"Contact" - the movie

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"Contact"- on the making of the film by Douglas Eby

separate interviews below with :
Michael Goldenberg (screenwriter);
Steve Starkey (producer);
Ed Verreaux (production designer)

link to interview with Jodie Foster

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Alien interactions with human society, such as UFOs and crop circles, are tantalizing mysteries -- part of the evolution in scientific understanding. The director of the TV movie "Roswell", Jeremy Kagan, noted (Cinefantastique, Aug., 1994) that his film is an example of looking at life with a wider vision: "I've become more aware that we have been educated to see the things that are in front of us, and not other things that may also be in front of us, whether they are ghosts or alien presences or other versions of ourselves. I think we are in the time -- and maybe it's the end of the millennium -- where our awareness level lets us look at life in a deeper, more dense way and we see these other realities."

The origin for CONTACT was in that kind of interest in "other realities", as well as the established verities of astronomy. Carl Sagan wrote his only novel, the basis for the film, in the mid 80s, but his wife (and co-producer and story contributor) Ann Druyan (pronounced dreean) noted his interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the SETI Institute, had been there a long time: "He started writing about it in the early fifties, and was a pioneer in making SETI a respectable scientific area of research." She is excited about the way the film is coming together and feels it "will affect people, shake them up, and will convey something of the true grandeur of the universe. For me, it's that possibility that makes the seventeen year journey even that much more meaningful."

Sagan was passionate about popularizing science, and wrote more than two dozen books, hundreds of articles and hosted the 1980 PBS series COSMOS. "I think he was the leading scientist on Earth in the efforts to inquire about extraterrestrial life," said Louis Friedman, president of the Planetary Society, which Sagan co-founded. The work of the SETI Institute, at the heart of the film, has had a $58 million government investment and a long history of cooperation with NASA, with further funding suddenly cut off in 1993. But the institute continues as Project Phoenix, with its mission intact, as their Internet site declares, "to find evidence of intelligence elsewhere in the universe."

A number of the key filmmakers on CONTACT have commented on how wide-ranging the film has been in terms of the moral and philosophical implications of a human meeting with an alien civilization, and Druyan notes that she has also been interested in those larger issues "from day one. Going to back to the moment that my wonderful late husband Carl Sagan and I sat on a patio in West Hollywood, talking about what the story would include. We were very excited about the notion of creating a story that was rip-roaring and exciting and had a kind of suspenseful pacing and action, but that was also an opportunity to kind of joyfully explore these questions."

At the beginning of his 1985 novel, Sagan included a poem by Marvin, a fifth grader from Harlem: "My heart trembles like a poor leaf / The planets whirl in my dreams / The stars press against my window / I rotate in my sleep / My bed is a warm planet." That sensibility very much fits CONTACT's central character, radio astronomer Ellie. Recalling the times Jodie Foster spent with Sagan and herself during his last days alive, and how Foster fit the role, Druyan said "Carl and I looked at each other and said 'Ellie lives.'"

Foster was drawn to the story because of, among other things, the intense involvement her character has with her work: "The foremost thing about Ellie's character, that's true in the book, in the screenplay, and definitely on screen, is that she is completely and totally passionate", Foster says. "And that's something that I was dying to play: somebody that is very involved and very focused on an intellectual process, and that that process allows her to fly in ways that feels very loving and emotional. And feels very human. I think too often, intellectual processes are portrayed as some kind of dry, scientific thing that doesn't have a connection to the soul. And when you're obsessed by something, when something fascinates you, it's wondrous. And in fact, if anything, I think she's a zealot, so it's actually kind of a movie about a zealot who learns to have tolerance for other people's zeal."

Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg (who wrote and directed BED OF ROSES) recalls Foster getting involved early on in the development process: "And she certainly had input. She was very respectful of the story, and very much approaching it as an actor, although we all know she has chops as a director as well, and a writer. She always had strong ideas, great ideas. We were trying to encourage her to bring in even more." He was working with Zemeckis "from day one", which he found very positive: "I don't want to sound too gushy, but it was sort of the idyllic screenwriter's experience, especially on a movie this big where you tend to have a lot of nervous studio people, and money. Fortunately when you've got someone like Bob running the show, he set the tone for everything and made it a breeze, a pleasure."

Goldenberg found that Zemeckis also "felt very strongly about this being an internal journey, the human journey, and this one human's journey as sort of the metaphor for all of us. One of the things I'm proudest of is the way we've been able to take a lot of ideas -- and there are a lot of ideas in the book, about science and religion, humanity's destiny -- and embody them in these real, living, breathing characters, and sort of get the best of both worlds. What was unique about this was being able to work on a scale this large, to tell this kind of epic story, and to have all the tools of modern digital filmmaking at your disposal." Those characters also include, beside Foster and Woods, Matthew McConaughey, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, David Morse, Rob Lowe, and Angela Bassett.

