Making Contact

it's impossible to be a scientist and to confront the grandeur subtlety elegance and magnificence of the universe without feeling a sense of reverence and awe it's clear to me that there are some questions that humans don't have the answers to in 1996 robert zemeckis academy award-winning director of forrest gump began filming contact the only novel ever written by pulitzer prize-winning author carl sagan contact tells the story of an astronomer played by jody foster who was the recipient of the first ever signal from an alien intelligence and the incredible chain of events that signal sets off the book represents a lifetime of sagan's passions everything from the technical feasibility of intergalactic space travel to the tensions between religion and science man watching forever you've been waiting for a long time and action if the novel was ambitious bringing it to the screen was even more so this is the story of the making of contact i anticipate i imagine i presume that if statistics are correct that we're not alone in the story we make contact with another life in another way it's about humans making contact with ourselves it's about some really intelligent issues really intelligently told i think you look at the world in a different perspective when you go out to space if you will or to the edge of the universe and look back this film is for all intents and purposes enormous there's lots of effects really exciting adventurous parts to it there's the idea of space travel but i think it's much much more than that it's really a story about about people and their passions [Music] she found a soft patch of grass and lay down sky was blazing with stars thousands of them but if something as big as the earth turned once a day it had to be moving at an unbelievable speed she thought she could now actually feel the earth turn not just imagine it but really feel it in the pit of her stomach is anybody out there cq this is w9 gfo here cq cq this is w9 gfo here this is w9 gfo is anybody out there i'm not getting anything small moves ellie small moves carl felt that that he had lived exactly the right moment in time to fulfill his his his deepest dreams contact is everything that carl in his life has tried to present to us and what that is it's about us by finding out what the other planets are like by finding out whether there are civilizations on planets of other stars we re-establish a meaningful context for ourselves he was a child before the dawn of the space age and then he was a scientist and experimenter on every single unmanned mission he briefed the apollo astronauts the dreams of his of his childhood were reality in his adulthood and contact was one of his most terrorist dreams because he wanted to convey to the largest possible audience the wonder of science and action yeah there are 400 billion stars out there just in our galaxy alone if only one out of a million of those had planets all right and if just one out of a million of those had life and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life there would be literally millions of civilizations out there elieraway is a brilliant driven uh young astronomer who's had to come up the hard way she gets involved with the study program the search for extraterrestrial intelligence uh and starts uh sending signals out and hoping to receive signals from outer space uh does this for many many years to no avail not a single message nothing happening everybody's given up on her nobody believes in her i don't consider what could potentially be the most important discovery of the human race nonsense okay there's 400 billion students there's only two probabilities one there is intelligent life out there but it's so far away you'll never contact it in your lifetime there's nothing out there about noble gases and carbon compounds and you're wasting your time in the meantime you won't be published you won't be taken seriously and your career will be over before it's begun so what it's my life ultimately the body and main body of it is about a person who's not connecting with people on a very basic level for clear reasons at the front she loses the one man she's ever loved which is a father at a very young age that i would tend to think would cause a very tender soul to close down i can't imagine another actress who can bring both the emotion and the intellect to the character which is needed it was a just a wonderful thing for us because we knew that ellie was in the best possible hands and many many times i would turn to carl and say jody is bringing ellie to life and this would have made him tremendously happy well when i first read the book and was considering it as a movie i saw it as a tremendous challenge it's a fantastic story that's rooted in reality if you read the novel it spans years and countries and different planets and parts of the universe and spans not only years but light years the scope and the scale of the movie is is was probably the biggest i've ever done arecibo puerto rico the cast and crew of contact traveled to the largest radio telescope in the world just have that one light on there and leave it pointing on to the turn and as it gets darker i'll have you light them built inside a huge mountain crater the dish is far away from the noisy radio interference that can hinder the progress of seti researchers what we're doing is using large radio telescopes to listen for radio signals that they may be signals that they're using for their own purposes they may be signals that they set up as beacons in order to attract our attention because we're really primitive as a [Music] technology [Music] what do you think dr araway isn't she a beauty