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文字起こし [Music] space the final frontier science fiction is basically saying there are no limits space is anything we want it to be yes the scale of the universe is unbelievably stunning we are asking those big questions like where are we going and what does it say about us as humans i think it answers something elemental in human beings which is we love danger space travel sounds rather ahead of us they will never get me onto one of those dreadful starships science fiction inspired the rocketeers who brought us to the moon and that's just the beginning science fiction holds out hope for even more incredible discoveries i think we're curious in our bones about going into the galaxy what is the galaxy ever done for you why would you want to save it because i'm one of the idiots who lives in it humanity is hardwired to explore and to exploit we are citizens of the universe we belong there too i hate space [Music] i've been thinking about this idea that space is anything we want it to be it's the great unknown and we can project our fantasies and our ideas our sociology and you know we can use it just as an excuse to get to a completely different culture or we can take it at face value as a problem we need to solve yeah and i sort of think about science space science fiction as you know on the one hand you got the hard tech stuff like 2001 and then at the other end of the spectrum it's more space as a kind of complete unfettering of the imagination you got you got two things no matter how you do it whether it's 2001 oral star wars their adventures the the the big boogie man is the unknown right because the thing about humans that's always been with us is we have an imagination the night sky has always been the great mystery one it's terrifying because you walk out in it and you get eaten and the other part is that there's there's things up there i mean the stars the planets and the things have to mean something so this is a primal attraction yes and man has curiosity curiosity and imagination bring you things like stories so you're saying it's a mystical connection there's a mystical connection with the sky and with stars and all things so they relate directly to us isn't that what we try to do with our movies to capture a little bit of that awe and bring it into a movie theater and and feel what it might be like to go out there how small a human can be in front of the entire planet and then the camera will spin around and you'll see how small a human is in front of the vastness of the universe can't beat the view [Music] that movie really brought people to space it showed them not only what the view looked like but also what it felt like to have the view and that was so important to me to be able to share because the view is unimaginable it was so clean and pristine it almost hurt your eyes because the edges are so sharp and it's giant when i was living up on the space station my little brother met sandra bullock's brother-in-law he said well you know my sister-in-law is making this movie maybe your sister would talk to her and my little brother said she's been up there for a couple months with five guys and i think she'd love to talk to sandra bullock how are you feeling while that's being tumbled some of the things that she wanted to know were what's it like for me when i wake up in the morning what's a hard thing what's an easy thing so that she understands how she can make space look real sandra i thought looked purposeful and not like a space newbie has been a science fiction theme for a long long long time it is really fantastic the lengths that the early science fiction writers went to to get a spacecraft from the earth even to the moon george melies was a originally a stage magician who got enamored with the brand new art form the cinematography and not only uh did he invent the science fiction movie he essentially invented movie special effects and it was really based on the two giants of science fiction at the time h.d wells and jules verne jules were provided the plot and story for the first half of the movie with his from the earth to the moon the second half was based on h.g wells's first men in the moon early depictions of space travel show characters just moving about freely opening up the door and walking out into space with no trouble but within a couple decades things change pretty quickly in cinematic depictions of outer space and space travel so as early as the 1920s you have films like women in the moon by fritz lang where characters are strapped into their seats and as the ship is taking off they can feel the pressure of the g-force on their chests struggling to breathe as they lift off and then you've got writers that worked for john w campbell jr when he began editing astounding science fiction who were held to a standard of scientific verisimilitude and that's when you start getting realistic believable space adventures stand by fire tell us about this trip to the moon you do you think this is possible oh yes yes it's quite possible we're here aren't we not only are we here but uh it can be done it can be done as soon as anyone is willing to put the bill to do it robert heinlein was the guru of hard science fiction but i think before that and beyond that he was the guru of logical science fiction heinlein asked the question which is the classic hard science fiction question how do you do it how do you solve that problem even today that's a key theme in science fiction debris chain reaction is out of control and rapidly expanding satellites are down and then wanted to recreate the good the bad and the ugly of space travel it can hit you with the kinetic energy of a howitzer round [Music] the film gravity is visually compelling because it really sets up the unforgiving dynamic how just the smallest step in the wrong direction is going to send the entire series of events tumbling and it only takes that much the only really big mistake they made in the movie is that if you were up on a space station the last thing you do is let george clooney go there's a lot of secrets in the universe we don't know anything that's the one thing i do know for sure but we've got to get out of our solar system we've got to get to another solar system yeah but einstein says you can't travel fast in the speed of light science fiction is basically saying there are no limits that's right think outside the box no matter what somebody tells you what you learn throw all that away and say i can do anything i want to do you're in a completely different universe traveling through hyperspacing like dust and crops boy we sometimes forget that space is cosmologically big traveling to the rest of the universe would take tens thousands of years with current technology the reason we measure them in light years is because it takes that long for the speed of light to travel that distance faster than light travel is the holy grail of space travel and right now it's the bolonium that we bolonium is that stuff you make up to make the story work and it's different from hand wavium which is how you distract the reader or the viewer but and it's not unobtainium that's a dif but uh bolonium is that stuff if we had the right bolonium we could make faster than light travel work so here is a perfect limitation for an artist you can't go faster than light speed how are we going to get around it to explore the universe science fiction writers said okay well we have to create a speed faster than light speed everybody ready say goodbye to our solar system execute joe i'm not sure what's wrong here is the parking brake on compressor rush and with that rush science fiction launches an age of exploration we're down to 0.3896 of light speed forbidden planet is one of those rare big budget science fiction movies from a time when most science fiction movies look pretty cheesy it's very easy to see many of the things that later science fiction specifically star trek if not directly took from was certainly inspired by the ship on forbidden planet it almost looks like the saucer section of the enterprise without the rest of it these discs they stand on it looks just like the transporter it definitely looks like the designers of star trek looked at this and said boy this is a beautiful looking movie forbidden planet is definitely less diverse which makes star trek special space the final frontier the importance of star trek is that it brought space into the living rooms of americans and people really across the globe it made space accessible star trek was a classic humanistic vision of the kind of utopian future that you live and let live these are the voyages of the starship enterprise gene roddenberry said he wanted to do an all-inclusive series in space with all the ideas that could more easily be done in science fiction in the 60s than in realistic fiction to boldly go where no man has gone before so you could deal with controversial issues but they weren't controversial because they're distanced they're not us it's not our own society we did want to get into racial issues sexist issues that were going on at the time and i think it opened a door into an alien world that people could say oh yeah i get that it offered lots of story opportunities to tell stories about things going on right here on earth this is no game captain half a million people have just been killed there's an episode called uh a taste of armageddon about these two planets that have that are conducting a virtual war computers captain they fight their war with computers totally computers don't kill a half a million people deaths have been registered of course they have 24 hours to report to report to our disintegration machines at the very end of it kirk says we're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands but we can stop it we can admit that we're killers but we're not going to kill today so all of these different stories they all had a social message buried in them gene knew what he was doing the writers knew what they were doing it's up to you star trek was a way of saying look we can do better things the way they are it's not necessarily the way they have to be what about the cast of the show i'm told that nbc only wanted white males on the bridge no women no blacks when i brought in a mixed ratio crew both the network and dizzy lou studios which headed at that time came in saying what are you doing you're going to ruin us i can tell you what happened to me the first time i saw star trek really before star trek there were no people of color in the future we didn't really exist at all anywhere and gene roddenberry created this group where this beautiful black woman not uh mammy was head of communications captain i'm picking up a subspace distress call priority channel it's from space station k7 so to see her in that position for me was like extraordinary and it's why i went to jean to do star trek next generation was because of what michelle nichols showed me which was that i had a future in the world what about you you speak romulan cadet uh all three dialects sir the day that i met michelle nichols i was very nervous because that was the first time for me to step in someone else's shoes and she suspended any kind of judgment if anything she handed me that torch and she said run with it the jamming signal's gone