Trivia for
Contact (1997) More at IMDbPro »

• Jodie Foster was interested in this movie as early as 1995. After initially deciding to drop out, her interest was resparked by a new revision of the script.
  
  
• Ralph Fiennes was considered for a role, but not cast.
  
  
• George Miller was slated to direct until Warner Bros. offered him the rights to Mad Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) to pull out and let Robert Zemeckis take his place.
  
  
• Francis Ford Coppola filed breach-of-contract suits against Carl Sagan's estate and Warner Brothers, halting the film. He claimed that Sagan had developed the "Contact" premise for Zoetrope Studios (possibly for a Children's Television Workshop program). The suit alleged that Sagan had not paid the required $250,000 when he had turned the concept into a novel, and in any event was prohibited from selling the film rights to the story.
  
  
• Author and producer Carl Sagan died during production of the film. He was reportedly taking great care to ensure that "science" was accurately depicted in the film.
  
  
• The dish at the beginning of the movie is the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. It is actually used for SETI research. Some of the time SETI scientists actually have the huge telescope for themselves, but mostly they use data collected by their "piggybacked" receiver that listens to any part of the sky other astronomers are observing.
  
  
• Through the entire filming of the scenes at the Very Large Array, the array was actually collecting data.
  
  
• William Fichtner's character in the film, a blind astrophysicist with enhanced hearing as a result of his condition, is named Kent Clark, a play on the name of Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent. The character is based on a real-life blind SETI scientist, Kent Cullers.
  
  
• Actors John Hurt (Hadden) and Tom Skerritt (Drumlin) also starred in Alien (1979), about a hostile extraterrestrial intelligence.
  
  
• Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, makes a short cameo appearance, along with former United States Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.
  
  
• The character of Dr. Arroway was modeled after two of the pioneering radio astronomers of the 1930s and 1940s, Grote Reber and John Kraus; both men were ham radio operators at an early age. Another model for the character's work was real-life SETI researcher Jill Cornell Tarter.
  
  
• The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (featured in the film) has a club station which, with the permission of Reber, had acquired his old call sign "W9GFZ" earlier in 1997. Robert Zemeckis, learning of this tribute, planned to use the same call sign for Arroway in the movie. However, in the end "W9GFO" was used instead. While viewing the film after release, David Wilson of the Internet recognized this call sign as that of his father Robert (Bob) Wilson from the late 1930s. W9GFO and K4WLD are currently assigned to ham radio operators in the USA.
  
  
• The sounds heard during the film's opening shot include: - "Semi-Charmed Life" by Third Eye Blind - "Angry Days" by Lagwagon - "Wannabe" by The Spice Girls - "God Shuffled His Feet" by Crash Test Dummies - "Obviously a major malfunction..." (Challenger Shuttle disaster quote) - The theme to "Dallas" (1978) - "Sometimes You Feel Like A Nut..." (chocolate bar commercial) - "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc. - Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech - Walter Cronkite announcing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy - Neil Armstrong's "One Small Step" speech - "Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" by Brian Hyland - "I Have A Dream..." a Martin Luther King speech - Theme from "The Twilight Zone" - Transition music from "Seinfeld" (1990) - "Broken Wings" by Mr. Mister - Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous interrogation question ("Are you now or have you ever been...") - Douglas MacArthur's "Old soldiers never die..." quote - Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 8 December 1941 address to Congress ("a date that will live in infamy") - "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're in the Money)" by Al Dubin and Harry Warren - Opening speech by Adolf Hitler at the German 1936 Olympics, being the first transmission in history that was aired with sufficient power to escape the Earth's atmosphere - "White Bird" by It's a Beautiful Day - "Nel blu dipinto di blu" also known as "Volare" by Domenico Modugno - "Boogie Oogie Oogie" by A Taste of Honey - "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sung by Judy Garland - Theme to "The Andy Griffith Show" (1960) - "Please, Mr. Postman" by The Marvelettes
  
  
• Argus Project, featuring 100+ radio telescopes, is named after a monster with a hundred eyes from Greek mythology.
  
  
• The Dynamics officer, addressed only as "Gerry" in dialogue, is Gerry Griffin, who in real life was a Flight Director at Mission Control in Houston during the Apollo program.
  
  
• The succession of colors in the space tunnel match the colors of the chakra points as described in the New Age "religion", starting with red (materialism) and reaching gold (enlightenment). The SFX crew deliberately inserted contradicting images in the Pensacola scene at the end, to create a dreamlike feeling. So the beach is brightly lit with no sun in sight, the waves move backwards and the shadows slowly change from one scene to the next.
  