it'll do i work on a project called city search for extraterrestrial intelligence wow and that is out there i love this i mean here's a guy looking the way he looks like this in the middle of the jungle and you're talking about seti and science bob kind of cued this line because it's this really great love story and that i like intimacies but opposing ideologies matthew mcconaughey the star of a time to kill plays palmer joss a non-denominational reverend who becomes the spiritual advisor to the president joss falls in love with ellie it is through their relationship that sagan's lifelong fascination with religion versus science is made literally look look over to look over to where joss is sitting over there science is sometimes i know attacked for supposed arrogance but i think it's the most humble occupation and discipline around because instead of trying to impose our preconceptions our predispositions on the universe we are open for the universe to see what the universe has to offer uh we got to have a kind of you know a special carl seminar and uh he sat down he had a slide projector in his stuff and he sat down and sort of goes through the cosmos it was very inspiring to hear the scientific truths behind the universe our galaxy it was very captivating performance by a man who was gravely ill but inspired and followed by a question and answer session that went on into the late hours of the evening no one wanted to leave it seemed like he enjoyed that listen to your question and really being intrigued by it and never there's never a dumb question i think at one point he was he was eating something and he held this fork you know full of food and he he held it there for like 20 minutes while he kept talking and i realized he had totally forgotten that he had a bite of food in his hand uh and i know that that's how i can be when i'm talking about movies and that's how he is when he's talking about science and there was passion too because these were questions of religion and science and the ways in which they collide with each other i was learning and learning going hand in hand in hand all the way i think the great thing that this movie does is it tells you that religion isn't on the other side it is there are some religious figures that put spirituality or the idea of a higher power somehow on the other side of science uh when in fact we we're all involved in the same quest which is to find out about our origins and to find out of whether we're alone or not is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology we shop at home we surf the web but at the same time we feel emptier lonelier and more cut off from each other [Music] october 1996 the very large array in new mexico sagan described the site of the 27 radio telescopes like some strange species of mechanical flower straining towards the sky the dishes are perfectly aligned to capture even the smallest detectable radio signal let's get them over here let's roll let's roll the crane the weather is not cooperating but it doesn't seem to matter this is the moment when the signal is received she's going to lean back to that position and that's when we just when she starts making her move we just start making our move that nice slow speed like we did it isn't so much an image from the book as much as it is a tone from the book and a sound that the book had she heard as always a kind of static a continuous echoing random noise once she had felt she heard a kind of singing fading tantalizingly in and out lying just beyond her ability to convince herself that there was something really there the way communication is achieved with this other life form is through sound so that in a sense was inspiring to me as a way to bring another element into the movie which is very important in this and that is it's not just a movie about images it's a movie about sound as well [Music] talk to me guys partially polarized set of moving pulses amplitude modulated systems checkout signal across the board what's the frequency 4.46 23 gigahertz point source confirmed whatever it is it ain't local position i checked interferometry somewhere in lira i think vega can't be it's only 26 light years away who are we gonna call now [Music] the president made a everybody statement calling the message from vega one of the most stunning insights attendance at religious services has risen a dramatic 39 in recent days everyone would respond differently to the notion that there might be intelligent life somewhere in outer space and that it's talking to us in some complex way and each one of the points of view is a very reasonable one and that's what i think is most exciting about this movie because my character who is the national security advisor is rightfully concerned that it's quite possible these aliens might not necessarily have the most benevolent intentions so i'll come right to the point may i you're having sent this announcement all over the world may well constitute a breach of national security this isn't a person-to-person call uh scientists who've worked all their lives of course you'd be excited by the notion that they're all going to come down and start you know eating prepackaged candy and sharing secrets of the universe and you know i think it says more about human nature and the diversity of human nature which is kind of what this movie's about the message was a kind of mirror in which each person saw his or her own beliefs challenged or confirmed it was taken as evidence for many gods or one god or none some thought it was from god and some from the devil we we felt that what would happen is very quickly after this becomes a national news story that there would be the believers and