Production notes

The scientist Carl Sagan conceived Contact in 1979. That year, Lynda Obst, one of his closest friends, was hired by the film producer Peter Guber as a studio executive for his production company, Casablanca FilmWorks. She pitched Guber the idea for Contact, and he commissioned a development deal. Sagan and Ann Druyan (who later married) finished the film treatment in November 1980. Druyan said they hoped "to write something that would be a fictional representation of what contact would actually be like, that would convey something of the true grandeur of the universe". They added the science and religion analogies as a metaphor of philosophical and intellectual interest in searching for the truth of both humanity and alien contact. Sagan incorporated Kip Thorne's study of wormhole space travel. Druyan denied that Arroway was inspired by Jill Tarter, the head of Project Phoenix of the SETI Institute, though Foster met her to research the role. The name Ellie was short for Eleanor, which was taken from Eleanor Roosevelt, whom both Sagan and Druyan adored; Arroway was selected based on both Voltaire's real name (Arouet), and that Ellie "was going to travel like an arrow through the cosmos", according to Druyan. Tarter was a story consultant, and advised on how to portray career struggles of women scientists from the 1950s to 1970s. The writers debated whether Arroway should have a baby at the film's end. Although Guber was impressed with Sagan and Druyan's treatment, he hired various screenwriters to rewrite the script. New characters were added, including a Native American park ranger turned astronaut. Guber suggested that Arroway have an estranged teenage son, whom he believed would add depth to the storyline. Guber said: "Here was a woman consumed with the idea that there was something out there worth listening to, but the one thing she could never make contact with was her own child. To me, that's what the film had to be about." Sagan and Druyan disagreed and did not incorporate the idea. In 1982, Guber took Contact to Warner Bros. Pictures. As the film's development stalled, Sagan rewrote Contact as a novel, which was published by Simon and Schuster in September 1985. The film adaptation remained in development, and Guber left Warner Bros. in 1989. Guber became the new president of Sony Pictures Entertainment and tried to purchase the film rights from Warner Bros., but the studio refused. In 1989, Obst was hired as a new executive at Warner Bros. and fast-tracked the film by hiring more writers. Roland Joffé was hired to direct, using a screenplay by James V. Hart. Joffé almost commenced pre-production, but dropped out. Obst hired Michael Goldenberg to rewrite the script, who finished his second draft in late 1993. Goldenberg's draft rekindled Warner Bros.' interest in Contact, and asked Robert Zemeckis to direct; he refused in favor of making a film based on the life of Harry Houdini. Zemeckis liked the script, but did not like the ending, which had "the sky open up and these angelic aliens putting on a light show". In December 1993, Warner Bros. hired George Miller to direct, and Contact entered pre-production. Actresses including Julia Roberts expressed interest in the role of Ellie. Miller considered Uma Thurman before he cast Jodie Foster. He approached Ralph Fiennes to play Palmer Joss, and considered casting Linda Hunt as the US president. In addition to having aliens put on a laser lighting display around Earth, another version of the Goldenberg scripts had an alien wormhole swallow up the planet, transporting Earth to the center of the galaxy. Miller also asked Goldenberg to rewrite Contact to portray the pope as a key supporting character. Warner Bros. was hoping to have the film ready for release by Christmas 1996, but pre-production lasted longer than expected. Warner Bros. fired Miller, blaming pushed-back start dates, budget concerns, and Miller's insistence that the script needed five more weeks of rewriting. Zemeckis decided to accept the offer to direct. Warner Bros. granted him total artistic control and final cut privilege. Zemeckis cast Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss; McConaughey dropped out of the lead role in The Jackal to take the role. Despite being diagnosed with myelodysplasia in 1994, Sagan remained involved in the production of the film. For the cast and main crew members, he conducted an academic conference that depicted a detailed history of astronomy. The production crew watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for inspiration.