One of the things Woods (who has referred to himself as 'the epitome of nerdom', being an ex math student at MIT) liked about the film is that it emphasized the internal, personal dimensions of the story: "When all this new technology is available to us, CGI and so on, I was really impressed that Bob Zemeckis chose to do what was really the most important thing, and it's always, as a true nerd knows, that everything takes place in the human mind. I was really pleased to work with a guy who wanted to take the internal journey, rather than what I call the 'T-shirt journey'... I mean, the movie's really about religion as much as about science. And it also points out the collision between and collusion of science and faith."

There's an enduring magic to the idea that we are not alone, that there are advanced beings out there who are interested in communicating with us, and have something valuable to say. As Jill Tarter, Director of Project Phoenix of the SETI Institute, has put it: "They'd probably know a lot about how the Universe works. They've been out there and they've been talking to other civilizations and there may be this whole galactic club, the ultimate Internet." CONTACT explores some of the social and personal consequences of a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Especially when the search is successful.

The novel by Carl Sagan, the basis for the film, revolves around the passionate enchantment of talented radio astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) with the possibility of finding an alien civilization. The novel illustrates her early affinity for science when she fixes a broken radio by herself as a young girl, and goes on to figure out the basic electronics involved. Jena Malone, who plays Ellie from about age 9 to 11, says she hadn't read the Sagan novel before being cast but was interested in the subject: "There's been lots of movies about alien contact, but this has really a good story behind it. It's not just about the aliens, and making the contact, but it's more about life. It's real, much more in depth. And to work with Jodie Foster, obviously, was a big reason to do it."

Comparing the experiences she had in BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA (directed by Anjelica Huston), a story of abuse which demanded emotional range and depth from her, Malone says CONTACT was "really just me playing me. It was fun, and it was neat to learn how to work the ham radio. It's amazing you can reach that far. And in 1960 or 70, as a little girl. So all those things interested me. Even if I could just visit the set, I would have. It's an amazing script."

Malone is well-cast as a gifted girl: "I'm supposed to be sixth grade, but I do seventh to ninth grade work. Right now I'm taking a break from school, and I sometimes go to a museum or some historical park, something like that." Before switching to home schooling, Malone was in public schools, always in a gifted program, and in CONTACT she found it appealing to be a character who had interests in technical subjects: "I really studied up on ham radio, and really got to learn it. Usually, characters are just there; there's different sides to them, but it's really the person feeling all these feelings. But to be able to express it and have this great love of science was fun to do. I've never had to learn about something specific for a character, but for this part I learned a lot, and actually passed all my science and astronomy." Another thing Malone likes is that the movie "is very action-oriented, and a thriller. I'm going to be right in line as soon as it comes out."

As co-producer and story contributor, Ann Druyan had been involved with the material, along with her husband Carl Sagan, for many years. She thinks the subject matter is even more meaningful now: "What I think is very exciting is, in the kind of long and winding road that has led us to an actual movie, that tension between religion and science, and that yearning for some kind of worldview or philosophy that will be informed by the discoveries, is more immediate now, worldwide, than I think it was seventeen years ago when we began this process. And it will also have a kind of goosebump-raising, spiritual dimension to it."

Druyan served as creative director of the NASA Voyager Interstellar Record Project, the complex message of music, text and images for possible communication with an alien civilization, and she and Sagan collaborated on the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning 13-part TV series COSMOS, a project she recalls "was no small undertaking, especially for its time. It was 40 locations around the Earth, and we did a fair amount of space travel in that as well, so it feels to me that CONTACT is close to that in ambition. And people working on it have the sense that this has the potential to become an event, and to affect the way we think about things."

The story development for CONTACT has been "a thoroughly pleasurable, stimulating experience from the beginning", Druyan says. "What was so nice about Michael [Goldenberg] and Bob [Zemeckis] and Steve [Starkey] was that, just like in science, the best argument always seemed to win the day. No arguments from authority, from 'Because I say so.' So as we would explore these questions, it was a very thrilling kind of activity. We had gone about the Voyager Record, which has a shelf life of a billion years, with a sense of sacred purpose, a little bit like constructing the 'Noah's Ark' of human civilization, because anything we put on the record had a shot at surviving longer than the shape of the continents, or the contents of our DNA. So that was a profound experience, and everything that Carl ever did in his whole life, as far as I can see, was with the biggest possible context, and the kind of a perspective that was informed by the time scale that he dealt with as a scientist."