transport abilities are reestablished the main attribute that star trek gives people is hope may we together become greater than the sum of both of us what i took from the original series was the love humanity is able to have even if it's set in a time that they may never recognize they may never meet the strive for that is tangible live long and prosperous spock live long and prosper the cultural importance of the star trek franchise can't be underestimated we've had to date seven different series 13 films and hundreds of novelizations comic books board games video games costumes fans love star trek because it does suggest that there will be opportunities for us to meet each other in space and to learn from each other the most powerful message to me of star trek was just the idea that by stepping out of the universe we put our old problems behind us and we become better people through cooperation and you know believing in a certain set of values it's a very romantic notion it's a very idealistic notion but that's a universe i want to go live in i want to go get on a starship i want to be part of the federation 2001 as far as i'm concerned is the best science fiction film ever made it is the quintessential what space travel is yeah and it looks great you know it's it's it's just it's impeccable the way they put it together the discovery coming overhead endlessly is basically the precursor of the of the opening shot of star wars that stunned everybody myself included probably 2001 had more of an influence on me than i realized but at the same time i was completely stoked by that movie it's brilliant i think 2001 opened up films to be a much broader and interesting canvas in terms of what space travel might be like that anything had been shown before everything was believable even though it would have our jaws on our laps at amazement but everything always had a reality to it that's absolutely the most meticulously accurate science fiction movie between arthur clark the hard science fiction writer and stanley kubrick the visionary filmmaker who thought this image is all you need let the audience figure it out in that sense everything was a surprise and a visual entree of unbelievable significance but it's really not the the filmmaking part of it it's the let's go into outer space too and we have the reality now to deal with it which is why mars is becoming more of a thing but we have to get people to say this is a fun adventure i guess i was probably 11 years old when i when i first saw star wars it was the most magnificent experience i had ever had in my life my mind was you know you're searching for those answers and the world and you're hungry and i looked at star wars and i just i knew i wanted to live in that world i've been chasing star wars for my entire career star wars is a landmark film in the history of science fiction stories about space because it opened up the excitement and the adventure of traveling from planet to planet and made us all want to go there with the heroes we built the cameras we built the optical printers we built the miniatures all under one roof which was kind of unusual we could fabricate metal we could do machining did chemistry for the explosions it was a whole litany of things that were new the first shot in the movie was sort of the touchstone for whether it was going to work or not it had a miniature of the star destroyer which was three feet long [Music] when we saw it everybody went wow it's great that is a shot of pure awe where suddenly as a viewer you're just knocked out by the potential of space and where this movie could go this was revolutionary really felt like you were standing there and the ship was coming overhead it was so transformative talk about what your influences were that fed into the creation of star wars as much as star wars seemed to just leap from your forehead no fully formed it had roots that any anybody in the science fiction world knows nothing in this world pops into your head fully formed it's an accumulation of all the things you've seen and then when you go to regurgitate it into a your own thing you take all the best parts the roll up that was taken from flash gordon the angle that it rolls up the screen with the way the text was arranged even the number of ellipses and he was very much influenced by the movies of akira kurosawa so in terms of cowboy films lucas was very influenced by john ford's the searchers which contains a scene that very much mirrors the scene where uncle owen and amberu are murdered [Music] that definitely helped fuel this notion that star wars is a space west [Music] one of the things that was really critical in star wars was again this sense of adrenaline and the idea of uh trajectory into space almost there and that brought some of that visceral quality back to it sort of the idea of having that rush i can't shake it and you know it's interesting the closer you get to something at speed the faster it feels it's just like beggars canyon back home so that was really the idea behind the trench for the death star let's get people down into a space that's traveling at an extreme speed and give you the excitement that you get when you do it i mean there's so many great shots in star wars but i think if there's one that makes my heart ache a bit it's luke seeing the two sunset it just has this very somewhere over the rainbow kind of wistful vibe to it that is a shot that i can relate to as a teenager in texas that is a shot that i think any kid can relate to this idea of what is next for me and how do i go there's this yearning that makes this space story feel like something that's happening to us one of the reasons why i made star wars this is made for 12 year olds it appeals to everybody but it was still made for 12 year olds and we were all 12 once and i tell people don't underestimate 12 year olds they're smarter than the rest of us right they get stuff much faster than you do yeah and the whole point was to get them to allow to think a lot of them to think outside the box the whole thing is subjective and dreamy who said wookies can't fly well i said they can fly yeah i said i'm not going to obey the rules if you can imagine it you can do it but if you can't imagine it you can't do it yeah because it's the prison of your own mind it's that prison of your own mind that allows you to do it and you can enjoy that and come up with really crazy stuff chewbacca well i can guarantee there's no wookies in space how do you know you single-handedly revolutionized science fiction and pop culture with star wars 1977. because it had been three decades of downer stuff dystopian stuff apocalyptic stuff and science fiction was making less and less and less money every year and then all of a sudden you came along with another vision one of wonder and hope and empowerment and boom star wars is a space opera it's not science fiction and it's because it's really just you know one of those soap operas only in space yeah but it's more than that and and you know and you know it is it's it's a neo myth but it fulfills the role that myth played in society it's mythology but you took it to a new level no film that i can think of had the used future idea the future was always shiny it was always perfect it always had just been unwrapped on christmas morning because it was this kind of optimistic idea and you said no the future has to have been lived in for thousands of years so the sand crawlers all rusted and things are kind of broken and it looked like it had been lived in so where did that idea come from because there was no precursor to that i just felt that's got to look like it's the real place the transition from the science fiction space travel of the 60s to the 70s it probably reflects a wider shift in culture at the time the sort of general cynicism of the 70s has kind of infected this vision of the future and it's like okay if we get into outer space probably giant corporations are still gonna be running everything and that's when you get to movies like alien where you have a spacecraft that looks like it's been through the mill things are leaking steam's sprouting out of broken pipes it's grimy and the place is a mess look i'm not gonna do any more work we get this straightened out brett you're guaranteed by law to get a share and it's i think no accident that in a lot of these films it's the military-industrial complex that are the real monster in space this can cause trouble for us that could put my people out of business don't worry he's a dead man from the moment that humans set off to lands that they've never been to before immediately what follows that is you see all of the normal human problems that we have in societies transposed to other worlds which means you're going to have labor problems you're going to have hazardous environments for workers you're going to have all kinds of things that reflect what might be the reality of outer space exploration at some point corporations are going to have to get involved at some point maybe the government will have to take over and lead to something like a militarized society like the starship troopers we break net now and take you live to glendale where the invasion has begun it's an ugly planet when palvero and i were talking one day what movies would we like to make he said well i've always wanted to do a movie about like what it was like to be you know 15 years old in nazi germany in 1935 when nobody knew it was bad yet it's just a pretty interesting idea it came to me the idea based on being a young boy when i was occupied by the germans of course in holland which was fascist clearly or nazis whatever you want to call it i said i remember saying to him well they won't let us do that but then i thought oh starship troopers we can do that based on the book by robert heinlein really is a kind of a political tract and fairly conservative political tract where he said if people who had been in the military ran the world it would be fair and right he really felt that the kind of mentality that was encouraged in the u.s army was extremely important for making boys into men starship troopers is an important science fiction movie because it's one of the few movies that warns us that humans may bring the worst of themselves into space rather than the best of themselves we really tried to bring in a level of criticism about what these people are doing especially in the newsreels continuously telling to the audience you're like these people these are you heroes and heroines by the way they're probably fascists and what's fascinating about these patriotic news reels they are very shot-for-shot similar to triumph of the will i wanted to do was a movie about war and propaganda and why we go to war and what happens to us when we do but i wanted to tell it you know almost like a 1950s b movie starship troopers is troy donahue and sandra d go to outer space fight giant bugs and become nazis was my kind of logline the story of humankind is exploration is followed by colonialization and exploitation so we've always done this he figured that he could get an alien back to a quarantine if one of us was impregnated i don't know which species is worse you don't see them each other over for a damn percentage and i think what you see in science fiction is as we reach out into the universe we take all of