Principal photography began on September 24, 1996, and ended on February 28, 1997. The first shooting took place at the Very Large Array (VLA) near Socorro, New Mexico. "Shooting at the VLA was, of course, spectacular but also one of the most difficult aspects of our filming", producer Steve Starkey said. "It is a working facility, so in order for us to accomplish shots for the movie, we had to negotiate with the National Science Foundation for 'dish control' in order to move the dishes in the direction we needed to effect the most dramatic shot for the story." After arduous first weeks of location shooting in New Mexico and Arizona, production for Contact returned to Los Angeles for five months' worth of location and sound stage shooting that used a total of nine soundstages at Warner Hollywood Studios in West Hollywood, and Culver Studios. The art department created more than 25 sets. In an attempt to create a sense of realism for the storyline, principal CNN news outlet commentators were scripted into Contact. More than 25 news reporters from CNN had roles in the film, and the CNN programs Larry King Live and Crossfire were also included. Ann Druyan makes a cameo appearance as herself, debating with Rob Lowe's character, Richard Rank, on Crossfire. In January 1997, second unit filming, directed by producer Steve Starkey took place for one week at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Other second-unit work took place in Fiji, Saint John, US Virgin Islands and Newfoundland, Canada. Also essential to the production were a host of technical consultants from the SETI Institute, the California Institute of Technology, the VLA and a former White House staff member to consult on Washington, D.C., and government protocol issues. Sagan visited the set a number of times, where he also helped with last-minute rewrites. Filming was briefly delayed with the news of his death on December 20, 1996. Contact was dedicated to Sagan: "For Carl" appears on the screen at the fade. Cinematographer Don Burgess shot the film in anamorphic format using Panavision cameras, as well as using large-format 65 mm and VistaVision for visual and special effects shots. The sound designers used Pro Tools software for the sound mixing, which was done at Skywalker Sound.

The visual effects sequences were designed by eight VFX companies, including Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), Weta Digital, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Warner Digital, and Effects Associates, with Pixar's RenderMan used for CGI rendering. Weta Digital, in particular, was responsible for designing the wormhole sequence. Foster found working with blue screen technology for the first time difficult: "It was a blue room. Blue walls, blue roof. It was just blue, blue, blue. And I was rotated on a Lazy Susan with the camera moving on a computerized arm. It was really tough." News footage of Bill Clinton was digitally altered to make it appear as if he is speaking about alien contact. Zemeckis had approached Sidney Poitier to play the president, who turned the role down in favor of The Jackal. Shortly afterwards, Clinton gave a speech about the Martian meteorite fragment Allan Hills 84001, which was used in Contact. Zemeckis said: "I swear to God it was like it was scripted for this movie. When he said the line 'We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say', I almost died. I stood there with my mouth hanging open." Digital color correction was used to solve continuity errors during the location shooting at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. The opening scene is a three-minute CGI sequence, beginning with a view of Earth from high in the exosphere and listening to numerous radio broadcasts emitting from the planet. The camera zooms backward, passing the Moon, Mars, and other features of the Solar System, then to the Oort cloud, interstellar space, the Local Bubble, the Milky Way, other galaxies of the Local Group, and eventually into deep space. As this occurs, the radio signals start to drop out and reflect older programming, representing the distance these signals would have traveled at the speed of light, eventually becoming silent as the distance becomes much greater. The sequence eventually resolves into the iris of young Ellie's eye as she is listening on her amateur radio base station. The scale-view shot of the entire universe was inspired by the short documentary film Powers of Ten (1977). At the time, it was the longest continuous computer-generated sequence in a live-action film, eventually surpassed by the opening of The Day After Tomorrow (2004). One sequence, with young Ellie running upstairs to try to retrieve her father's medicine, appears to have Ellie running just behind a camera as they move into the bathroom, but the shot resolves to show that this was part of the medicine cabinet mirror's reflection, pulling back to have Ellie open it. It is noted as one of the film's most impressive visual effects due to the seamlessness of the transition. According to Carin-Anne Strohmaier, first assistant film editor, the shot was created through three different plates and manipulated in CGI to create the effect: one plate was from the cameraman leading Ellie, the second of Ellie opening the cabinet door (which was a blue screen instead of a mirror), and the third of the reflection of the photograph of Ellie and her father when the door closes. In the sequence with the death of Ellie's father, they planned to use an effect similar to bullet time from The Matrix to show him stopped in time as he died. As the movie was filmed, they found the approach did not fit the casting or the direction the film was going. They decided it would be most effective to create something distressing but with Ellie's father absent from the shot, leading to the development of the mirror sequence. The decoding of the extraterrestrial message, with its architectural drawings of the machine, was created by Ken Ralston and Sony Pictures Imageworks. It was Zemeckis's and Ralston's sixth film collaboration. Imageworks created more than 350 visual effect shots, using a combination of model and miniature shots and digital graphics. On designing the Machine, Zemeckis said, "The Machine in Sagan's novel was somewhat vague, which is fine for a book. In a movie, though, if you're going to build a giant physical structure of alien design, you have to make it believable... It had to be huge, so that the audience would feel like it was bigger than man should be tinkering with. It had to look absolutely real." The machine was designed by concept artist Steve Burg, reusing a design he created as a "time-displacement device" for an unused scene in Terminator 2. Early conceptual designs of the Pod were based, as in the novel, on one of the primary shapes in geometry: a dodecahedron, or a twelve-sided body. Eventually it was modified to a spherical capsule that encased the traveler, with a dodecahedron surrounding the sphere. Zemeckis and the production crew also made several visits to the Kennedy Space Center at Merritt Island adjacent to Cape Canaveral, where officials gave them access to sites off-limits to most visitors. Filmmakers were also brought onto Launch Complex 39 before the launch of the Space Shuttle, where they studied the mechanics of the elevator, gantry area and loading arm for the design of the Machine's surrounding supports and gantry. Once the concept met with the filmmakers' approval, physical construction began on the sets for the Pod, elevator interior and gantry, which took almost four months. The rest of the effects were compiled digitally by Imageworks. The climactic scene depicting the mysterious beach near the galactic core where Arroway makes contact, in particular, called for major visual innovations. The goal was an idyllic seashore with a sky blazing with stars that might exist near the core of the galaxy. Ralston said that "the thought was that this beach would have a heightened reality. One that might make the everyday world seem like a vague daydream." To keep the question alive whether any of it was real in Arroway's mind, elements such as ocean waves running in reverse and palm tree shadows swaying with sped-up motion were applied. The Hitler newsreel also required digital manipulation.