Druyan affirms that Sagan was able to make contributions to the development of the film until the very last moments of his life: "And Bob and Michael and Steve went to great lengths to assure that, even traveling to Seattle where Carl was hospitalized for long periods of time. And Jodie Foster, as well. She made a trip to Seattle, which touched us very deeply, and spent long periods talking at length about the significance of these questions, and about what was best for the movie."

For Druyan, the film has had an additional depth of meaning: "Losing my husband has made even the triumphant sense of CONTACT's imminent release upon the world bittersweet. I've seen a little bit of it, and what I see thrills me, and I think 'Oh, that's fantastic' and then my first thought is 'Isn't Carl going to love this?' and then my second thought is how irrevocable and brutal the acceptance of death is, that this person you've loved and worked with for twenty years is never going to see it. It takes some of the pleasure away. But I have the sense this is an event looming on the horizon."

Michael Goldenberg, an accomplished playwright with a degree in drama from Carnegie-Mellon University, wrote and directed BED OF ROSES (starring Christian Slater and Mary Stuart Masterson) before taking on the job of writing CONTACT. He had read the Sagan novel when it first came out, and started doing some drafts for the screenplay in 1993, joining the company full time in 1995. He says he's been a "hard-core science fiction fan" since he was a kid, recalling he was eleven when STAR WARS came out: "I was reading a lot of science fiction at the time, and saw the commercials on TV, and I didn't go the first month, because I thought it wasn't hip enough, but then my non-science-fiction friends were all saying I had to see it, and I was converted."

Goldenberg remarks that he's been "totally concerned" with the quality and level of detail in CONTACT: "It was a dream project, to be able to tell the story on this level, but also to help make the kind of movie I've always wanted to see as a fan, and not play fast and loose, the way we see so often, but to get the details right. Especially with a story like this, which is totally based on the credibility and authenticity of the world, and the science; that's what makes it tick. And when you've got Carl Sagan there, you know the real-world science is going to be impeccable; that was a huge priority with him. He read over at least everything that came out of my computer, and I'd get notes from him periodically, and talk to him on the phone, and his wife. It was great, an incredible resource. We had more fun talking and arguing. He was a hero."

One of the ideas in the novel is that the crew of the Machine, the craft built from design specs supplied by the aliens, consisted of five people, carefully chosen to represent humanity. In the film the sole passenger is just Ellie, and Goldenberg recalls that that story decision "happened pretty early, I guess. It was a prime example of how you winnow a novel down to get a movie, and the sort of distillation process that has to happen. In this case, it worked dramatically as well. Carl was very enthusiastic about it. When the book was written in the early 80s, the five-member crew was sort of a metaphor for the United Nations. But in the post-Cold War era, it didn't have the same resonance. Although there's still very much the idea in the movie about the message [from the aliens] functioning as a catalyst for unity and international cooperation. And when you've got Jodie Foster, she's worth four other characters anyway."

An earlier script of Goldenberg's, the first one he sold, is now in development at Universal. Called "Interpretation of Dreams", it's a "dark psychological fantasy," he says, "sort of combining spectacular visuals with a compelling drama. And that's always been my interest, making those things work together. But in a funny way, a lot of that came up with CONTACT as well, and that's something that's been brought out a little more from the book. It was implicit in the book, but when you have Jodie Foster, you can get inside her head. So from the character point of view, we were able to delve a little deeper, and the medium allows that."

Goldenberg acknowledges the director's influence on the script development: "You can write anything, and you know Bob Zemeckis is going to visualize it brilliantly. It was really liberating to be able to go anywhere, come up with anything, and know you could get that image on the screen. So it was a great ride, that way. And also to work with these big ideas, and Carl brings big ideas to the party, stuff you sat up all night in your dorm room talking about. Bob was able to keep it grounded in this reality, and credible, and at the same time, it's juiced up and you're on the edge of your seat."

Producer Steve Starkey began his long association with Robert Zemeckis in 1986 as an associate producer of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, and went on to help create the second and third BACK TO THE FUTURE films, DEATH BECOMES HER, and FORREST GUMP. Asked about the level and quality of effects in CONTACT, compared with the spectacular work in GUMP, Starkey said the two projects have different needs, but notes that Ken Ralston and Sony Imageworks is still making use of the technology developed for the earlier film, but that it "probably is not going to be as apparent, if that's the word, in CONTACT as it was in GUMP -- stuff like interacting with presidents and Lieutenant Dan's legs: effects which are kind of really in your face. A lot of what we're doing in CONTACT is more of the same, but done in a more complicated way, and we take more liberties. For example, when you're filming large crowds in Washington DC, which we did again in this movie, rather than have camera lock-off, which we did in GUMP, we're actually moving the camera more, and making it feel like more fluid photography, as if you had those hundreds of thousands of people there. Going from helicopter shots that continue in a crane shot, and moving shots down roads, with throngs of people, all manipulated digitally. It's stuff that everyone will feel 'Oh, it's just another helicopter shot with a bunch of people out in the desert', when actually it was all created by the use of this new technology."