our baggage with us my parents thought that television and this is back in the early 50s was the worst influence so they prevented me from watching television i could only watch like jackie gleason the honeymooners yeah right and so i started to imagine my own shows i couldn't watch television i would just dream up something for myself to enjoy and that's what kids do when they're exercising their natural ability to create worlds that don't exist i mean i remember when i saw mysterious island that in in the third grade i raced home and started doing my own version of mysterious island yeah so yeah i think that's the creative impulse you take it in you i don't want to copy it in a slavish fan way i want to create my own version it was it always had to do with a pencil and a piece of paper and of course later the eight millimeter movie camera but you were processing the world back out in the form of something visual exactly that was that that's that's a blast because you know you do the same thing when i sit down to storyboard i come up with my best ideas in the process of making my sketches i mean ideas that weren't even in the script and weren't even in my imagination will come out as i'm actually drawing [Music] the science fiction artists are often overlooked in the history of science fiction but artists have influenced authors in their own right because they're bringing their ideas and characters like visually but if you think back to everything you probably visualize about science fiction you're probably going back to what a science fiction artist has done chesley bonnie still was considered the father of space art or astronomic art he started producing the 1940s these paintings that were extraordinarily realistic [Music] you'll find even today astronomers astronauts astrophysicists engineers who will say that you know they got into doing what they're doing because as kids they were inspired by chesley vanessa [Music] the great advantage of science fiction is that you can draw anything on this vast campus of space it's all open you know for you to throw your imagination in with world building you are creating a society from scratch a planet from scratch a people from scratch they may not look like people like you and me but they are people every plant that you see in that remarkable forest on pandora even if you see it for half a second has an english name a latin name a na'vi name and probably a two-page description on its ecology on how it reproduces and how it's used by the navi so if you're going to go into that much detail then you're not going to skimp on the language you've got to make sure that everything really holds together the language i wrote it it's like 400 words and i make a little dictionary and that was interesting because the only two person who can speak the language at the time was was mila and me we were kind of fluent after a couple of weeks what is your name that's her name [Laughter] i think there's like a first middle and last somewhere in there but don't ask me which working with luke bassan who wrote and directed fifth element it changed my life it just seemed so realistic to me which i was really impressed by it's the the white page that you can write everything you can make everything beautiful again in space i like the fantasy of it and i just take a subject like the law the police the food we're fortunate for you and then i start writing you know 10 15 pages on each and then you give that to the actors and and it gives some life and polish on the story even if you never talk about it science fiction is probably the best way to open your mind about everything and sci-fi is just an oil so the doors open easier it doesn't like so hard to push space is the biggest canvas to write whatever you want to push all the limits because by definition future doesn't have a limit or if there is one we don't know it when i was eight or nine years old i was obsessed with creating different planets creating these worlds and these universes and building them up from the ground even at that young age and i wrote up the visuals of guardians of the galaxy hundreds of pages of documents with the different cultures and what they do and how do they think where you're creating a world in outer space based on real rules that is still filled with imagination and fantasy oh yeah when you're dealing with a raccoon in a tree you are in some ways dealing with space fantasy but within that let's say there is a talking raccoon what would it be and how would it be and i came up with racket raccoon is a result of experiments on his body to turn him into something that's designed to kill ain't nothing like me except me i'm rude you said that grew some most popular character from guardians of the galaxy he's probably the soul of the movie i mean i remember like it was yesterday we were getting ready to shoot this scene where groot grows into sort of like this nest and protects us from this impact that was just going to completely kill us that day when we're shooting that scene that we couldn't stop crying this character that doesn't even exist but risking his life for mine was very moving why are you doing this it's very much of a christ story we have this character who gives his life and is born again we [Music] we are groot is the line of dialogue that every single other thing in the movie is hanging on it's about seeing a raccoon and a human being and a green assassin and a big oaf and they find a family with each other for the first time an outer space family that's what makes it science fiction is that it's an outer space family today it is you learn the power of mars tomorrow it will be the whole world we're dreaming is it about mars the angry red planets we're heading straight for mars mars is burning up 50 years ago space is an extraordinarily hostile environment and then we go through the trajectory of science fiction which includes exploring the rest of the universe but the solar system is now very much within our reach the closest mars ever gets to us is 36 million miles which doesn't seem so huge when you think about light years it's a tiny distance by comparison stories like the martian make us believe that we can and will do this in our own lifetime i got to figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here on a planet where nothing grows in the martian what you see is a smart person actually acting smart using his brain to solve problems instead of a lightsaber or a ray gun they say that once you grow crops somewhere you've officially colonized it so technically i colonized mars one of the other great things that andy weirs the martian does is make the experience seem like an everyday experience almost you can see yourself as mark watney he doesn't power through problems without hitting a hitch he hits every single hitch there is and you get to see him work through them and you find yourself thinking i could do that so it's inspirational but it's also just very practical i forgot to account for the excess oxygen that i've been exhaling when i did my calculations because i'm stupid the whole story is just one prolonged cascade failure basically his solution to this immediate problem leads to the next problem and the next and the next and so on i would say that the problem-solving style of arthur clark and also robert heinlein influenced how i wrote the martian although i would say one of the biggest influences on the martian was apollo 13 both the real events and the movie uh this is houston uh say again please houston we have a problem my father is particle physicist and my mother is an electrical engineer so i was pretty much doomed to be a nerd there is one joke where they tell him everything he's typing is being broadcast live to the entire world yeah in the novel he says look a pair of boobs and draws like these ascii art boobs it's open parentheses period y period close parenthesis they didn't put that in the movie they just had everybody look up and go oh oh my god as if he'd written something really profane the face of overwhelming odds i'm left with only one option i'm going to have to science out of this i'm going to have to science out of this what does that mean well it equates with his thrill of terror saying i'm either going to die here i can survive yeah and so he leans heavily on what i call gallows humor i'm not going to think too much about this i'm going to take it day by day hour by hour yeah and i'm going to have to science to get my survival going that kind of humor yeah probably keeps in check terror and fear which will stop him functioning you know what i got out of it we're all that guy our oh that our state right now of affairs on earth yeah is such that we have no choice but to science to get out of it correct in order to survive that's the threats in front of us yes are threats that will be sold that are they're caused by technology for the most part and they need to be solved by science yes yeah that's a good point i think the drive for the realism of the martian is the fact that we will get to mars quite soon so suddenly it's come right back to our doorstep that we now have the technology and are building the sophisticated means for getting to mars and colonizing mars that's why the martian is is important and why it has that realism to it this is space it does not cooperate at some point everything's going to go south and you're going to say this is it now you can either accept that or you can get to work if we don't figure out how to get to mars and live there and then build another spaceship that can go to another solar system yeah we're toast yeah in the long-term way and i say yeah we've only got a million years to figure this out we better we're way behind schedule here so you have to get people to sort of buy into the idea and we didn't have these movies to say this is an adventure this is really going to be fun yeah do you think we'd be dumb enough to go in a spaceship off to mars where there's nothing there but a bunch of red dirt yeah no it's like the adventure the whole idea of it we have to do this the human race depends on it well thank you for doing this my pleasure this has been an amazing brain jam yeah well this is all i have to do now and i don't get to do it very much
0:01[Music]
0:07space the final frontier science fiction is basically saying there are no limits
0:16space is anything we want it to be yes the scale of the universe is unbelievably stunning we are
0:24asking those big questions like where are we going and what does it say about us as humans
0:30i think it answers something elemental in human beings which is we love danger
0:37space travel sounds rather ahead of us they will never get me onto one of those dreadful starships
0:43science fiction inspired the rocketeers who brought us to the moon and that's just the beginning science
0:50fiction holds out hope for even more incredible discoveries i think we're curious in our bones about
0:59going into the galaxy what is the galaxy ever done for you why would you want to save it because i'm one of the idiots who lives in it
1:06humanity is hardwired to explore and to exploit we are citizens of the
1:13universe we belong there too
1:20i hate space
1:34[Music]
1:58i've been thinking about this idea that space is anything we want it to be it's the great unknown and we can
