end it worked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GinvzbONjD0&ab_channel=yannshukor

Golderberg: I think I wrote the phrase “I'm ready to go” and it was like Jodie took that phrase and made it her mantra that kept her whole.

Foster: I said "I'm ready to go" thousands of times, obviously. That's what the NASA people say. But the fact that it fits with death, end of life, Buddhism, faith, and all those things is extremely wonderful.

There were things I did and then I had to do it again, but in a different way. I was, like, glued to that uniform.

Zemeckis: We gave Jodie a Joan of Arc armor that was part of a chair. She ended up being pinned to the chair. We rock it a lot. It was pretty violent.

Foster: Before recording, Robert sent me to Magic Mountain. Someone took me ten times in a row, without a break. So I think they were pretty sure I would take the hit.

Zemeckis: And she caught fire.

Foster: Jill, my stunt double, was tied to the chair, but they had to get her out quickly. An electrical failure burned everything, the thing spread very quickly.

Zemeckis: But we only lost a few hours.

A beach so real it looks fake

The film's entire success is based on one moment: When Ellie finally lands on her "destiny" and makes contact with an alien on a surreal beach at the center of the universe. It took a massive amount of work to get this scene right.

Druyan: When I was a kid, my brother was an amateur radio operator. There was one time he got the Pensacola signal. I was little, and that concept, the name Pensacola, made me come up with an idea of ​​keeping in touch before I even had any concept of it. Reach the world and find another soul on the planet. I thought Ellie would experience what I experienced as a child – the first time she understood the notion of a universe larger than her own experience.

Zemeckis: The aliens pulled that memory from her brain. They created the idea of ​​a beach that was on her mind. But we wanted them to be aliens. When I described it to the special effects team, the idea was that the entire beach would fit inside the ship, and everything was just a simple projection. We got the idea that it was inside a balloon and the image was projected onto the surface of the balloon and could wobble at the slightest touch. I think that was my idea of ​​heaven.

ralston. She is not on another planet, but in the depths of her subconscious.

Zemeckis: There's always the possibility that she had a small stroke or something. She might have died for a few seconds, who knows?

Morse: When I read the script, that scene was more expensive. I've traveled all over the Earth, and of all places, I've been to the Grand Canyon. I thought, I can't wait to do this. So I said yes to the movie. Then I got a new script, and all those places the characters went in that long scene – they were gone.

goldenberg: It was supposed to be as simple as possible.

ralston: We took Jodie and David Morse to pre-record. We only had a small video group, and we went to Leo Carillo's beach in Malibu, and in just one day we shot the whole scene. Robert came and recorded everything as if it were for the movie.

Morse: He recorded us, scripts in hand, from different angles. Then we went home, waiting for the day we shot the scene. And when the day came, the scene was even shorter than before, which was a little disappointing. We wouldn't do it on the beach. The scene would be shot in the FIji Islands without our presence.

ralston: I ended up going there with my team. We lived on a boat. There were no actors. Then we came back with many hours of recordings, all very complicated. But now the whole creative process of figuring out what we would actually do with that backdrop began.

Morse: Instead of being in Fiji, Jodie and I spent three days in front of a green screen. There was a little plate with some sand on it and that was our beach. We need to fake everything else.

Foster: They added stuff after recording, like my red lips, and stuff on our faces, and it gave it a hyperrealistic feel. There's a part of me – how can I say that? I'm not 100% sure what we did. There's a part of me that would love to see it be more real, rather than hyperrealistic.

Morse: All we needed was us and that little plate of sand. We could do whatever we needed. We had no idea how it would turn out, of course. When we saw him, my God in heaven, he was spectacular.

goldenberg: I know we disappointed a lot of people who wanted to see more. But Robert was convinced that there was no way to show the aliens in a way that didn't look silly. I agreed to show the father and then we had all that emotional contemplation of the protagonist saying goodbye to him. And that's what's most beautiful about Carl's philosophy: "The only thing we find to make emptiness bearable is each other."

Foster: As Carl would say, "The chances of you recognizing an alien are tiny, why would he have a recognizable shape?" There's a good chance he looks like a squid with a doorknob instead of an ear.

Druyan: The way we imagine aliens has always been weird to me, in our fantasies they are always more technologically advanced, but with the same feelings. It is so obvious that this is a projection of our fears as this is a projection of the way we treat each other on planet Earth. We are brutally selfish, and we assume everyone is like that. I think this is a failure of the imagination.