Based on the script, the filmmakers created a distinct orientation for the dishes to point at the start, and then move to a new position. Starkey says "Having to shoot the same thing over and over from different angles, our complexity was that our scene was at predawn, that magical time between when the sun sets and it's dark, or when it's dark in the morning and the sun rises. Those are the only times you can create that look, and that's the time in the story when [Ellie] actually hears the sound, she sits up and she starts driving, races down the road, calls in the coordinates to the people inside. She races inside, the machine locks in, they hear the pulse and, boom, the sun comes up; it's all timed in the screenplay."

All of these shots, Starkey points out, "are big, massive set-ups, in that little window in which we also need dish control time. The first morning we were there it rained like they've never seen it in October, ever. Then it's so muddy you can't drive on these slick, clay roads. The next morning it was blowing so hard you couldn't even have a camera on a crane, it was near-hurricane conditions. Finally the rains stopped, and we were setting up for a big scene with helicopters zooming in, where the government wants to take over this facility, and they got this ground fog so bad you couldn't even see the dishes! I got rain, I go mud, I got high winds and then fog, and it was like I was about to kill myself. But anyway, we got all the shots. We also had as a technical advisor an astronomer who's doing this work, so we had a lot of sympathetic souls around in the trenches with us, who saw we were doing the best we could, and that they should help us out a little. At Arecibo we had a lot of unseasonable rain, but other than that, everything went very smoothly in fact. The Arecibo antenna is staggering; it's such a huge object it's hard to capture on film."

Having been involved with Lucasfilm as assistant film editor on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI, and associate producer of Spielberg's AMAZING STORIES, Starkey commented on his interests in science fiction and fantasy projects: "As a boy, I certainly read my share of science fiction, meaning Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and a variety of things. In college I took this course called "Sociology of the Possible" and you read a lot of science fiction, and it was really about projecting all the possibilities of societies in the future. But I would say when I've been going through my film work, I never had it in my mind that I was seeking a science fiction-related project. It's just that the movie work I got happened to be a lot of science fiction in nature. I was really pursuing film work with Lucas, then with Spielberg, then with Bob; it's just that each of them chose science fiction at the time I landed there. And Bob always has had a bent on reality on most of his movies, so anytime you would have landed into Bob's realm, whether in the past or now, you would have landed where reality is slightly askew."

Starkey feels CONTACT "represents a moment to investigate your own personal truths in a film, against a wonderful spectacle backdrop, and so for that reason it's very special, because we seem to be going down to an emotional core of our pivotal character, and trying to discover something about her while at the same time, she's trying to discover some truth in the universe. I think a lot of people my age are thinking about, so I think it's timely in my life and many people's lives, and hopefully enjoy a film while you're thinking about it."

This is his first project as production designer for Ed Verreaux, having worked as art director or assistant art director on HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT, CASPER, BLUE CHIPS, HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID, and BACK TO THE FUTURE 2 and 3. Science fiction is an area Verreaux enjoys, and he likes what was presented in this project: "On a film with the scope of CONTACT there was a whole lot of conceptual issues at the very beginning. That's the real challenge: working with a director like Bob and being able to get a sense of what he wants to do, and then offer stuff up to him, and coming to some kind of consensus about the design. It's been a really dynamic and challenging process. I'm getting more and more a sense of the whole, and how it's going to come out. It's pretty exciting."

Moving from art direction to production design is a big change in level of involvement, says Verreaux: "It's much, much broader in scope; having to interface a whole lot more with all the departments, and trying to put together, with the director, a visual direction that the movie's going to go in, and then just trying to keep it on track. With art direction, for instance, you don't usually get to choose colors of sets and stuff, but as production designer, you do. You're working on a much broader canvas, to use the painter analogy. It's both more satisfying and a lot scarier, because you know what'll happen if they get on the set and say 'Mustard yellow! This color looks like crap.' And they don't look at the art director, they look at me."

One of the key members of his production design team is Steve Burg, Verreaux points out: "He worked on a lot of big scifi films, like T2, TOTAL RECALL, THE ABYSS and others. His designs are really what you see in WATERWORLD. His title is production illustrator, but I would really call him the concept artist; very early in the design process I was able to get him to work on the show, and between him and me it was a real collaborative effort. Steve did the big paintings and sketches based on our discussions with Bob. My art directors on the show were Larry Hubbs and Bruce Crone."