2:03project our fantasies and our ideas our sociology and you know we can use it just as an excuse to get to a completely
2:09different culture or we can take it at face value as a problem we need to solve yeah and i sort of
2:15think about science space science fiction as you know on the one hand you got the hard tech stuff like 2001 and then at the
2:23other end of the spectrum it's more space as a kind of complete unfettering
2:28of the imagination you got you got two things no matter how you do it whether it's 2001
2:35oral star wars their adventures the the the big boogie man is the unknown
2:42right because the thing about humans that's always been with us is we have an imagination
2:47the night sky has always been the great mystery one it's terrifying because you walk out in it
2:52and you get eaten and the other part is that there's there's things up there
2:58i mean the stars the planets and the things have to mean something so this is a primal attraction
3:04yes and man has curiosity curiosity and imagination bring you things like stories so you're
3:11saying it's a mystical connection there's a mystical connection with the sky and with stars and all things so they
3:17relate directly to us isn't that what we try to do with our movies to capture a little bit of that awe and bring it into a movie theater
3:24and and feel what it might be like to go out there how small a human can be in front of the
3:31entire planet and then the camera will spin around and you'll see how small a human is in front of the vastness
3:37of the universe can't beat the view [Music]
3:42that movie really brought people to space it showed them not only what the view
3:50looked like but also what it felt like to have the view and that was so
3:55important to me to be able to share because the view is unimaginable it was so
4:02clean and pristine it almost hurt your eyes because the edges are so sharp and it's giant
4:10when i was living up on the space station my little brother met sandra bullock's brother-in-law he
4:16said well you know my sister-in-law is making this movie maybe your sister would talk to her and my little brother said she's been up
4:23there for a couple months with five guys and i think she'd love to talk to sandra bullock
4:29how are you feeling while that's being tumbled some of the things that she wanted to
4:35know were what's it like for me when i wake up in the morning what's a hard thing what's an easy thing
4:42so that she understands how she can make space look real
4:49sandra i thought looked purposeful and not like a space newbie has been a
4:56science fiction theme for a long long long time it is really fantastic the lengths that the
5:01early science fiction writers went to to get a spacecraft from the earth even to the moon george
5:08melies was a originally a stage magician who got enamored with the brand new art
5:14form the cinematography and not only uh did he invent the science fiction movie
5:19he essentially invented movie special effects and it was really based on the two
5:24giants of science fiction at the time h.d wells and jules verne jules were provided the plot and story
5:32for the first half of the movie with his from the earth to the moon the second half was based on h.g wells's
5:38first men in the moon early depictions of space travel show
5:45characters just moving about freely opening up the door and walking out into space with no trouble
5:55but within a couple decades things change pretty quickly in cinematic depictions of outer space
6:01and space travel so as early as the 1920s you have films like women in the moon by fritz lang where characters are
6:09strapped into their seats and as the ship is taking off they can feel the pressure of the g-force on
6:14their chests struggling to breathe as they lift off and then you've got writers
6:19that worked for john w campbell jr when he began editing astounding science fiction who were held to a standard of
6:25scientific verisimilitude and that's when you start getting realistic believable space adventures stand by fire
6:38tell us about this trip to the moon you do you think this is possible oh yes yes it's quite possible we're
6:44here aren't we not only are we here but uh it can be done it can be done as soon as anyone is
6:50willing to put the bill to do it robert heinlein was the guru of hard science fiction but i think before that
6:56and beyond that he was the guru of logical science fiction heinlein asked the question which is the
7:02classic hard science fiction question how do you do it how do you solve that problem even today that's a key theme in
7:08science fiction debris chain reaction is out of control and rapidly expanding
7:13satellites are down and then wanted to recreate the good the bad and
7:20the ugly of space travel it can hit you with the kinetic energy of a howitzer round [Music]
7:28the film gravity is visually compelling because it really sets up the unforgiving dynamic how just
7:35the smallest step in the wrong direction is going to send the entire series of
7:41events tumbling and it only takes that much
7:47the only really big mistake they made in the movie is that if you were up on a space station the last
7:52thing you do is let george clooney go
7:58there's a lot of secrets in the universe we don't know anything that's the one thing i do know for sure but we've got to get out of our solar
8:06system we've got to get to another solar system yeah but einstein says you can't travel fast in the speed
8:11of light science fiction is basically saying there are no limits that's right
8:18think outside the box no matter what somebody tells you what you learn throw all that away and say i can do anything i want to do
8:24you're in a completely different universe traveling through hyperspacing like dust and crops boy we sometimes forget that
8:30space is cosmologically big traveling to the rest of the universe would take
8:35tens thousands of years with current technology the reason we measure them in light years is because it takes that
8:41long for the speed of light to travel that distance faster than light travel is the holy
8:47grail of space travel and right now it's the bolonium that we bolonium is that stuff you make up to
8:54make the story work and it's different from hand wavium which is how you distract
9:00the reader or the viewer but and it's not unobtainium that's a dif but uh
9:05bolonium is that stuff if we had the right bolonium we could make faster than light travel work
9:11so here is a perfect limitation for an artist you can't go faster than light speed how
9:16are we going to get around it to explore the universe science fiction writers said okay well we have to create a speed
9:23faster than light speed everybody ready say goodbye to our solar system execute joe
9:30i'm not sure what's wrong here is the parking brake on compressor
9:48rush and with that rush science fiction launches an age of exploration we're down to 0.3896 of
9:56light speed forbidden planet is one of those rare big budget science fiction movies from a time when most science fiction
10:02movies look pretty cheesy it's very easy to see many of the things that later science fiction
10:08specifically star trek if not directly took from was certainly inspired by
10:13the ship on forbidden planet it almost looks like the saucer section of the enterprise without the rest of it these discs they
10:19stand on it looks just like the transporter it definitely looks like
10:25the designers of star trek looked at this and said boy this is a beautiful looking movie forbidden planet is definitely less
10:31diverse which makes star trek special space the final frontier
10:38the importance of star trek is that it brought space into the living rooms of americans and people really across the
10:44globe it made space accessible
10:50star trek was a classic humanistic vision of the kind of utopian future that you live and let live these are the
10:56voyages of the starship enterprise gene roddenberry said he wanted to do
11:02an all-inclusive series in space with all the ideas that could more easily be
11:08done in science fiction in the 60s than in realistic fiction to boldly go where no man has gone before
11:14so you could deal with controversial issues but they weren't controversial because they're distanced they're not us it's
11:20not our own society we did want to get into racial issues sexist issues that were going on at the
11:26time and i think it opened a door into an alien world that people could say oh yeah i get that
11:33it offered lots of story opportunities to tell stories about things going on right here
11:39on earth this is no game captain half a million people have just been killed
11:45there's an episode called uh a taste of armageddon about these two planets that have that
11:51are conducting a virtual war computers captain they fight their war with computers totally computers don't kill a
11:58half a million people deaths have been registered of course they have 24 hours to report to report
12:05to our disintegration machines at the very end of it kirk says we're human beings with the blood of a
12:11million savage years on our hands but we can stop it we can admit that
12:18we're killers but we're not going to kill today so all of these different stories they all had a social
12:24message buried in them gene knew what he was doing the writers knew what they were doing
12:29it's up to you star trek was a way of saying look we can do better things the way they are
12:35it's not necessarily the way they have to be what about the cast of the show i'm told that nbc only wanted
12:41white males on the bridge no women no blacks when i brought in a mixed ratio crew both the
12:47network and dizzy lou studios which headed at that time came in saying what are you doing you're going to ruin
12:53us i can tell you what happened to me the first time i saw star trek
12:58really before star trek there were no people of color in the future we didn't really exist at
13:04all anywhere and gene roddenberry created this group where this beautiful black woman
13:12not uh mammy was head of communications captain i'm picking up a subspace
13:17distress call priority channel it's from space station k7 so to see her in that
13:22position for me was like extraordinary and it's why i went to jean to do star trek
13:29next generation was because of what michelle nichols showed me
13:35which was that i had a future in the world what about you you speak romulan cadet
13:41uh all three dialects sir the day that i met michelle nichols i
13:46was very nervous because that was the first time for me to step in someone else's shoes
13:52and she suspended any kind of judgment if anything she handed me that torch and she said
13:57run with it the jamming signal's gone transport abilities are reestablished
14:04the main attribute that star trek gives people is hope may we together become greater than
14:11the sum of both of us what i took from the original series was the love humanity is able to have
14:18even if it's set in a time that they may never recognize they may never meet the strive for that is tangible
14:26live long and prosperous spock live long and prosper
14:31the cultural importance of the star trek franchise can't be underestimated we've had to date
14:36seven different series 13 films and hundreds of novelizations comic books
