“It was a little cursed”: The troubled 1997 movie that made Jodie Foster superstitious
Cinema has seen many supposedly cursed productions become the stuff of Hollywood legend. There’s something so enticing about a film shrouded in drama and superstition; perhaps it’s our natural human interest in the unknown that gets us, hooking us and drawing us into a world where a mysterious force has potentially worked behind the scenes (quite literally).
Look at Tobe Hooper’s film Poltergeist, often cited as one of the most cursed pictures in horror history, which, unbeknownst to many, involved real human skeletons as props, and within the next six years following its release, four of its actors died prematurely, including 12-year-old Heather O’Rourke, who played Carol Anne, and 22-year-old Dominique Dunne, who portrayed her sister, Dana.
How many cursed movie theories are just coincidences? It’s up to you whether you believe in mysterious forces trying to sabotage the production of certain movies, because if there’s one thing that Hollywood loves, it’s a good conspiracy theory, and many of us can’t help but be fascinated by them, but perhaps it’s different if you experience strange goings-on firsthand.
Jodie Foster found herself becoming increasingly superstitious when she starred in the 1997 film Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, which saw several disasters shape her experience of filming, about which she revealed in an interview with Vulture, calling the movie “weather cursed”, explaining how the weather continuously ruined shooting.
“Socorro was where all the big telescopes were, and if you wanted the telescopes to be facing in this direction and not in that direction, you had to apply years ahead of time. We were able to jump the line and do it eight months ahead of time, but then the weather fucked us up, and we were behind,” she explained.
That wasn’t all, either. “When we went to Puerto Rico, we had terrible storms with mudslides. When we went to DC, we had just bitter bitter cold for all these exterior scenes. That’s the worst weather movie I’ve ever had in my life,” she admitted. Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston backed up these claims, too, explaining that a trip to Newfoundland to shoot additional scenes became an unexpectedly hazardous event: “We were shooting in helicopters, and the weather turned really ugly; it started snowing like crazy. You could barely see what was happening”.
Weather wasn’t the only problem, though, as Foster also recalled a scene featuring a thousand extras which was ruined when the film was accidentally exposed to light. “So they had to go back and reshoot everything,” she said, “The poor guy who exposed all the film by accident, the assistant cameraman, was fired. It was sad.”
The actor was also struck by some pretty bad luck on a more personal level, too, continuously banging her head in one scene before getting stung by a bee on her neck. “I’m in terrible pain, and I had this big thing on my neck. I see them in the film: the big red splotch on my neck, the giant goose egg. I’m telling you, it was a little cursed, the movie,” she concluded.
Perhaps some aliens from outer space beamed down some mysterious curse to destroy the extra-terrestrial-themed movie, or perhaps it was just a bit of bad weather and some clumsy errors that made Contact a slight disaster behind the scenes.