The original score was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri, most of which was released on August 19, 1997, by Warner Bros. Records. The full score is approximately an hour long, 44 minutes of which is on the CD, including every major cue. The CD track entitled "Good to Go" features a slightly different opening—a brief brass motif that is not in the film—but all other cues are identical in orchestration to the mix in the film. The Region 2 Special Edition DVD release contains a 5.1 music score track, which presents the complete score (this feature, as with many isolated scores, is not mentioned in most product descriptions of the DVD).

On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a rating of 69% based on reviews 68 critics, with an average score of 7.6/10. The critical consensus reads, "Contact elucidates stirring scientific concepts and theological inquiry at the expense of satisfying storytelling, making for a brainy blockbuster that engages with its ideas, if not its characters." Metacritic calculated an average score of 62 out of 100, based on 23 reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert gave Contact three and a half out of four and wrote that it "tells the smartest and most absorbing story about extraterrestrial intelligence since Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Movies like Contact help explain why movies like Independence Day leave me feeling empty and unsatisfied." On December 21, 2011, Ebert added Contact to his "Great Movies" collection. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said Contact carried a more philosophical portrait of the science fiction genre than did other films, but would still "satisfy the cravings of the general public who simply want to be entertained". The critic James Berardinelli said that Contact is "one of 1997's finest motion pictures, and is a forceful reminder that Hollywood is still capable of making magic". Berardinelli likened its awe and spectacle to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, adding that "If Contact falls short in any area, it's an inability to fully develop all of its many subplots..." Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle largely enjoyed the first 90 minutes of Contact but felt that Zemeckis was too obsessed with visual effects rather than cohesive storytelling for the pivotal climax. Rita Kempley, writing in The Washington Post, did not like the premise, which she described as "a preachy debate between sanctity and science".