The radio transmission from the Vega system that is at the core of the story carries coded messages in several layers of meaning, including one that turns out to be a replay of one of the first commercial TV broadcasts: Der Fuhrer addressing the 1930's German Olympics. Referring to the visual portrayal of this signal, Verreaux credits video engineer Ian Kelly as one of the key people: "He had a lot to do with helping clarify everyone's mind as to how video works, the different kinds of signals and how the message could be layered within pulses, and the look of the Hitler playback. The people who should get the lion's share of the credit are the people at Sony Imageworks; they really developed all the playback. This movie is about windows and monitors; looking out of windows onto grand vistas, and seeing things played back on monitors from someplace across the world."

Verreaux and his team also designed the set for the NASA control room: "We went around and around on that, and also the shipboard control and designing the ship. We also built on stage a large executive hover-jet. The ship was part of [the story's] Hadden Industries - he's sort of a Bill Gates multinational, multibillionaire character - and he has all these resources, including a supertanker. What I had thought of was when scientists do deep oceanographic work lots of times, they have these container-like rooms they can just strap down on the deck of a ship, and that becomes your working space. So we did a large sketch on the idea of having a thousand foot long supertanker or superfreighter, and they've taken this modular control room and strapped it onto the deck. And Bob [Zemeckis] mentioned there are these companies that go drilling for oil in the middle of the Amazon, and have these self-contained units they fly in by helicopter, and drop them down, and in a day you've got a little village. So we liked that idea too."

Verreaux says they wanted to make the control room "look like NASA, but not really be NASA; that was really interesting. Early on, we went down to NASA and got the VIP tour. We got to go up on the gantry, with the Shuttle there, and got to stick our heads in the Shuttle while they were preparing it, and got to go in one of the three big firing rooms they have. At one point we were even talking about using one of those rooms, but it's always more efficacious, if you can, to do it on a stage, because you've got a lot more control. I first started with a copy of what's down there, but Bob said it looked too much like a James Bond set. Then we began to play with it, and I think in the end everyone felt we came up with a pretty satisfying solution."

The film has meant a lot to him: "One, this is my first time out as a production designer, so I regard myself as a tremendously lucky person to have been given this assignment. But then also I guess I have to give myself credit for having been prepared and having worked all these years as an art director. As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest film I've ever worked on, in any capacity, and for most people on the crew I've heard from, this is the biggest thing they've done, and that probably in the future, this will be regarded by us - certainly by me - as a watermark; on future projects we might say, 'Well, this isn't as big as CONTACT', or 'This is almost like CONTACT.'"

Verreaux had coffee mugs made for the crew: "On one side was the CONTACT logo, which was a version of the NASA logo, which we just used for the shoot, not onscreen, and on the other side was a quote from one of the production meetings where Bob had said 'A truly realistic representation of a fantastic event.' I thought that really summed up the show, and it's been kind of my guiding line all through the movie."

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Michael Goldenberg, screenwriter, CONTACT

by Douglas Eby

An accomplished playwright with a degree in drama from Carnegie-Mellon University, Michael Goldenberg wrote and directed BED OF ROSES with Christian Slater and Mary Stuart Masterson, before taking on the job of writing CONTACT. He had read the Carl Sagan novel when it first came out, and started doing some drafts for the screenplay in 1993, joining the company full time in 1995. He says he's been a "hard-core science fiction fan" since he was a kid, recalling he was eleven when STAR WARS came out: "I was reading a lot of science fiction at the time, and saw the commercials on TV, and I didn't go the first month, because I thought it wasn't hip enough, but then my non-science-fiction friends were all saying I had to see it, and I was converted."

Goldenberg remarks that he's been "totally concerned" with the quality and level of detail in CONTACT: "It was a dream project, to be able to tell the story on this level, but also to help make the kind of movie I've always wanted to see as a fan, and not play fast and loose, the way we see so often, but to get the details right. Especially with a story like this, which is totally based on the credibility and authenticity of the world, and the science; that's what makes it tick. It's a different tone than a film like INDEPENDENCE DAY, which takes a broader approach. The idea here was, what would really happen? That's what we were always asking ourselves. And when you've got Carl Sagan there, you know the real-world science is going to be impeccable; that was a huge priority with him. He read over at least everything that came out of my computer, and I'd get notes from him periodically, and talk to him on the phone, and his wife. It was great, an incredible resource. We had more fun talking and arguing. He was a hero."

Speaking of Foster (as astronomer Ellie), the heroine of the story, Goldenberg recalls her getting involved early on: "And she certainly had input. She was very respectful of the story, and very much approaching it as an actor, although we all know she has chops as a director as well, and a writer. She always had strong ideas, great ideas. We were trying to encourage her to bring in even more." He was working with Zemeckis "from day one", which was very positive for Goldenberg: "I don't want to sound too gushy, but it was sort of the idyllic screenwriter's experience, especially on a movie this big where you tend to have a lot of nervous studio people, and money. Fortunately when you've got someone like Bob running the show, he set the tone for everything and made it a breeze, a pleasure. And from a selfish point of view, it was just an incredible education, working with him."