Tom Skerritt, David Drumlin: I don't know why people are always taken by the scary side of things instead of the things that might feel good. Contact is kind of about that.

What happened to Carl's ending?

The Contact ending has always been in development, from the moment of its conception. How do you end a story like Ellie's – should its ending be ambiguous or conclusive? Scientific or faith-oriented? Emotional or rational? Realistic or transcendental?

Fruits: The story was not difficult to adapt, but its ending was. That was our challenge. After she returns from the galaxy, what do we mean? What did the aliens mean? What did they want to test her on? What would happen when she came back knowing what had happened but without any proof? Now comes the deep part: she's a scientist, and she doesn't want to get stuck on what she believes in, but what she can prove.

George Miller couldn't commit 100% to the film because he didn't know how he wanted the ending. Each had their own idea of ​​what it should be like.

Hart: I love Contact. I don't like the ending, as it wasn't Carl's. He was extremely specific to me when we worked together and wanted faith to be an issue, but in the end, what happened to Ellie and the galaxy can be proven to be real. It wasn't ambiguous the way the movie did.

goldenberg: There were several versions of the ending. I met with Steven Spielberg and talked about it. At some point, he considered making the film, but it would be the third in his sci-fi trilogy: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, and then Contact. One of the ideas was to have Ellie give a speech about what it would be like if people could see what she saw, and the aliens heard that, and in the end, they would do a light show, the same one Ellie saw in the center of the galaxy. It didn't work out.

I was trying to do something. The audacity of leaving an ambiguous ending, sort of leaving it slowly, rather than ending with something impactful was Robert's conviction, and I think he was right.

Zemeckis: I wouldn't dare do anything other than ambiguous, as anything else would sound false.

Druyan: We wanted to make her a person who would never believe someone who claimed to have a fantastic experience without any evidence and then become that person. But my son Sam told me, “If they had 18 hours of video, how could it be ambiguous? How would that happen?

Zemeckis: Eighteen hours of digital static that ended up on a chip that passed a bizarre kind of magnetic field is the same as nothing.

goldenberg: The 18-hour tape was my idea, but too late during production. This scene was written much later, and shot near the end of our schedule. I wasn't sure if it was a good idea. Ann is right – the scales tip more towards the “this definitely happened” side. But I can tell you that when I watched it together with the audience, it was possible to feel it in the cinema. When the scene took place, the audience got the message. I'm sure the movie was a hit thanks to the feeling of, “Man, you know what? It happened." But even if it was ambiguous, from a logical point of view, nothing has changed, but from an emotional point of view, everything has changed.

McConaughey: The ending was left open to me. I felt like that was the right spot for him.

Foster: There's a wonderful thing about how contained, small, internal, and personal the ending is. The moment where Ellie is answering questions and James Woods says something like “Did it happen or not?” His answer is the true ending: "I had an experience, and everything tells me it was real, it's alive inside of me, I can tell you that."

Morse: I think it was a very smart ending since we don't know what's out there. We have our hopes and faith, our quest, which is as important as any other of these things.

Druyan: I wish it were different. I thought he was wonderful, but if Carl and I were powerful, and Carl was in good health, then I would have done things differently, and so would he. The idea was that Ellie would learn to be modest. And Palmer too. For what reasons does your version of reality hold up even without any basis?

History: My father's lifelong philosophy was, "We don't have evidence yet." With the questions of extraterrestrials and so many others that we have been looking for answers for millennia. The ability to keep a place for the answer instead of just depositing something there because it satisfies us in the short term, that's a lot of what I learned from my father.

Fruits: Zemeckis added an addendum to the end, a scene where she is teaching. I've never seen that part, nor do I care – I think it's a very banal thing for such a profound question.

I love the feeling of sand slipping through my fingers, mostly because life is like that. It's slipping through our fingers just like that little glow. She has this moment of admiration not only for the environment around her, but also for everything she can't understand. Which we may never understand.

Zemeckis: I consider myself an atheist, but I realized working on this film that I was confusing God with spirituality, and they are different things. Contact, for me, was a way of understanding that an atheist is arrogant for believing that God doesn't exist, and that can make him arrogant like a believer. Spirituality is the only form of human modesty, being able to accept that you are okay without knowing and without needing to know.

