I had just co-written the part of Cosmos about the Great Library of Alexandria and the fact that Hypatia, who was the leader of the library, was a mathematician focusing on the Diophantine equations that Newton would later become interested in. At the time, it was popular to say things like, “Well, if men are as smart as women, then how come there are no female Leonardos? No female Einsteins?” This made both of us furious. Photo: Tony Korody/Sygma via Getty ImagesĪnn Druyan: This is 1978. “We used to make movies that were resonant and were entertaining.”
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They disagreed on several aspects of Contact’s development saga, but settled on some consensus: Contact was a lightning-in-a-bottle project, the kind of thing big movie studios barely made before and would probably never make again - intellectually challenging, emotionally messy, heavy with metaphor, wherein nobody shoots an alien in the face in front of an American flag. Tragically, by the time Sagan and Druyan’s long-cherished dream had manifested, he wasn’t around to witness it.Īhead of Contact’s 25th anniversary, we spoke to nearly two dozen people involved in its making, including Zemeckis, Foster, McConaughey, Druyan, Sasha Sagan, and veteran producer Lynda Obst.
It finally touched down in movie theaters on July 11, 1997, with director Robert Zemeckis at the helm, Jodie Foster as its headstrong lead, and Matthew McConaughey as a studly Christian philosopher. But somehow, rewrite after rewrite, Contact survived despite a hostile atmosphere and several failed attempts at liftoff, a bit dented in places but not destroyed. There were the film’s aliens, who didn’t kill anyone and didn’t possess any weird body parts like the otherworldly beings of most contemporary sci-fi films to that point. Nearly every screenwriter and filmmaker who tried a hand at Contact’s script fumbled to make the lead character, Ellie Arroway, relatable to male studio executives. At the time, Hollywood was accustomed to journey men and this was a story about a woman embarking on an intergalactic odyssey while her male counterpart stayed at home. Much like humanity’s interminable search to find intelligent life beyond Earth, the quest to make Contact was marked by heartbreak, hubris, meddling suits, and moments of sublime. What would it look like if we made definitive contact with aliens, they wondered, but only one person experienced it? It took Sagan, Druyan, and a litany of writers, producers, and directors nearly two decades to answer the question.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan - a world-famous astronomer and a former creative director at NASA, respectively - could never have anticipated the bliss and chaos that lay ahead when, sitting by a pool one night in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, they decided to co-write a movie about a “spiky” female scientist journeying to the center of the cosmos.
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