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. The hotel has also been featured in No Way Out, with Kevin Costner, John Grisham's The Firm, with Tom Cruise, and The Godfather Part II. Washington DC locations include the W Washington DC Hotel, 515 15th Street at Pennsylvania Avenue NW, site of the formal party – the hotel’s POV Rooftop Bar has spectacular views over the White House and the Mall. Young Ellie’s home is in Herndon, Virginia, a town just to the east of Dulles International Airport (though the interiors were filmed on a soundstage in Los Angeles), which of course serves Washington DC. 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. 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. The CGI image was added to shots of the real Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Similarly, though more obviously, tricked up is the vast machine designed to send Ellie Arroway through a wormhole in space. The dishes in the background were added later. Despite appearances, the apparently neighbouring canyon is the spectacular Canyon de Chelly, a great gash running through Defiance Plateau, near Chinle in Arizona, previously featured in the epic Western MacKenna’s Gold.
The visitor centre is on Route 52, and there’s a walking tour of the site.ĭon’t look for a nearby canyon rim to sit on and contemplate the universe, though. The collection of telescopes is the imaginatively-named Very Large Array, 27 dishes arranged along three 13-mile arms on the San Augustin Plains at Socorro, New Mexico. You can see the telescope in Bond movie GoldenEye and in daft sci-fi Species. It’s operated by Cornell University, and if you want to visit, there is a visitor centre. It’s not quite as pristine as it looks in the movie and had to be cleaned up with a little computer generated help. The huge radio telescope is the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the largest single-dish site in the world. There’s so much tricksy effects work in the film (after all, it’s directed by Robert Zemeckis who was responsible for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump), and it’s not confined to the sci-fi elements, that location spotting is a dodgy business. Rational scientist Dr Ellie Arroway ( Jodie Foster) is the recipient of apparent alien messages in this interesting but ultimately disappointing adaptation of Carl Sagan’s novel.
Contact location: the radio telescope: Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico | Photograph: iStockphoto / TexPhoto
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