Contact could have been a George Miller movie, if some things were different.Image: Warner Bros.
Hollywood is full of fascinating “What if?” scenarios. The so-and-so director almost made a movie. Actor X was the second choice for the role of Y. It’s an infinite rabbit hole and director George Miller is often a big part of it. He was very close to making a Justice League film long before anyone tried such a feat and he was also very, very close to adapting Carl Sagan’s iconic book, Contact.
This fact has already been covered in the media before, but a new oral story from Contact celebrating its 25th anniversary at Vulture sinks much deeper into Miller’s journey. The director of Mad Max tackled the project in 1993 and, a year later, read the adapted screenplay by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. He loved it and began developing a film that, according to eventual star Jodie Foster, was very different from what film director Robert Zemeckis would eventually do.
“George Miller’s film was very different,” the Oscar winner told Vulture. “It was an incredibly long script, like 200 pages. It was crazy. It looked a little more like Lorenzo’s oil or there were even moments like Eraserhead.” Druyan, who created the story along with Sagan, echoed those feelings. “It was weird, because that was the idea,” he said. “The universe is weird. There were scenes with, like, massacre on the road that you wouldn’t think were right on the path of history, but that I felt they had the power to broaden the viewer’s consciousness.” .
Several writers worked with Miller on various versions of a script, adding relationships and characters along the way, but Miller never thought it was right. “[Writer Michael Goldenberg’s] The script was fantastic, “said producer Lynda Obst.” Then I gave it to George, and he liked it, but he wanted to keep working on it. So we had our big setback: ‘George, you’re going to do this film. movie this year? ‘ And George said, “Probably, if the script is there.” And the studio executives said, “Well, we think the script is there.” And he says, ‘Well, I don’t think it’s there yet.” .
Obst explained that because the studio and Miller were not seeing eye to eye, they held a very important meeting. “He came to this meeting with a very complicated diagram about what he wanted to do with the script,” he said. “They said, ‘George, do you promise to shoot this movie before Christmas?’ That was the time to do or die. We were all praying for him to say yes. He said no. I remember sinking into my chair. ” Robert Zemeckis was hired the next day and the rest is history.
So what was the problem? What about Contact, Miller thought he wasn’t there at all? Obst thinks he knows. “I think George Miller couldn’t commit to the film, because he couldn’t figure out 100% what he wanted for the end,” he said. “Everyone had their own idea of what it was supposed to be.”
Miller did not comment on Vulture’s excellent story, but a few years ago spoke to Collider about his version of Contact that came to a meeting to become a reality. “One of the highlights of my life was spending a year with Carl Sagan, because he and Ann Druyan wrote that script, and it was absolutely wonderful to meet those scientists and talk about the film,” said the director of Fury Road. in 2015. “But over time, it became clear that Warners weren’t ready to make the film I was interested in making. It would be safer, so we agreed to separate. Then someone sent me the script they were going to do, and it basically went back to something much safer and more predictable. ”He thinks his film would have been more like Interstellar than Contact.
Now, if you found this story interesting, we recommend that you go to Vulture and read the entire oral history. It’s full of great peps like this, like the ending Steven Spielberg threw into the film, the actresses trying to get the lead, the problems with the cast of Matthew McConaughey and more. It’s a fantastic read. (Also, cheap plug for i9 look at the movie on its 20th anniversary at this link!)
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