Patrick Stoner: Let me begin by noting how much I personally owe to the late Carl Sagan. [Sagan was co-producer and story contributor for the movie CONTACT, and wrote the novel by the same name. He also may have been the world's most famous astronomer at the time of his death in December 1996.] Like so many others, I still look at the universe in a different way because of him.
Jodie Foster: It's a big legacy, isn't it? Carl Sagan was such a dreamer, such a romantic, and yet with the voice of reason -- and to be able to combine those two things, the intellectual process and the passion -- AND to be able to bring them together ... He always made science seem like a spiritual experience. I KNOW how many people he influenced, and I hope this film [CONTACT] will carry on that tradition.
Stoner: That's also something a good artist does -- combine the wonder with the craft.
Foster: Yeah, or a good athlete. I think it's about excellence. If you're good at what you do, then you really do it well, but if you're excellent at it, then you go deeper than that -- finding a sort of Zen collaboration between the head and the heart.
Stoner: I'm going to ask you to do something that we seldom do in these "movie star interviews," but this film is really about IT -- the reason, the point to it all. Can you wrap your mind around how big the cosmos is, and just what is our place in it?
Foster: Yes, one of the wonderful things about how Carl Sagan felt was just how beautiful he thought our "smallness" was -- and our ignorance was. How beautiful that thought is -- that there is so much mystery out there that we can never understand it. That's also something that religious leaders are very involved in. So, it's interesting -- that place where religion and science come together, and in this idea of wonder and mortality and who we are in relation to the grandness of the heavens.
Stoner: Do you have a personal feeling about it?
Foster: [laughs] Well, as usual, I'm very typecast. I feel exactly as my character does, although with a lesser vocabulary -- that science ultimately is the best way we have of finding the truth, and eventually all of the great mysteries in the world can be resolved by a science that we just don't understand yet.
Stoner: Well, we've just recently, as a species, have had the luxury of looking beyond survival to the great mysteries.
Foster: That's true, but we're still remarkably young as a species. We've just been beaming our voices out to the universe for the past 75 years -- a wink in the eye of time. The fact that people get discouraged that we haven't made contact with any other living thing yet is kind of disheartening. I mean, we've only been looking for 75 years out of 10 million. What can we expect so soon?
Stoner: True, and here's a frightening thought: What we're doing now, when it's aired, will be going out of our atmosphere, into space, and may someday make contact with something else, somewhere, as part of our human communication to the universe.
Foster: [laughs] Into space. Yeah, everything we do [in the media] goes out into space. It makes you wonder, "What of ourselves are we broadcasting out, and if you had to look at our planet, based on that, what would you think of us? What are we saying to everybody about who we are?" It really makes you feel very differently about yourself.
Return to Contact review.