14:42board games video games costumes fans love star trek because it does
14:48suggest that there will be opportunities for us to meet each other in space and to learn from each other
14:53the most powerful message to me of star trek was just the idea that by stepping out of the universe we put
15:00our old problems behind us and we become better people through cooperation and you know believing in a certain set of
15:06values it's a very romantic notion it's a very idealistic notion but that's a universe
15:12i want to go live in i want to go get on a starship i want to be part of the federation
15:192001 as far as i'm concerned is the best science fiction film ever made it is the quintessential what space
15:26travel is yeah and it looks great you know it's it's it's just it's impeccable the way they put it
15:32together the discovery coming overhead endlessly is basically the precursor of
15:38the of the opening shot of star wars that stunned everybody myself included probably 2001 had more of an influence
15:45on me than i realized but at the same time i was completely stoked by that movie
15:51it's brilliant i think 2001
15:56opened up films to be a much broader and interesting canvas in terms of what
16:03space travel might be like that anything had been shown before everything was believable even though it
16:10would have our jaws on our laps at amazement but everything
16:15always had a reality to it that's absolutely the most meticulously
16:22accurate science fiction movie between arthur clark the hard science fiction writer
16:27and stanley kubrick the visionary filmmaker who thought this image is all you need let the audience figure it out in that
16:34sense everything was a surprise and a visual entree of unbelievable
16:42significance but it's really not the the filmmaking part of it it's the let's
16:48go into outer space too and we have the reality now to deal with it which is why mars is becoming more of
16:53a thing but we have to get people to say this is a fun adventure
17:04i guess i was probably 11 years old when i when i first saw star wars it was
17:11the most magnificent experience i had ever had in my life my mind was you know
17:18you're searching for those answers and the world and you're hungry and i looked at star wars and i just i knew
17:26i wanted to live in that world i've been chasing star wars for my entire
17:32career star wars is a landmark film in the history of science fiction
17:37stories about space because it opened up the excitement and the adventure of traveling from planet to
17:43planet and made us all want to go there with the heroes
17:49we built the cameras we built the optical printers we built the miniatures all under one roof which was kind of
17:57unusual we could fabricate metal we could do machining
18:02did chemistry for the explosions it was a whole litany of things that
18:07were new the first shot in the movie was sort of the touchstone
18:13for whether it was going to work or not it had a miniature of the star destroyer which
18:20was three feet long [Music] when we saw it everybody went wow it's
18:26great that is a shot of pure awe
18:32where suddenly as a viewer you're just knocked out by the potential of space and where this movie could go
18:37this was revolutionary really felt like you were standing there and the ship was
18:43coming overhead it was so transformative talk about what your influences were
18:51that fed into the creation of star wars as much as star wars seemed to just leap from your forehead
18:57no fully formed it had roots that any anybody in the science fiction world knows
19:02nothing in this world pops into your head fully formed it's an accumulation of all the things you've seen
19:08and then when you go to regurgitate it into a your own thing you take all the best parts the roll up
19:15that was taken from flash gordon the angle that it rolls up the screen with the way the text was arranged even
19:22the number of ellipses and he was very much influenced by the movies of akira kurosawa
19:38so in terms of cowboy films lucas was very influenced by john ford's the searchers which contains
19:45a scene that very much mirrors the scene where uncle owen and amberu are murdered
19:51[Music]
20:06that definitely helped fuel this notion that star wars is a space west [Music]
20:14one of the things that was really critical in star wars was again this sense of adrenaline and the idea of uh trajectory into space
20:23almost there and that brought some of that visceral quality back to it sort of the idea of
20:29having that rush i can't shake it and you know it's interesting the closer
20:36you get to something at speed the faster it feels it's just like beggars canyon back home
20:42so that was really the idea behind the trench for the death star let's get people down
20:48into a space that's traveling at an extreme speed and give you the excitement that you get
20:55when you do it i mean there's so many great shots in star wars but i think if there's one
21:01that makes my heart ache a bit it's luke seeing the two sunset it just has this
21:07very somewhere over the rainbow kind of wistful vibe to it
21:13that is a shot that i can relate to as a teenager in texas that is a shot that i think any kid can relate to this idea of what
21:19is next for me and how do i go there's this yearning that makes this space story feel like
21:26something that's happening to us one of the reasons why i made
21:31star wars this is made for 12 year olds it appeals to everybody but it was still
21:36made for 12 year olds and we were all 12 once and i tell people don't underestimate 12 year olds they're smarter than the rest of us right
21:42they get stuff much faster than you do yeah and the whole point was to get them to allow to think a lot of them to think outside
21:48the box the whole thing is subjective and dreamy who said wookies can't fly well i said they can fly yeah
21:56i said i'm not going to obey the rules if you can imagine it you can do it but if you can't imagine
22:02it you can't do it yeah because it's the prison of your own mind it's that prison of your own mind that allows you to do it
22:08and you can enjoy that and come up with really crazy stuff chewbacca well i can guarantee there's
22:14no wookies in space how do you know
22:19you single-handedly revolutionized science fiction and pop culture with star wars 1977. because it had been
22:27three decades of downer stuff dystopian stuff apocalyptic stuff
22:33and science fiction was making less and less and less money every year and then all of a sudden you came along with another vision
22:39one of wonder and hope and empowerment and boom star wars is a space opera it's
22:46not science fiction and it's because it's really just you know one of those soap operas only
22:53in space yeah but it's more than that and and you know and you know it is it's it's a neo myth but it fulfills the role
23:01that myth played in society it's mythology but you took it to a new level no film that i can think of had the used
23:09future idea the future was always shiny it was always perfect it always had just been unwrapped
23:14on christmas morning because it was this kind of optimistic idea and you said no the future has to have
23:20been lived in for thousands of years so the sand crawlers all rusted and things are kind of broken
23:26and it looked like it had been lived in so where did that idea come from because there was no precursor to that
23:32i just felt that's got to look like it's the real place the transition from the science fiction
23:38space travel of the 60s to the 70s it probably reflects a wider shift in
23:44culture at the time the sort of general cynicism of the 70s has kind of infected this vision of the future and
23:51it's like okay if we get into outer space probably giant corporations are still gonna be running everything and that's
23:56when you get to movies like alien where you have a spacecraft that looks
24:03like it's been through the mill things are leaking steam's sprouting out
24:08of broken pipes it's grimy and the place is a mess
24:14look i'm not gonna do any more work we get this straightened out brett you're guaranteed by law to get a
24:21share and it's i think no accident that in a lot of these films
24:27it's the military-industrial complex that are the real monster in space this can cause trouble for us
24:35that could put my people out of business don't worry he's a dead man from the moment
24:42that humans set off to lands that they've never been to before immediately what follows that is you see
24:48all of the normal human problems that we have in societies transposed to other worlds
24:54which means you're going to have labor problems you're going to have hazardous environments for workers
25:00you're going to have all kinds of things that reflect what might be the reality of outer space exploration
25:05at some point corporations are going to have to get involved at some point maybe the government will have to take over
25:11and lead to something like a militarized society like the starship troopers we break net
25:17now and take you live to glendale where the invasion has begun it's an ugly planet
25:28when palvero and i were talking one day what movies would we like to make he said well i've always wanted to do a
25:33movie about like what it was like to be you know 15 years old in nazi germany in 1935
25:39when nobody knew it was bad yet it's just a pretty interesting idea it came to me the idea based on being a
25:47young boy when i was occupied by the germans of course in holland which was fascist clearly or nazis
25:53whatever you want to call it i said i remember saying to him well they won't let us do that but then i thought oh
25:58starship troopers we can do that based on the book by robert heinlein
26:07really is a kind of a political tract and fairly conservative political tract where he
26:12said if people who had been in the military ran the world it would be fair and right he really felt that the kind of
26:20mentality that was encouraged in the u.s army was extremely important
26:27for making boys into men starship troopers is an important
26:32science fiction movie because it's one of the few movies that warns us that humans may bring the worst of
26:38themselves into space rather than the best of themselves
26:44we really tried to bring in a level of criticism
26:50about what these people are doing especially in the newsreels continuously telling to the audience
26:58you're like these people these are you heroes and heroines by the way they're probably fascists
27:06and what's fascinating about these patriotic news reels they are very shot-for-shot similar to
27:11triumph of the will
27:26i wanted to do was a movie about war and propaganda and why we go to war and what happens to
27:33us when we do but i wanted to tell it you know almost like a 1950s
27:38b movie starship troopers is troy donahue and sandra d go to outer space fight giant bugs and
27:46become nazis was my kind of logline
27:52the story of humankind is exploration is followed by colonialization
27:57and exploitation so we've always done this he figured that he could get an alien
28:03back to a quarantine if one of us was impregnated i don't
28:08know which species is worse you don't see them each other over for a damn percentage