Goldenberg declares that Zemeckis also "felt very strongly about this being an internal journey, the human journey, and this one human's journey as sort of the metaphor for all of us. One of the things I'm proudest of is the way we've been able to take a lot of ideas -- and there are a lot of ideas in the book, about science and religion, humanity's destiny -- and embody them in these real, living, breathing characters, Jodie's and Matthew's, and sort of get the best of both worlds. What was unique about this was being able to work on a scale this large, to tell this kind of epic story, and to have all the tools of modern digital filmmaking at your disposal. And you can write anything, and you know Bob Zemeckis is going to visualize it brilliantly. It was really liberating to be able to go anywhere, come up with anything, and know you could get that image on the screen. So it was a great ride, that way. And also to work with these big ideas, and Carl brings big ideas to the party, stuff you sat up all night in your dorm room talking about. Bob was able to keep it grounded in this reality, and credible, and at the same time, it's juiced up and you're on the edge of your seat."

=====================

Steve Starkey, Producer, CONTACT

by Douglas Eby

Beginning his long association with Robert Zemeckis in 1986 as an associate producer of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, Steve Starkey went on to help create the second and third BACK TO THE FUTURE films, DEATH BECOMES HER, and FORREST GUMP, earning an Academy Award as one of the producers. Asked about the level and quality of effects in CONTACT, compared with the dramatic work in GUMP, Starkey said the two projects have different needs, but Ken Ralston and Sony Imageworks is still making use of the technology developed for the earlier film. In the middle of bluescreen work for the "ride" sequence of the film, in which astronomer Ellie Arroway (Foster) becomes the human representative chosen to travel on the alien-designed craft, Starkey said "this sequence gets our hero from getting into this alien machine, to the end of the movie. We're down to just Jodie Foster acting in this pod against blue screen. We're getting close to the finish line."

He says the effects technology "probably is not going to be as apparent, if that's the word, in CONTACT as it was in GUMP; in other words, stuff like interacting with presidents and Lieutenant Dan's legs: effects which are kind of really in your face, and you really see it. A lot of the stuff that we're doing in CONTACT is more of the same, but done in a more complicated way, and we take more liberties. For example, when you're filming large crowds in Washington DC, which we did again in this movie, rather than have lock-off, which we did in GUMP, we're actually moving the camera more, and making it feel like more fluid photography, as if you had those hundreds of thousands of people there, but you can move the camera more easily. Going from helicopter shots that continue in a crane shot, and moving shots down roads, with throngs of people outside the gates of the VLA [Very Large Array radio telescope installation], which aren't even shot at the VLA at all, all manipulated digitally. It's stuff that everyone will feel 'Oh, it's just another helicopter shot with a bunch of people out in the desert', when it was all created by the use if this new technology. And people are just kind of unaware of it when it becomes so much a part of fluid moviemaking."

Starkey speculates on the future developments possible: "We're not yet creating digital characters at all, although you know that seems to be on the brink of possibility. You're right at the point where you could render a person if you got all their expressions and you got their poses for you, you probably could create a shape of a performance, although a computer-generated performance, not an inspired human performance. But you could manipulate a performance in the computer in some fashion. We're playing a little bit with time-space travel, manipulating somewhat our main character's trip through space, taking her through a series of emotions that will transform in front of your eyes. It's not really a manipulation as much as a transformation, in other words we move from an emotion to an emotion to emotion, or we move from something you saw in the past and recreate that as sort of a double image in the present, so you're losing a sense, while she's riding through space, of time. We're going to try to play with time through imagery, so in that way we're using the computer to play a little." Starkey, asked about the famed Stargate sequence "ride through space" in 2001, notes "That was really just on a guy's face, with a split screen light show. This is evolving that much more. Our ride, I hope, will be something very new and innovative, that you have never seen anywhere before. It's going to be a wild trip."

Locations for CONTACT included the VLA (Very Large Array), a field of 27 huge dish-shaped radio telescopes located in the desert of Socorro, New Mexico, and at the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Starkey recalls there were some major challenges involved in the shooting: "The obvious obstacle in going to these two places is that they are government-run facilities, and of course time is bought by individuals to pursue very specific things. They have little tolerance for movie making, they've got business to attend to. So we got involved, like at the VLA, in a negotiation for what we'll call 'dish control time', and what that means is just that huge array is pointed in a specific direction at any time the facility is in use. When it's their time up, the people using it say 'Okay, point dish one through four to this axis' and so on; every dish is pointed in the direction they want. Now when we came in, we created a visual declination, a distinct way we wanted the dishes to point, and then moved to the so-called Vega position, where the pulse comes in from space.