  
• During one of the most intense scenes in the pod ("I had no idea...") Jodie Foster shows a wide range of conflicting emotions. Director Robert Zemeckis had asked her to repeat the scene six times, each time with a different expression (intense joy, fear, sadness and so on) and then the SFX crew quickly morphed her face from one take to the next. For a brief moment they also used the face of Dr. Arroway as a child. When Dr. Arroway starts receiving the alien signal, we follow her from the parking lot to the lab in what appears to be a long, continuous shot. Actually the scenes were shot in two different locations, and then digitally composed to make them appear seamless.
  
  
• Jena Malone, who played the young Ellie Arroway, has brown eyes. Her eyes were colored blue (to match Jodie Foster's) by computer for the opening shot, which zooms into her eye.
  
  
• Young Ellie's father calls her "Sparks". Sparks is a nickname given to early radio operators who used spark-gap transmitters.
  
  
• Peter Jackson did some visual effects for this film, repaying the favor to Robert Zemeckis, who executive-produced his film The Frighteners (1996).
  
  
• Arroway's remark at the end that if humans were the only life in the universe it would "be a terrible waste of space" is a famous quote by author Carl Sagan.
  
  
• Footage of a press conference by President Bill Clinton was re-edited and altered to make it appear as if he was speaking about alien contact. This manipulation of news footage caused some controversy. A few years later, CNN would ban the use of its logo in fictional movies, as well as bar its reporters from doing cameo appearances (although Larry King does appear from time to time).
  
  
• People in the crowds at the end of the movie seem to be wearing the same exact shade of blue. According to the DVD commentary with the director and producer, that shade is the "machine consortium blue" (a blue used in the film by the corporate ID of the consortium which builds the huge travel devices). It is supposed to suggest that those people believe in Dr Arroway's story as the main theme of the movie is "belief".
  
  
• Dr. Arroway hypothesizes that the message could be an "Encyclopaedia Galactica", a concept envisioned by Carl Sagan as well, featured prominently in the TV series "Cosmos" (1980) and meant to be a planetary database for all the worlds within the Milky Way Galaxy. The term originates from Isaac Asimov's science-fiction novel "Foundation".
  
  
• At the time of filming, Conroy Chino was, in fact, a reporter for KOB-TV, the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
  
  
• Sidney Poitier was announced for this film but was replaced before filming.
  
  
• The "UFO ABDUCTION INSURANCE" banner across an RV is from a real company that was paid by Warner Bros to use their novel idea in the movie.
  
  
• The long shot of Ellie as a child running up the stairs to get medicine for her father starts off on the stairs and rounds a corner, down the hall, into the bathroom and out of the medicine cabinet mirror a shot that is practically impossible. The shot was actually filmed as a normal shot would have been and then flipped and placed in the mirror which, at the time of shooting was a blue screen placement in the cabinet.
  
  
• The vehicle in which Ellie Arroway travels through the wormhole system is a sphere surrounded by a dodecahedron, the fourth Platonic solid. This beautiful figure with twelve pentagonal faces was considered by some Greek philosophers to represent the structure of the Universe. It was favored by Carl Sagan, and appears many times in his TV science series "Cosmos" (1980).
  
  
• The melodic use of the notes C#, D#, E, are recurring audio punctuations in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" (1980), and also are used in key scenes of this film. Notably when Dr. Arroway touches the then invisible interior of the space pod.
  
  
• President Bill Clinton's appearance was taken from an actual press conference on the White House South Lawn in 1997. His remarks were regarding the real-life discovery of an arctic meteorite discovered to be from Mars.
  
  
• Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan began the concept in 1980 as a movie treatment that was never picked up. Sagan finished the story alone and in 1985, released the book "Contact" with no further assistance from Druyan.
  
  
• Jenny McCarthy, when her popularity was boosted when she hosted "Singled Out" (1995), tried to audition for the role of Eleanor.
  
  
• Both co-writers James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg have worked on adaptations of "Peter Pan." Hart co-wrote Hook (1991), and Goldenberg co-wrote Peter Pan (2003).
  
  

• SPOILER: The Carl Sagan book "Contact" is different from the movie in several key places. First, the book had three machines built; one in the USA, one in the Soviet Union, and the third built by Hadden on Hokkaido, Japan. The movie had only two machines. The second major difference is that the book's machines held five passengers, and Ellie was accompanied on the voyage by four diverse intellectuals from around the world. Further, in the book semi-retired Ellie discovers "message" in the number pi (certain pattern of digits in it), thus revealing that our universe was indeed created or tweaked by other intelligent beings, as she has been told during her journey. Finally, there is no previous romantic relationship between Ellie and Joss, although the book hints at a potential relationship between the two as the story nears its end.
  
  

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