Foster: I was undecided. I was like, “I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God. But wait a minute, do I believe in God? And does that make a difference? It's like a pyramid scheme. Right, but the scheme works…” I still wonder.

Druyan: We are babies. We are new. I think Carl felt the only appropriate place in our position of ignorance was to be agnostic. "I don't know." Modesty is the only position to take.

the great loss

On December 20, 1996, Carl Sagan died, aged 62. And then the process began.

Fruits: He was heroic in the end. He worked until he started receiving a stem cell transfusion.

Druyan: A month after Carl died, we went to Washington DC to see a recording. Carl was tired but was able to show his fascination when he talked about the movie. The energy was overwhelmingly positive, but of course we were dealing with an existential crisis that threatened everything.

Foster: Unfortunately he died in the middle of the recordings.

Druyan: Carl saw only a small scene, where Bill Clinton was talking about aliens.

Fruits: I was with Annie and Carl when he left.

Druyan: I felt like I had something amputated, but I had no idea which part was removed.

History: A lot of my association with Activated came from the loss of my father. The idea that it was finally happening after years of work and a lot of trying and he couldn't see the finished movie, that's an extremely emotional connection that I have.

Zemeckis: I was sad. It was horrible. But it was a privilege to spend so much time with Carl. I really wanted him to see the finished work. My own selfishness was that I couldn't talk to him about the movie when it was finally finished, but at the same time, who knows, he might not have liked it.

Druyan: Carl was buried in Ithaca, New York, just five minutes from where I lived, and after his funeral, a limo took my little one and me home. There he parked a car. I thought someone had sent flowers or food since they knew Carl was dead. So this guy comes and gives me a subpoena.

Years before, even before I met Carl, Francis Ford Coppola had come to Ithaca to work with Carl on a science fiction film, but nothing was done. He had 20 years to do something, and he didn't. That was his way of getting an injunction to stop the movie from moving forward. At that time, only a small part had been recorded.

Fruits: Francis went crazy and decided that because he had a conversation with Carl once he had rights to Contact.

Druyan: I didn't believe someone could be so heartless. Warner executive Courtenay Valenti told us: “Relax. We are with you. He's mad about Pinocchio (a lawsuit where the director tried to move the film to Sony, but lost in higher instances), which is why he's doing it. Nor is there any reason for you to be involved.”

Zemeckis: What did he want? No idea. I don't know anything, but it was crazy.

Druyan: I was interviewed several times by his lawyers. I was there, a few months after Carl's death, and I could barely stand alone, the pain and the smoldering despair. They showed me Carl's manuscripts in his beautiful handwriting, I cried just seeing his writing.

Fruits: Nobody took it seriously, but it was ugly. He sued and lost badly.

Zemeckis: I don't know if you remember the Cosmos series, but every time Carl made a prediction he always said, "That's if we don't destroy ourselves."

Hart: I never heard him say a negative word for the three years I spent with him. One day, out of the blue, Carl said, "I give us ten years." And I asked, “What do you mean? Ten years?" I'm worried that we won't be around to take the call.” Much later I realized that he was talking about himself.

goldenberg: It was Robert's idea to put "To Carl" in the last scene. I was surprised.

Foster: Being responsible, in a way, for the legacy of Carl Sagan is incredible to me. This is really an important thing for me.

Druyan: The sheer joy of thinking that during the 20 years we've been together is phenomenal. It was so romantic. Everything we did together was romantic. What is more romantic than Travel (a 1977 space program that departed with some knowledge of Earth in spacecraft). This is still surreal to me. I think about it everyday. I think about it every day since 1977. And yet I still don't understand the full beauty of our history, and our life together.

The idea of ​​a sequel

Mourning for Sagan and racing against the clock, the Contact team had until the date of Premiére, in August 1997, to finish the film. "THE Premiére There were incomplete scenes. Nobody knew about it.” remembers Ralston. Eventually, the film grossed twice its cost, which was $90 million. Its release ranked second in its first weekend, second only to Men in Black, and received positive reviews. However, as time passed, the esteem of the public and critics only increased; Roger Ebert, which at the time of release had given it three out of four possible stars, added the work to its collection of “great movies” in 2011.

Druyan: I remember sitting there watching the premiere, less than a year after Carl died. I was holding Lynda's hand, and we watched the first three minutes. We were just trying to relax. Someone whispered to someone else, “It's going to be okay, it's really good. The three minutes I'm very proud of.