"In movies, having to shoot the same thing over and over from different angles, our complexity was that our scene at predawn, that magical time between when the sun sets and it's dark, or when it's dark in the morning and the sun rises; those are the only times you can create that look, and that's the time in the story when she [Ellie/Foster] actually hears the sound, she sits up and she starts driving, races down the road, calls in the coordinates to the people inside. She races inside, the machine locks in, they hear the pulse and, boom, the sun comes up; it's all timed in the screenplay. So we had to shoot all of these shots, which are big, massive set-ups, in that little window in which we also need dish control time. The first morning we were there it rained like they've never seen it in October, ever. Then it's so muddy you can't drive on these slick, clay roads. The next morning it was blowing so hard you couldn't even have a camera on a crane, it was near-hurricane conditions.

"Finally the rains stopped, and we were setting up for a big scene with helicopters zooming in, where the government wants to take over this facility, and they got this ground fog so bad you couldn't even see the dishes! I got rain, I go mud, I got high winds and then fog, and it was like I was about to kill myself. But anyway, we got all the shots. We were constantly renegotiating for a little more dish time, and they were always very accommodating, and they'd give us the two or three hours we needed. We also had as a technical advisor an astronomer who's doing this work, so we had a lot of sympathetic souls around in the trenches with us, and saw we were doing the best we could, and that they should help us out a little. At Arecibo we had a lot of unseasonable rain, but other than that, everything went very smoothly in fact. The Arecibo antenna is staggering; it's such a huge object it's hard to capture on film."

Starkey feels CONTACT "represents a moment to investigate your own personal truths in a film, against a wonderful spectacle backdrop, and so for that reason it's very special, because we seem to be going down to an emotional core of our pivotal character, and trying to discover something about her while at the same time, she's trying to discover some truth in the universe. I think a lot of people my age are thinking about, so I think it's timely in my life and many people's lives, to at least think about this stuff, and hopefully enjoy a film while you're thinking about it."

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Ed Verreaux, Production Designer, CONTACT

by Douglas Eby

This is his first project as production designer for Ed Verreaux, having worked as art director or assistant art director on HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT, CASPER, BLUE CHIPS, HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID, and BACK TO THE FUTURE 2 and 3. He appreciates the chance to work on QUILT: "I haven't had the opportunity to do very many straightforward, dramatic type pieces, and I was really interested in that; I really like the story. I haven't gone out and actively sought it, but I seem to have ended up doing a lot of heavy visual effects movies, and stuff that is more fanciful." One of those projects was some initial design work for JURASSIC PARK, but then Spielberg pulled him off that film to help storyboard HOOK. Then, about a month into that, he was offered the job on HONEY.., and Verreaux says "I jumped at that because it was a chance to art direct a show, and to work with production designer Les Dilley, who did THE ABYSS. He was also art director on RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, where I was the production illustrator."

Science fiction is an area Verreaux enjoys: "You've got to try to figure out how you're going to do this, who's doing what, and of course on a film with the scope of CONTACT there was a whole lot of conceptual issues at the very beginning. That's the real challenge: working with a director like Bob [Zemeckis] and being able to get a sense of what he wants to do, and then offer stuff up to him, and coming to some kind of consensus about the design. It's been a really dynamic and challenging process. As I look at dailies and as I see photographs taken by the stills photographer on the sets, see assembled footage, and stuff that's starting to come from Sony [Imageworks], and a lot of it's based on what we designed, I'm getting more and more a sense of the whole, and how it's going to come out. It's pretty exciting."

Moving from art direction to production design is a big change in level of involvement, says Verreaux: "It's much, much broader scope; having to interface a whole lot more with all the departments, and trying to put together, with the director, a visual direction that the movie's going to go in, and then just trying to keep it on track. With art direction, for instance, you don't usually get to choose colors of sets and stuff, but as production designer, you do. You're working on a much broader canvas, to use the painter analogy. It's both more satisfying and a lot scarier, because you know what'll happen if they get on the set and say 'Mustard yellow! This color looks like shit.' And they don't look at the art director, they look at me."

Verreaux recalls one "little glitch" on the execution of the spherical "spaceship" set, "the big, kind of chromium-silver pod; originally we had done about two-foot diameter models, and we were trying to find a color and texture that wasn't quite normal. You know when you're running your motorcycle and the fuel is a little too rich, and you kind of burn the exhaust pipe to a metallic blue color? We tried that, and Bob really like it in the model, but then months later when we had the full size set done, Bob looks at it and says 'Is that too blue?' So we had to do a quick overnight paint job. Looking now at what he changed it to, I've got to say it looks really good. That was the only real glitch we had, as far as concept to drawing board to ready-to shoot set."