the non-believers and the the most wild mix of humanity would gather some place and the obvious choice was well they would go to the telescopes in new mexico and you know gather there as if it was a shrine we want to shoot in about 10 minutes so we've gotta organize this and get to our position three thousand extras answering notices in local papers poured into a deserted corner of george air force base part tent revival part grateful dead concert this wild scene captures the public reaction to the alien message well this is a scene where everybody has gathered to see what's going to be happening here are their aliens landing all different tribes here today she's a die-hard trekkie i'd seen it in the newspaper advertised and i thought gosh this is the perfect thing for me typically hollywood might reduce a scene like this to make it more manageable but in zemeckis's hands it became much bigger i can't help myself you know i can't uh i i for some reason i'm attracted to these very large movies at this point in my career that might change you know we'll see but right now i'm figuring well you know um this is what i do i can never really imagine how big bob's ideas are and i'm constantly surprised that i can't because i would think after all these years that i would somehow get it you know every once in a while i walk onto the set and i just stare and i go look at all these people look at all this stuff who thought this up he knows how to marry the epic qualities of filmmaking with the very human small subtle elements of filmmaking too he also thinks in multiple layers as the filmmaking process continues those ideas and layers continue to open up that ellie is very intimidated by this [Music] an alien intelligence is going to be more advanced and that means efficiency functioning on multiple levels and in multiple dimensions yes of course where's the primer you see every three-dimensional page contains a piece of the primer there it was all the time staring you in the face buried within the message itself is the key to decoding it right here on a sound stage in los angeles zemeckis works out the white house conference where the meaning of the alien signal is disclosed the scene is complicated and action video those look like engineering schematics almost like blueprints it is our belief that the message contains instructions for building some kind of machine a machine it might turn out to be some kind of a transport making it more complicated is the fact that along with james woods angela bassett jody foster tom skerritt rob lowe and matthew mcconaughey is one more unseen star the president met with his top advisors today regarding the latest efforts to decode the message while there have been reports of some progress the official line remains a cautious one this is a series of shots that we did where bob asked us to create a character who um we couldn't by sort of more traditional ways get in the film that's the actual current president of the united states bill clinton so this is the uh original video of clinton speaking in the cabinet room and what we did is shot a plate with our current day actors with an empty chair ready for clinton we took a standings body and then cut clinton's head off placing it on the body and mix that back in and you can see the original video of clinton we do is we cut a mat for him used the mat to simply slip him into another scene so we weren't really changing what he was saying we were changing really the location he was in is everybody in so we're taking him out of the rose garden putting him into the press room as you can see we'll mix the two together seamlessly blend him into a new background so as i flip back and forth here you can see that we've actually changed the check pattern on his tie the color of his suit in general and also mixed in james woods and some of the other characters in the film some really complicated shots within those sequences and they just go by so seamlessly i don't think anyone's really going to know that he's not really there and has was never near the set so it's pretty exciting that's one of the key things that really excited me about working on this project that i'll be in a scene with the president first rule in government spending why build one when you can have two twice the price the character is one of the the richest and most powerful men in the world anyway a kind of howard hughesian sort of fella and of course like all such people he wants to leave his stamp on this earth he finally from the russian government gets given mere to exist in and the reason he gets it is because like you know anybody who's rich and powerful has a downside as well and the downside to him is he got cancer it's quite simple really the low oxygen zero gravity environment is the only thing keeping the cancer from eating me alive the difficulty is of course you've got to uh find some form some way of making it weightless the idea of the shot john is that you're you're closer to the camera and you're not completely upside down and your legs are up sort of like where bud's head is ready ready my little room has one hell of a view they still want an american to go doctor want to take a ride if you're going to build a giant machine of alien design it had to be huge and dangerous and moving and scary and and so the idea of a machine that was three times the size of the empire state building cost three trillion dollars and the biggest construction endeavor in the history of of man was what we decided to do supposed to be uh right now a thousand feet above the uh above the surface of the pacific ocean and uh so if you were to walk out there and look down all that blue screen is really