Contact with James V. Hart

Our guest this week is James V. Hart, whose screenwriting talents have seen him enlisted to pen scripts for everyone from Steven Spielberg to Francis Ford Coppola. There's one movie in his extensive filmography that he looks back on with particular pride and emotion, however. Contact – the Robert Zemeckis-directed story of a scientist played by Jodie Foster, who discovers proof of extraterrestrial life – was a novel before James adapted it into one of the most celebrated sci-fi dramas of all time. The book was written by renowned astronomer Carl Sagan – a close personal friend of James'. Carl sadly didn't live to see the film's completion, passing away after a long illness just months before Contact's release.

James looks back on the movie today as a tribute to his friend and the astronomer's brilliant partner, author Ann Druyan, both of whom he worked with closely while adapting Contact. It was a tricky screenplay to get right. As you'll discover in this episode, the book was a dense meditation on what would happen if contact were made with life from another planet – the ripples it would send through politics, through religion, and everything in between. It was a book rooted, as anyone who knows Carl's work might expect, in scientific fact. Translating the novel into a piece of blockbuster entertainment without losing any of the book's authority and spirit of scientific discovery, in a time dominated by the explosions and spectacle of alien movies like Independence Day, was a daunting task.

This is the story of how James pulled it off. Over an engrossing sixty minutes, we reflect on the movies that Contact helped inspire, a version of the script that included the Pope as a major character, and why James is not satisfied with the film's ending. Truly, they should have sent a poet to interview James. Instead, you guys have Al. Sorry about that.

Support for this episode comes from MUBI, Screencraft and Launchpad.

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek, with music from Stefan Bindley-Taylor. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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