The craft or pod in which radio astronomer Ellie (Jodie Foster) is presumably to take flight is described in a somewhat cursory fashion in Sagan's novel: "The geometric design of the Machine was simple. The details were extremely complex... no facilities for eating or sleeping or other bodily functions... Above and below the crew area, in the tapering part of the dodecahedron, were the organics, with their intricate and puzzling architecture." Verreaux says the only thing they really took from the book was the dodecahedron shape that surrounds the spherical pod: "because it was such an interesting form. In early stages we were going for much more traditional, almost cockpit-like designs, or a rocket sled thing. But Bob had gone to Seattle to visit Carl [Sagan], where Carl was undergoing cancer treatment at the time. Bob took a packet of drawings to show him, and Carl of course had his comments; he really wanted this dodecahedron to be part of the design, because it's one of the primary forms in nature." But, according to Verreaux, it has been Zemeckis who has been in charge of the details: "Bob has very clearly been the captain of this project from the very first day. There's no question he's been the leader."

Part of the design for the Machine is a series of rings, which Verreaux notes "came from the basic idea of a nucleus of an atom, and the electron rings surrounding it, and the idea was these rings are spinning and in some way creating some kind of force field that's opening up a wormhole vortex or something to allow the instantaneous transfer of this pod, or whatever you want to call it, to the other end of the wormhole."

The pod vehicle referred to as the Machine, according to the story, drops down some distance at the beginning of its journey, and the idea of it being a sphere made sense to Zemeckis and the other designers. "Not that a sphere would work in space, necessarily," notes Verreaux, "but on some subliminal level, you say if you put her [Ellie] in a sphere - that's a planet form; if you give it enough time, everything tends to become spherical. And Bob suggested putting the dodec shape around the sphere. Steve did some really elegant drawings that we showed to Bob and he said to go ahead. And from there we began to develop the actual drop chamber, with several months of R&D and drawing, building and refining."

The radio transmission from the Vega system that is at the core of the story carries coded messages, including a replay of one of the first commercial TV broadcasts: the fuhrer addressing the 1930's German Olympics. Referring to the visual portrayal of this signal, Verreaux credits video engineer Ian Kelly as one of the key people: "He had a lot to do with helping clarify everyone's mind as to how video works, the different kinds of signals and how the message could be layered within pulses, and the look of the Hitler playback. The people who should get the lion's share of the credit are the people at Sony Imageworks; they really developed all the playback. This movie is about windows and monitors; looking out of windows onto grand vistas, and seeing things played back on monitors from someplace across the world."

Other design challenges, Verreaux says, included the set for the NASA control room: "We went around and around on that, and also the shipboard control and designing the ship. We also built on stage a large executive hover-jet. The ship was part of Hadden Industries - he's sort of a Bill Gates multinational, multibillionaire character - and he has all these resources, including a supertanker. What I had thought of was when scientists do deep oceanographic work lots of times, they have these container-like rooms they can just strap down on the deck of a ship, and that becomes your working space. So we did a large sketch on the idea of having a thousand foot long supertanker or superfreighter, and they've taken this modular control room and strapped it onto the deck. And Bob mentioned there are these companies that go drilling for oil in the middle of the Amazon, and there are these self-contained units they fly in by helicopter, and drop them down, and in a day you've got a little village. So we liked that idea too."

Another challenge, he says, was "making the control room look like NASA, but not really be NASA; that was really interesting. Early on, we went down to NASA and got the VIP tour: got to go up on the gantry, with the Shuttle on the gantry, got to stick our heads in the Shuttle while they were preparing it, and got to go in one of the three big firing rooms they have. At one point we were even talking about using one of those rooms, but it's always more efficacious, if you can, to do it on a stage, because you've got a lot more control. I first started with a copy of what's down there, but Bob said, 'No, this looks too much like a James Bond set.' Then we began to play with it, and I think in the end everyone felt it was a pretty satisfying solution that we came up with."

The film has meant a lot for Verreaux: "One, this is my first time out as a production designer, so I regard myself as a tremendously lucky person to have been given this assignment. But then also I guess I have to give myself credit for having been prepared and having worked all these years as an art director. As far as I'm concerned, this is the biggest film I've ever worked on, in any capacity, and for most people on the crew I've heard from, this is the biggest thing they've done, and that probably in the future, this will be regarded by us - certainly by me - as a watermark; on future projects we might say, "Well, this isn't as big as CONTACT", or "This is almost like CONTACT.'"

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(from a series published in Cinefantastique Magazine, August, 1997)

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