supposed to be an open area and that pod will get dropped down to these into this giant vortex of spinning rings kind of slowly approach here then you come over here right don yeah and look over and the camera comes over and we do this big vertigo shot we look down at all the you know the ocean is 1000 feet down [Music] there's a lot of stuff that i had to be involved in this film that i've just never done before and i made a lot of movies but i've never made a film that had you know a lot of blue screen the whole thing so in other words the head turn where you saw something move you look and then i get to you know then i see it then you it's got form okay so it's like there was more stages yeah more stages right i'm standing on a stage in warner hollywood with you know blue all around me no i'm around they'll be out there she's spinning which way on the turntable putting us this faintest sense of a reflection here might be really cool so you you have to uh you have to embrace the technicianship of the film and be able to kind of push it away from your view and say this is not happening there's nothing interesting about technical filmmaking unless there's humanity and humanity is everything and this film does have a very very strong very deep human core to it [Music] and cut over 90 people working three shifts executed vareau's designs for the machine to give you some idea um when we started forrest gump we had about 120 shots i think or so and we ended up on this show in the end with over 500. there were miniatures that redefined the term miniature computer graphics and real life elements all combining to realize carl sagan's vision of an intergalactic ship that can travel at the speed of light to fuel their imaginations the production team visited cape canaveral looking for the details that would make their spacecraft believable [Music] the the vehicle assembly building which is 500 feet tall and what does that look like in various kinds of florida light and that's only a third the height of the machine and then looking across the uh the grasslands there to see what the all the launch complexes look like when they were two three miles away and how does all that structure look in the light and then try and play that back on the machine mechanical go electrical go dynamics dynamics is i can confirm the walkway retract systems communications life support ellie we are go for closure you all set in there jerry griffin former flight director at nasa and a veteran of the apollo program was brought on board as technical consultant for the control room scenes there's really two things that he keeps checking with me on is does it look right so he just watches it when the second hand hits 12 he'll just turn that's right right okay and then does it sound right copy that 35 percent we're good 40 as we go through the rehearsals and all that i'm reminded of the days when we did so many simulations trying to get ready to go to the moon i just don't much see how we can make it on this next trip i think you guys ought to continue to work they both kind of to the observer look like chaos oxidizer tanks in the second and third stages now have pressurized but at the end of the day you get this final product that comes out right i guess in a way what i really come back to is that even in the in the real control center during the real flights knowing that you're on and that other people are depending on you in a way you are a performer people we have been of income but we are still go initiate secondary drive systems initiating sequence we'll go for ignition initiate drop sequence [Music] [Music] five [Music] i have been searching for radio signals from other civilizations on planets beyond our own solar system we're not interested only to satisfy our intellectual curiosity or our sense of adventure we have at the back of our minds the possibility that we might learn something useful about our own planet december 1996 as the cast and crew work out a complicated shot they hear the news carl sagan has passed away from the cancer he had been fighting for so long i was very saddened for the obvious reasons but also because i had i think carl would have been very proud of the movie and i wish that he'd been able to see the final product because he really was so passionate about it you know i was also looking forward to you know hearing his critique at the end of the movie too and and i and i was you know i always had that log in the back of my mind as one of the great moments of my life you know when when carl was going to finally see what i've done to his what i've done to his novel the idea is their life out there on other planets [Music] over time you know it started out in man's ego i am the center of the universe earth is it the sun route goes around us well i mean we're like down here in the far right corner of our galaxy and there's hundreds of millions of galaxies that idea that's inspiring to me i think that'll be inspiring to everybody to think what is out there you know one of the great reasons to to make a film like this not just as an actor but also as a filmmaker um is um to hope that you know there's some 11 or 12 year old girl out there who looks up the sky and says oh my god that's jupiter and that somehow that thrusts her forward to understand what she does and who she is there's something tremendously poignant about the idea that at the end of carl's life he was given the biggest canvas of all the opportunity to tell a story and to convey the ideas that were most important to him to the largest audience of all [Music] you

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Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020