28:14and i think what you see in science fiction is as we reach out into the universe we take all of our baggage with us
28:24my parents thought that television and this is back in the early 50s was the worst influence so
28:31they prevented me from watching television i could only watch like jackie gleason the honeymooners yeah right and so i started to imagine
28:39my own shows i couldn't watch television i would just dream up something for myself to enjoy and that's what kids do
28:45when they're exercising their natural ability to create worlds that don't exist i mean i
28:50remember when i saw mysterious island that in in the third grade i raced home and started doing my own version of
28:56mysterious island yeah so yeah i think that's the creative impulse you take it in you i don't want to
29:01copy it in a slavish fan way i want to create my own version it was it always had to do with a pencil
29:06and a piece of paper and of course later the eight millimeter movie camera but you were processing the world back
29:12out in the form of something visual exactly that was that that's that's a blast because you
29:17know you do the same thing when i sit down to storyboard i come up with my best ideas in the process of making my sketches i mean ideas that
29:24weren't even in the script and weren't even in my imagination will come out as i'm actually drawing
29:29[Music]
29:36the science fiction artists are often overlooked in the history of science fiction
29:45but artists have influenced authors in their own right because they're bringing their ideas and
29:51characters like visually but if you think back to everything you
29:58probably visualize about science fiction you're probably going back to what a science fiction artist has done
30:06chesley bonnie still was considered the father of space art or astronomic art
30:11he started producing the 1940s these paintings that were extraordinarily
30:16realistic [Music] you'll find even today astronomers astronauts
30:22astrophysicists engineers who will say that you know they got into doing what they're doing because as
30:28kids they were inspired by chesley vanessa [Music]
30:33the great advantage of science fiction is that you can draw anything on this vast campus of
30:38space it's all open you know for you to throw your imagination in
30:44with world building you are creating a society from scratch a planet from scratch a people from
30:50scratch they may not look like people like you and me but they are people
30:57every plant that you see in that remarkable forest on pandora even if you
31:03see it for half a second has an english name a latin name a na'vi name and probably a
31:10two-page description on its ecology on how it reproduces and how it's used by the navi
31:17so if you're going to go into that much detail then you're not going to skimp on the language
31:24you've got to make sure that everything really holds together
31:31the language i wrote it it's like 400 words and i make a little dictionary and that
31:36was interesting because the only two person who can speak the language at the time was was mila and me we were kind of fluent
31:43after a couple of weeks what is your name
31:51that's her name [Laughter] i think there's like a first middle and
31:57last somewhere in there but don't ask me which working with luke
32:03bassan who wrote and directed fifth element it changed my life it just seemed so
32:08realistic to me which i was really impressed by it's the the white page that you can write everything you can
32:15make everything beautiful again in space i like the fantasy of it
32:20and i just take a subject like the law the police the food we're fortunate for
32:27you and then i start writing you know 10 15 pages on each
32:33and then you give that to the actors and and it gives some life and polish on the story even if you never
32:39talk about it science fiction is probably the best way to open your mind
32:44about everything and sci-fi is just an oil so the doors open
32:51easier it doesn't like so hard to push
32:56space is the biggest canvas to write whatever you want to push all the limits because by definition future doesn't
33:03have a limit or if there is one we don't know it
33:11when i was eight or nine years old i was obsessed with creating different planets
33:18creating these worlds and these universes and building them up from the ground even at that young age
33:24and i wrote up the visuals of guardians of the galaxy hundreds of pages of documents with the
33:30different cultures and what they do and how do they think
33:36where you're creating a world in outer space based on real rules that is still filled with
33:42imagination and fantasy oh yeah
33:51when you're dealing with a raccoon in a tree you are in some ways dealing with space fantasy but
33:56within that let's say there is a talking raccoon what would it be and how would it be and
34:03i came up with racket raccoon is a result of experiments on his body
34:08to turn him into something that's designed to kill ain't nothing like me except me i'm
34:15rude you said that grew some most popular character from guardians of the
34:20galaxy he's probably the soul of the movie i mean i remember like it was yesterday
34:26we were getting ready to shoot this scene where groot grows into sort of like this nest
34:31and protects us from this impact that was just going to completely
34:36kill us that day when we're shooting that scene that we couldn't stop crying
34:43this character that doesn't even exist but risking his life for mine
34:49was very moving why are you doing this it's very much of a christ story we have this
34:55character who gives his life and is born again we [Music]
35:04we are groot is the line of dialogue that every single other thing in the movie is hanging on
35:11it's about seeing a raccoon and a human being and a green assassin and a big
35:16oaf and they find a family with each other for the first time an outer space family that's what makes
35:22it science fiction is that it's an outer space family
35:27today it is you learn the power of mars tomorrow it will be the whole world
35:33we're dreaming is it about mars the angry red planets we're heading straight for mars mars is
35:40burning up
35:4750 years ago space is an extraordinarily hostile environment and then we go through the trajectory of
35:52science fiction which includes exploring the rest of the universe but the solar system is now very much
35:58within our reach the closest mars ever gets to us is 36 million miles which doesn't seem so huge when you
36:04think about light years it's a tiny distance by comparison
36:09stories like the martian make us believe that we can and will do this in our own
36:15lifetime i got to figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here on a
36:22planet where nothing grows in the martian what you see is a smart person actually acting smart
36:29using his brain to solve problems instead of a lightsaber or a ray gun they say that once you grow crops
36:36somewhere you've officially colonized it so technically
36:43i colonized mars one of the other great things that andy weirs the martian does is make
36:49the experience seem like an everyday experience almost you can see yourself as mark watney
36:57he doesn't power through problems without hitting a hitch he hits every single hitch there is
37:05and you get to see him work through them and you find yourself thinking i could do that so it's inspirational
37:12but it's also just very practical i forgot to account for the excess oxygen that
37:20i've been exhaling when i did my calculations because i'm stupid the whole story is
37:28just one prolonged cascade failure basically his solution to this immediate
37:33problem leads to the next problem and the next and the next and so on i would say that the problem-solving
37:40style of arthur clark and also robert heinlein influenced how i wrote the martian
37:46although i would say one of the biggest influences on the martian was apollo 13 both the real events and the movie uh
37:53this is houston uh say again please houston we have a problem
37:58my father is particle physicist and my mother is an electrical engineer so i was pretty much doomed to be a nerd
38:06there is one joke where they tell him everything he's typing is being broadcast live to the entire world
38:12yeah in the novel he says look a pair of boobs and draws like these ascii art
38:17boobs it's open parentheses period y period close parenthesis they didn't put that in the movie
38:23they just had everybody look up and go oh oh my god as if he'd written something
38:28really profane the face of overwhelming odds i'm left with only one option
38:36i'm going to have to science out of this i'm going to have to science out of this
38:42what does that mean well it equates with his thrill of terror saying i'm either going to die
38:49here i can survive yeah and so he leans heavily on what i call gallows
38:55humor i'm not going to think too much about this i'm going to take it day by day hour by hour yeah and i'm going to have
39:01to science to get my survival going that kind of humor yeah probably keeps in check terror
39:09and fear which will stop him functioning you know what i got out of it we're all that guy our oh that
39:16our state right now of affairs on earth yeah is such that we have no choice but to
39:21science to get out of it correct in order to survive that's the threats in front of us yes are threats that will be sold that are
39:28they're caused by technology for the most part and they need to be solved by science yes yeah that's a good point i think the
39:35drive for the realism of the martian is the fact that we will get to mars quite soon
39:40so suddenly it's come right back to our doorstep that we now have the technology
39:45and are building the sophisticated means for getting to mars and colonizing mars
39:50that's why the martian is is important and why it has that realism to it this is space it does not cooperate
39:59at some point everything's going to go south and you're going to say this is it now you can either accept that or you
40:06can get to work if we don't figure out how to get to mars
40:11and live there and then build another spaceship that can go to another solar system yeah
40:16we're toast yeah in the long-term way and i say yeah we've only got a million years to figure this out
40:22we better we're way behind schedule here so you have to get people to sort of buy into the idea and
40:28we didn't have these movies to say this is an adventure this is really going to be fun yeah do you think we'd be dumb enough to
40:35go in a spaceship off to mars where there's nothing there but a bunch of red dirt yeah no it's like the adventure the whole
40:42idea of it we have to do this the human race depends on it
40:47well thank you for doing this my pleasure this has been an amazing brain jam yeah well this is
40:53all i have to do now and i don't get to do it very much
41:30you
https://youtu.be/fnXu0X1ZgKw?si=VTC1AEkq4oVd98wA