Fruits: We talked about Contact hitting that stupid movie, Independence Day, which had come out a year earlier and became a hit. Do you remember how stupid that was? With aliens shooting computers? It's a movie I irrationally hate for a reason: I hated it for refuting Carl. He believed that if you give them entertainment that stimulates their cerebral cortex, getting them to think in a thought-provoking way, it would be far more successful than appealing to the reptilian brain. I wanted Contact to be number one. But we debuted against the Men in Black, and we came out second. What made her very angry for a long time was that stupid movie won.

But now people tell me they've watched Activated with their daughters for the first time. I realized, it's all about your longevity, isn't it? It's a long run. Nobody remembers Independence Day these days. And everyone remembers Contact.

McConaughey: The movie did very well, didn't it?

Foster: If we're talking about expectations, it was a Robert Zemeckis movie, and I was the hottest actress in Hollywood. I think there were a lot of expectations that the movie should become a blockbuster just for the two of us. And like a blockbuster, should become a franchise. But Robert Zemeckis always makes epic movies that are about little personal things. I think people were surprised by the amount of resonance. We did it. We made films that resonated and also entertained.

Zemeckis: The movie was expensive, and I know it was profitable, but nothing close to Titanic or anything like that. I think the ambiguous ending prevented the movie from becoming a gigantic blockbuster hit. An ambiguous ending will never do that. I think the best comment on Contact came from South Park. They mentioned the movie, and the character threw up on the floor and said, "I watched two goddamn hours of this movie to find out the alien was her father." This is definitely my favorite comment about the movie.

McConaughey: A lot of people came to me afterward and said, “That was a really wrong choice for your career.” And I said: “Maybe for you, not for me”.

Foster: I felt brave. Inside Contact is a little treasure. If you release it, you'll see Carl Sagan's book, and you'll also see George Miller's movie. They are there somewhere.

Druyan: I feel proud that we were able to protect Contact enough to keep a female hero we can be proud of.

Fruits: One of the best things about Contact is that we have more women in astronomy today. When Annie and I do something together, we always run into astronomers who tell us, "It's because of Ellie."

Foster: I feel like people always go through Contact, and I never understood why. Sometimes I think it's because the poster looks like, I don't know… I wouldn't say corny, but more like a Hollywood movie. Matthew was like the young hottie. People still didn't see what a great actor he was.

McConaughey: I'm very interested to see what my kids, when they're old enough, will think when they see the movie. Now more than ever, there is science to certain spiritual endeavors with technology – which prove the value of meditation, of laughter, of a sense of community, of the human touch, of sleep. There are things I've learned that I'd like to share with the platform I have, like Palmer Joss. I don't know if this is my calling. Still, as I said, I thought I should be a monk for a while. And I still have time.

Morse: I moved to Philadelphia right after the movie came out, and there was a club where I practiced swimming. A father was there with his daughters, and the girls were looking at me. Eventually, the dad came over with the girls and said, “See, I wanted you to know that…” – sorry, that always gets to me. He said: “The girls' mother passed away a few weeks ago. And we saw the movie. And we would like you to know how much it meant to us and how much hope in God.”

Malone: Of all the things I've done, this was the first one I showed my son. I was like, "Do you want to see Mom when she was a kid?" And he said to me, "Yes, Mom." So I turned on the movie, and in that first scene, the whole universe came out of my eyes, which is pretty crazy. He was perplexed.

Zemeckis: Many people tell me that Contact is their favorite movie out of all the ones I've made.

goldenberg: I have an idea for the sequel. It's like a limited series model that would get a new entry.

Hart: It would be really cool to have a series on streaming, as Carl's book is so expansive and has so much of it that has never been talked about.

Fruits: Everyone talks about a sequel, but I don't know. It's complicated.

Zemeckis: That movie probably wouldn't be made today. since it's about some thing. Movies can be about things if they don't cost much to make. None of the movies I made in the 1980s or 1990s would be made today.

Fruits: Well, the movie industry sucks, but one thing they like is sci-fi. I'm sure they would make another realistic fiction movie nowadays. Would they make a $100 million original movie without a Marvel hero pegged to it?

Zemeckis: I had a good journey. Films have been with us for 120 years. We are at the tipping point. Maybe all will be well, or maybe this is the birth of a new golden age of cinema.

Article translated from vulture.

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