Jodie Foster Reflects on the Personal Journey of Making ‘Contact’

It didn’t take long for Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster to decide to make Contact. “The script came with the words ‘Carl Sagan,’†she said. “So right there, I was in love.†The 1997 film, directed by Robert Zemeckis, is based on a 1985 novel by the acclaimed scientist, and, at a recent event, Foster spoke about why she was drawn to the film all those years ago.

The screening took place earlier this week at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, CA, as part of its film series, “To Infinity: Space Travel in the Movies.†io9 was given complimentary tickets to the event to watch the masterful film in 35mm and hear Foster, along with astrophysicist Dr. Nivedita Mahesh, discuss it.

“[Sagan] was an extraordinary man, and his legacy continues in everything we do,†Foster continued. “The script itself, even though he didn’t write the script, really had that very specific tone of his that is trying desperately to join together the spiritual impulse [and] the religious impulse with the scientific impulse. And the subset there that connects those two is wonder. And wow. And, ‘I can’t believe how beautiful it is that I don’t understand this.’ And I think at the time, there was something so beautiful and humanist and lovely about that that I wanted to participate in.â€

“But now, especially, I really understand the beauty of that idea that we’ve lost about how we can come together in that act of wonder,†she continued. “And the importance of science, and the importance of faith in our lives, in what makes us human.â€

In terms of humans, Foster said she believes Ellie Arroway, the main character of the film who discovers a message from a distant planet, is “the most me character I’ve ever played.â€

“Or maybe who I wanted to be,†Foster continued. “Maybe who I wanted to appear for people. She’s somebody who is driven by this passion and this love of something. [But] that kind of singular quality also detaches her from other people. So that is the quandary. In order to reach for this, she has to let go of that. And that really is the question of the movie. In order to find this thing, to be a part of something, this revolutionary idea that I’m looking to connect with the greater planets of who we are in space, do I have to be alone? So that was the question that interested me the most.â€

Of course, Foster was not alone in creating the character. And, in fact, Zemeckis himself had a very specific vision for what Ellie should look like. “I think the idea behind Ellie Arroway that Zemeckis had was that she was an explorer,†Foster said. “So, with the costume designer, with the production designer, [there was] this idea of she is our female Christopher Columbus, or our female explorer. And so, they took a lot of images from old pictures of what a Spanish explorer would look like, and we kind of translated that to her character.â€

One thing that, fascinatingly enough, didn’t quite translate was the crux of the movie itself, that signal from a distant planet. In the film, Ellie hears a message sent from deep space, which then sets off a whole chain of events. Dr. Mahesh explained, however, that radio waves aren’t sound. They are light. Sound can’t travel through a vacuum. Light can. So, basically, everything you thought you knew about Contact was wrong. Ellie would’ve gotten light images, not sound.

“We get a lot wrong in the movie,†Foster admitted. “The one good thing I can say is we knew we were getting it wrong. They were specific choices that were made by Robert Zemeckis, and he said, like, ‘This is what matters, this is what doesn’t… I had a long conversation with Zemeckis where he explained to me why he thought me wearing headphones and listening was important for the audience, and we all came up with… some kind of reasoning about why she listens to the signs instead of just looking at the computer screen, because looking at computer screens is boring on film.â€

Know what’s not boring on film? Contact. A movie that was both of its time and ahead of its time. If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it in a while, definitely check it out.

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