Contact is a tremendous movie. 27 years after its release, Robert Zemeckis‘ film remains awe-inspiring. The Carl Sagan adaptation is emotionally, intellectually, and viscerally engaging science-fiction. It’s the full-package. For cinematographer Don Burgess, it is the most challenging film he’s shot.
Which is saying a lot considering he just made Here with Zemeckis, in which the two explore the passage of time from one angle. No small feat, but the two always go big, as Burgess recently discussed with Immersive. During our interview with the cinematographer, he reflected on Contact and explained why it remains his most ambitious shoot:
Contact was the most difficult movie by far. It was large in scope, and it was from Washington, D.C., to Puerto Rico, to New Mexico, to Hollywood. And by the way, a shot would start in New Mexico and finish in Hollywood. There were a lot of blends that were seamless, but we had to make ’em feel that way. But that’s what we had to do.
We still had optical effects. They had to use a larger negative. So we shot a lot of things in VistaVision and 65 millimeter, and they’re bigger, heavier cameras, and you still had to make the camera float and move effortlessly through the shot to make it all appear.
In that movie, I don’t think the movie camera ever stops moving, right? It’s always moving. And we would do things like with Jodie [Foster] when she was at the very end, and James Wood is drilling her in front of all these people, there’s a thousand people in that auditorium, it’s huge. It’s an enormous lighting setup. But we still would do things like instead of pushing straight in on the close-up, I laid the track on a slight diagonal so that as you pushed in, the background would change behind her, would rotate behind her. So, there was always this idea of what goes on in outer space. You have this rotation of everything to stay alive, in essence.
I showed it to Bob. I said, “Bob, I just think that if we do this, the background shifts, and it’s just going to create a little bit more dynamic feeling in the world that Ellie Arroway is captivated by.” And so, those are things that come up along the way. But every day on that movie, we were doing something, in theory, that me personally and a lot of people, had never done before.
We were pushing the envelope on the technology of imagery every day. Everything was on a huge scale. The size of my crew was twice the size of a normal movie. You’re managing many more things that are going on that are happening down the road, happening in the next setup, happening next week.
And just the ride itself and the way we had to light that to her, going through all these different wormholes and all that and the color chakra of it all, and what color she needed to be hit when she was going… I mean, every day was like that.
I had the most wonderful crew in the world. They were all fantastic, and all just top-notch at what they did. And I always said, “Listen, if you guys weren’t in that stage, I wouldn’t even come in. I wouldn’t even bother. I’d just turn around and go home,” because it was so stressful to go in there and kind of like, okay, let’s buck up. We got to dive in here and figure this out one more thing. It’s just not a normal day where you just sat down and shot a normal scene. Just didn’t seem to happen.
Check back next week for our full interview with Don Burgess.
