It was 25 years ago when Contact first debuted in cinemas around the world. But it's been more than 40 years since world-renowned astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife, former creative director at NASA and co-creator of Cosmos, Ann Druyan, first came up with the idea for the film. Like some of the best films ever made, it took the brainy pair almost two decades to bring their inspiration to life. It went through many iterations, including a divisive one by Mad Max director George Miller, before it finally fell into the hands of Robert Zemeckis, the man behind the incredibly intricate Forrest Gump.
Of course, Contact is also known as one of Jodie Foster's best films. While it certainly wasn't a straightforward space travel/alien film, it does have a die-hard cult audience that's loyal to it to this very day. It also showed off Matthew McConaughey's acting chops in the middle of a time he had some major duds at the box office.
While the film, which deals with humanity's search for life beyond our planet, has fans who love to dissect its true meaning, many haven't quite grasped what the film was truly about. In a fantastic oral history by Vulture, the filmmakers, writers, and cast of the movie revealed an explanation...
What Was The Point Of The Movie Contact?
Anyone who knows anything about Carl Sagan is aware that the scientist constantly struggled to reconcile the existence of god with his understanding of science. It was this idea that was the basis of Contact. Even though the plot has some direct homages to Carl's relationship with his daughter Sasha, his wife, Ann Druyan's role in the scientific community, and the human desire to know if we're alone in the universe, it's the topic of religion versus science that holds the true meaning of the film.
In their interview with Vulture, the cast and crew of Contact revealed that they too were constantly grappling with this debate. It not only affected the way they played their characters (namely Jodie's science-minded Ellie Arroway and Matthew's religious Palmer Joss) but also how they acted behind the scenes.
"I wanted it to feel real. There was no way that I was ever going to have the kind of knowledge that real scientists could have," Jodie Foster said regarding her research into the topic. "There was a lot of research that I did that I did not understand, but somebody very smartly bought me children’s books about science and black holes."
Executive producer Lynda Obst said that the production had various workshops for the cast and crew that featured guest speakers who spoke to the different perspectives in the debate.
"There were very serious Christian theologians who talked to us about Joss’s stuff and what apocalyptic Christian thinking meant. Jill Tarter came in and talked to us about radio astronomy. We wanted to get the essential debate between science and religion right. We wanted science to win, but we didn’t want religion to lose," Lynda explained.
How Carl Sagan And Matthew McConaughey Argued Over The Meaning Of Contact
Among the speakers was Carl Sagan himself, who not only thought of the idea for the movie but wrote the earliest incarnations of it, as well as the book the film was based on. Of course, it was handed off to professional screenwriters before it was finally developed. When Carl came to set to speak with the actors he was already very sick. Sadly, he ended up losing his life prior to the film's release.
"We got to be a captive audience to Carl Sagan taking us through the beginning of the world," Matthew McConaughey said to Vulture. "If I remember correctly, it was like. It was actually like this, 'If you take a clock and you were looking at it two-dimensionally, it would be at the tip of the left corner of the top of the five on the clock. That’s our galaxy that we’re in. It’s ever-expanding, and there are many universes.' I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. Everything he had said was filling me up and making me more of a believer than I already was. He got to the very end and he goes, 'And therefore God doesn’t exist.' I went, 'Wait a minute. You had me believing God existed more than ever, and that’s your punch line?' He was like, 'Yep. I’d love to discuss it.'"
"What Carl and I wanted was Eleanor Arroway as a skeptic," Ann Druyan said. "But then she has this contact experience where she goes to see her father in heaven, and what a great way to turn her inside out. Because she literally believes that she saw her father in heaven. We also wanted Palmer Joss to realize that his God was just too small — he wasn’t big enough for the universe, and science reveals that. But Matthew would not do it. I didn’t want him to become like Richard Dawkins, but I wanted him to say these words: 'My God was too small.'"
"I can’t imagine saying that line because that would have undercut who I was," Matthew admitted. "That was a lie. I can’t go on and lie on my character. To play a character who believes at the end 'Oh, my God was too small' is different than saying, 'Oh, God’s backyard is bigger than I thought.'"
While Carl Sagan always grappled with whether or not there was a God, he was certain that humankind's concept of the entity was false. Due to all the evidence before us, Carl believed that science had all but disproven the old definitions of God.
"It’s what Carl really feels about people who think that God would not have put other intelligences in the universe. That's a small God," Lynda Obst explained. "But a God who can conceive of a birthing forth of life forms — that’s a big God."
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