文字起こし [Music] space the final frontier science fiction is basically saying there are no limits space is anything we want it to be yes the scale of the universe is unbelievably stunning we are asking those big questions like where are we going and what does it say about us as humans i think it answers something elemental in human beings which is we love danger space travel sounds rather ahead of us they will never get me onto one of those dreadful starships science fiction inspired the rocketeers who brought us to the moon and that's just the beginning science fiction holds out hope for even more incredible discoveries i think we're curious in our bones about going into the galaxy what is the galaxy ever done for you why would you want to save it because i'm one of the idiots who lives in it humanity is hardwired to explore and to exploit we are citizens of the universe we belong there too i hate space [Music] i've been thinking about this idea that space is anything we want it to be it's the great unknown and we can project our fantasies and our ideas our sociology and you know we can use it just as an excuse to get to a completely different culture or we can take it at face value as a problem we need to solve yeah and i sort of think about science space science fiction as you know on the one hand you got the hard tech stuff like 2001 and then at the other end of the spectrum it's more space as a kind of complete unfettering of the imagination you got you got two things no matter how you do it whether it's 2001 oral star wars their adventures the the the big boogie man is the unknown right because the thing about humans that's always been with us is we have an imagination the night sky has always been the great mystery one it's terrifying because you walk out in it and you get eaten and the other part is that there's there's things up there i mean the stars the planets and the things have to mean something so this is a primal attraction yes and man has curiosity curiosity and imagination bring you things like stories so you're saying it's a mystical connection there's a mystical connection with the sky and with stars and all things so they relate directly to us isn't that what we try to do with our movies to capture a little bit of that awe and bring it into a movie theater and and feel what it might be like to go out there how small a human can be in front of the entire planet and then the camera will spin around and you'll see how small a human is in front of the vastness of the universe can't beat the view [Music] that movie really brought people to space it showed them not only what the view looked like but also what it felt like to have the view and that was so important to me to be able to share because the view is unimaginable it was so clean and pristine it almost hurt your eyes because the edges are so sharp and it's giant when i was living up on the space station my little brother met sandra bullock's brother-in-law he said well you know my sister-in-law is making this movie maybe your sister would talk to her and my little brother said she's been up there for a couple months with five guys and i think she'd love to talk to sandra bullock how are you feeling while that's being tumbled some of the things that she wanted to know were what's it like for me when i wake up in the morning what's a hard thing what's an easy thing so that she understands how she can make space look real sandra i thought looked purposeful and not like a space newbie has been a science fiction theme for a long long long time it is really fantastic the lengths that the early science fiction writers went to to get a spacecraft from the earth even to the moon george melies was a originally a stage magician who got enamored with the brand new art form the cinematography and not only uh did he invent the science fiction movie he essentially invented movie special effects and it was really based on the two giants of science fiction at the time h.d wells and jules verne jules were provided the plot and story for the first half of the movie with his from the earth to the moon the second half was based on h.g wells's first men in the moon early depictions of space travel show characters just moving about freely opening up the door and walking out into space with no trouble but within a couple decades things change pretty quickly in cinematic depictions of outer space and space travel so as early as the 1920s you have films like women in the moon by fritz lang where characters are strapped into their seats and as the ship is taking off they can feel the pressure of the g-force on their chests struggling to breathe as they lift off and then you've got writers that worked for john w campbell jr when he began editing astounding science fiction who were held to a standard of scientific verisimilitude and that's when you start getting realistic believable space adventures stand by fire tell us about this trip to the moon you do you think this is possible oh yes yes it's quite possible we're here aren't we not only are we here but uh it can be done it can be done as soon as anyone is willing to put the bill to do it robert heinlein was the guru of hard science fiction but i think before that and beyond that he was the guru of logical science fiction heinlein asked the question which is the classic hard science fiction question how do you do it how do you solve that problem even today that's a key theme in science fiction debris chain reaction is out of control and rapidly expanding satellites are down and then wanted to recreate the good the bad and the ugly of space travel it can hit you with the kinetic energy of a howitzer round [Music] the film gravity is visually compelling because it really sets up the unforgiving dynamic how just the smallest step in the wrong direction is going to send the entire series of events tumbling and it only takes that much the only really big mistake they made in the movie is that if you were up on a space station the last thing you do is let george clooney go there's a lot of secrets in the universe we don't know anything that's the one thing i do know for sure but we've got to get out of our solar system we've got to get to another solar system yeah but einstein says you can't travel fast in the speed of light science fiction is basically saying there are no limits that's right think outside the box no matter what somebody tells you what you learn throw all that away and say i can do anything i want to do you're in a completely different universe traveling through hyperspacing like dust and crops boy we sometimes forget that space is cosmologically big traveling to the rest of the universe would take tens thousands of years with current technology the reason we measure them in light years is because it takes that long for the speed of light to travel that distance faster than light travel is the holy grail of space travel and right now it's the bolonium that we bolonium is that stuff you make up to make the story work and it's different from hand wavium which is how you distract the reader or the viewer but and it's not unobtainium that's a dif but uh bolonium is that stuff if we had the right bolonium we could make faster than light travel work so here is a perfect limitation for an artist you can't go faster than light speed how are we going to get around it to explore the universe science fiction writers said okay well we have to create a speed faster than light speed everybody ready say goodbye to our solar system execute joe i'm not sure what's wrong here is the parking brake on compressor rush and with that rush science fiction launches an age of exploration we're down to 0.3896 of light speed forbidden planet is one of those rare big budget science fiction movies from a time when most science fiction movies look pretty cheesy it's very easy to see many of the things that later science fiction specifically star trek if not directly took from was certainly inspired by the ship on forbidden planet it almost looks like the saucer section of the enterprise without the rest of it these discs they stand on it looks just like the transporter it definitely looks like the designers of star trek looked at this and said boy this is a beautiful looking movie forbidden planet is definitely less diverse which makes star trek special space the final frontier the importance of star trek is that it brought space into the living rooms of americans and people really across the globe it made space accessible star trek was a classic humanistic vision of the kind of utopian future that you live and let live these are the voyages of the starship enterprise gene roddenberry said he wanted to do an all-inclusive series in space with all the ideas that could more easily be done in science fiction in the 60s than in realistic fiction to boldly go where no man has gone before so you could deal with controversial issues but they weren't controversial because they're distanced they're not us it's not our own society we did want to get into racial issues sexist issues that were going on at the time and i think it opened a door into an alien world that people could say oh yeah i get that it offered lots of story opportunities to tell stories about things going on right here on earth this is no game captain half a million people have just been killed there's an episode called uh a taste of armageddon about these two planets that have that are conducting a virtual war computers captain they fight their war with computers totally computers don't kill a half a million people deaths have been registered of course they have 24 hours to report to report to our disintegration machines at the very end of it kirk says we're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands but we can stop it we can admit that we're killers but we're not going to kill today so all of these different stories they all had a social message buried in them gene knew what he was doing the writers knew what they were doing it's up to you star trek was a way of saying look we can do better things the way they are it's not necessarily the way they have to be what about the cast of the show i'm told that nbc only wanted white males on the bridge no women no blacks when i brought in a mixed ratio crew both the network and dizzy lou studios which headed at that time came in saying what are you doing you're going to ruin us i can tell you what happened to me the first time i saw star trek really before star trek there were no people of color in the future we didn't really exist at all anywhere and gene roddenberry created this group where this beautiful black woman not uh mammy was head of communications captain i'm picking up a subspace distress call priority channel it's from space station k7 so to see her in that position for me was like extraordinary and it's why i went to jean to do star trek next generation was because of what michelle nichols showed me which was that i had a future in the world what about you you speak romulan cadet uh all three dialects sir the day that i met michelle nichols i was very nervous because that was the first time for me to step in someone else's shoes and she suspended any kind of judgment if anything she handed me that torch and she said run with it the jamming signal's gone transport abilities are reestablished the main attribute that star trek gives people is hope may we together become greater than the sum of both of us what i took from the original series was the love humanity is able to have even if it's set in a time that they may never recognize they may never meet the strive for that is tangible live long and prosperous spock live long and prosper the cultural importance of the star trek