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filming locations
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CREDITS
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Rational
scientist Dr Ellie Arroway (Jodie
Foster) is the recipient of apparent alien messages
in this interesting but ultimately disappointing adaptation
of Carl Saganís novel.
Thereís so much tricksy effects work in the film, and
itís not confined to the sci-fi elements, that location
spotting is a dodgy business.
Young Ellieís home is in Herndon,
Virginia,
though the interiors were filmed on a soundstage in
LA.
The huge radio telescope is the Arecibo
Observatory in Puerto
Rico, the largest single-dish site in the world.
Itís not quite as pristine as it looks in the movie
and had to be cleaned up with a little computer generated
help. Itís operated by Cornell University, and if you
want to visit, there is a visitor centre, open Wednesday
to Friday, 10am to 4pm and Saturday, Sunday and most
holidays from 9am to 4pm.
The collection of telescopes is the imaginatively-named
Very
Large Array, 27 dishes arranged along three
thirteen-mile arms on the San
Augustin Plains at Socorro,
New Mexico.
The visitor centre is on Route 52, and thereís a walking
tour of the site.
Donít look for a nearby canyon rim to sit on and contemplate
the universe, though. Despite appearances, the apparently
neighbouring canyon is the spectacular Canyon
de Chelly, a great gash running through Defiance
Plateau, near Chinle
in Arizona.
See MacKennaís Gold for details. The dishes in the background
were added later.
Similarly, though more obviously, tricked up is the
vast machine designed to send Ellie Arroway through
a wormhole in space. The CGI image was added to shots
of the real Cape Canaveral
coast in Florida.
The wild and wacky UFO encampment was also a good way
away from the Array, this time at Victorville,
a standard Hollywood desert location in the Mojave Desert,
California.
Also in California
is the airport where Dr Arroway boards the private plane
of SR Hadden (John
Hurt, as the Carl Sagan character), which shot at
Van Nuys Airport, Burbank,
another favourite location dating back to Casablanca
and before.
Washington DC
locations include the Hotel
Washington, 515 15th Street at Pennsylvania
Avenue NW, site of the formal party – the hotelís
Rooftop
Terrace has spectacular views over the White
House and the Mall. The hotel has also been featured
in Now Way Out,
with Kevin Costner,
and The
Godfather Part II.
The finale, which was filmed, not at the Capitol
Building as it appears, but on the steps of the more
easily available Treasury Building,
Pennsylvania Avenue NW at 15th Street. And,
yes, thatís a computer generated image of the Capitolís
dome reflected in the car window to complete the illusion.
The tropical beach 'heaven' was filmed by a Second Unit
in the Yasawa Islands
in Fiji.
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