franchise can't be underestimated we've had to date seven different series 13 films and hundreds of novelizations comic books board games video games costumes fans love star trek because it does suggest that there will be opportunities for us to meet each other in space and to learn from each other the most powerful message to me of star trek was just the idea that by stepping out of the universe we put our old problems behind us and we become better people through cooperation and you know believing in a certain set of values it's a very romantic notion it's a very idealistic notion but that's a universe i want to go live in i want to go get on a starship i want to be part of the federation 2001 as far as i'm concerned is the best science fiction film ever made it is the quintessential what space travel is yeah and it looks great you know it's it's it's just it's impeccable the way they put it together the discovery coming overhead endlessly is basically the precursor of the of the opening shot of star wars that stunned everybody myself included probably 2001 had more of an influence on me than i realized but at the same time i was completely stoked by that movie it's brilliant i think 2001 opened up films to be a much broader and interesting canvas in terms of what space travel might be like that anything had been shown before everything was believable even though it would have our jaws on our laps at amazement but everything always had a reality to it that's absolutely the most meticulously accurate science fiction movie between arthur clark the hard science fiction writer and stanley kubrick the visionary filmmaker who thought this image is all you need let the audience figure it out in that sense everything was a surprise and a visual entree of unbelievable significance but it's really not the the filmmaking part of it it's the let's go into outer space too and we have the reality now to deal with it which is why mars is becoming more of a thing but we have to get people to say this is a fun adventure i guess i was probably 11 years old when i when i first saw star wars it was the most magnificent experience i had ever had in my life my mind was you know you're searching for those answers and the world and you're hungry and i looked at star wars and i just i knew i wanted to live in that world i've been chasing star wars for my entire career star wars is a landmark film in the history of science fiction stories about space because it opened up the excitement and the adventure of traveling from planet to planet and made us all want to go there with the heroes we built the cameras we built the optical printers we built the miniatures all under one roof which was kind of unusual we could fabricate metal we could do machining did chemistry for the explosions it was a whole litany of things that were new the first shot in the movie was sort of the touchstone for whether it was going to work or not it had a miniature of the star destroyer which was three feet long [Music] when we saw it everybody went wow it's great that is a shot of pure awe where suddenly as a viewer you're just knocked out by the potential of space and where this movie could go this was revolutionary really felt like you were standing there and the ship was coming overhead it was so transformative talk about what your influences were that fed into the creation of star wars as much as star wars seemed to just leap from your forehead no fully formed it had roots that any anybody in the science fiction world knows nothing in this world pops into your head fully formed it's an accumulation of all the things you've seen and then when you go to regurgitate it into a your own thing you take all the best parts the roll up that was taken from flash gordon the angle that it rolls up the screen with the way the text was arranged even the number of ellipses and he was very much influenced by the movies of akira kurosawa so in terms of cowboy films lucas was very influenced by john ford's the searchers which contains a scene that very much mirrors the scene where uncle owen and amberu are murdered [Music] that definitely helped fuel this notion that star wars is a space west [Music] one of the things that was really critical in star wars was again this sense of adrenaline and the idea of uh trajectory into space almost there and that brought some of that visceral quality back to it sort of the idea of having that rush i can't shake it and you know it's interesting the closer you get to something at speed the faster it feels it's just like beggars canyon back home so that was really the idea behind the trench for the death star let's get people down into a space that's traveling at an extreme speed and give you the excitement that you get when you do it i mean there's so many great shots in star wars but i think if there's one that makes my heart ache a bit it's luke seeing the two sunset it just has this very somewhere over the rainbow kind of wistful vibe to it that is a shot that i can relate to as a teenager in texas that is a shot that i think any kid can relate to this idea of what is next for me and how do i go there's this yearning that makes this space story feel like something that's happening to us one of the reasons why i made star wars this is made for 12 year olds it appeals to everybody but it was still made for 12 year olds and we were all 12 once and i tell people don't underestimate 12 year olds they're smarter than the rest of us right they get stuff much faster than you do yeah and the whole point was to get them to allow to think a lot of them to think outside the box the whole thing is subjective and dreamy who said wookies can't fly well i said they can fly yeah i said i'm not going to obey the rules if you can imagine it you can do it but if you can't imagine it you can't do it yeah because it's the prison of your own mind it's that prison of your own mind that allows you to do it and you can enjoy that and come up with really crazy stuff chewbacca well i can guarantee there's no wookies in space how do you know you single-handedly revolutionized science fiction and pop culture with star wars 1977. because it had been three decades of downer stuff dystopian stuff apocalyptic stuff and science fiction was making less and less and less money every year and then all of a sudden you came along with another vision one of wonder and hope and empowerment and boom star wars is a space opera it's not science fiction and it's because it's really just you know one of those soap operas only in space yeah but it's more than that and and you know and you know it is it's it's a neo myth but it fulfills the role that myth played in society it's mythology but you took it to a new level no film that i can think of had the used future idea the future was always shiny it was always perfect it always had just been unwrapped on christmas morning because it was this kind of optimistic idea and you said no the future has to have been lived in for thousands of years so the sand crawlers all rusted and things are kind of broken and it looked like it had been lived in so where did that idea come from because there was no precursor to that i just felt that's got to look like it's the real place the transition from the science fiction space travel of the 60s to the 70s it probably reflects a wider shift in culture at the time the sort of general cynicism of the 70s has kind of infected this vision of the future and it's like okay if we get into outer space probably giant corporations are still gonna be running everything and that's when you get to movies like alien where you have a spacecraft that looks like it's been through the mill things are leaking steam's sprouting out of broken pipes it's grimy and the place is a mess look i'm not gonna do any more work we get this straightened out brett you're guaranteed by law to get a share and it's i think no accident that in a lot of these films it's the military-industrial complex that are the real monster in space this can cause trouble for us that could put my people out of business don't worry he's a dead man from the moment that humans set off to lands that they've never been to before immediately what follows that is you see all of the normal human problems that we have in societies transposed to other worlds which means you're going to have labor problems you're going to have hazardous environments for workers you're going to have all kinds of things that reflect what might be the reality of outer space exploration at some point corporations are going to have to get involved at some point maybe the government will have to take over and lead to something like a militarized society like the starship troopers we break net now and take you live to glendale where the invasion has begun it's an ugly planet when palvero and i were talking one day what movies would we like to make he said well i've always wanted to do a movie about like what it was like to be you know 15 years old in nazi germany in 1935 when nobody knew it was bad yet it's just a pretty interesting idea it came to me the idea based on being a young boy when i was occupied by the germans of course in holland which was fascist clearly or nazis whatever you want to call it i said i remember saying to him well they won't let us do that but then i thought oh starship troopers we can do that based on the book by robert heinlein really is a kind of a political tract and fairly conservative political tract where he said if people who had been in the military ran the world it would be fair and right he really felt that the kind of mentality that was encouraged in the u.s army was extremely important for making boys into men starship troopers is an important science fiction movie because it's one of the few movies that warns us that humans may bring the worst of themselves into space rather than the best of themselves we really tried to bring in a level of criticism about what these people are doing especially in the newsreels continuously telling to the audience you're like these people these are you heroes and heroines by the way they're probably fascists and what's fascinating about these patriotic news reels they are very shot-for-shot similar to triumph of the will i wanted to do was a movie about war and propaganda and why we go to war and what happens to us when we do but i wanted to tell it you know almost like a 1950s b movie starship troopers is troy donahue and sandra d go to outer space fight giant bugs and become nazis was my kind of logline the story of humankind is exploration is followed by colonialization and exploitation so we've always done this he figured that he could get an alien back to a quarantine if one of us was impregnated i don't know which species is worse you don't see them each other over for a damn percentage and i think what you see in science fiction is as we reach out into the universe we take all of our baggage with us my parents thought that television and this is back in the early 50s was the worst influence so they prevented me from watching television i could only watch like jackie gleason the honeymooners yeah right and so i started to imagine my own shows i couldn't watch television i would just dream up something for myself to enjoy and that's what kids do when they're exercising their natural ability to create worlds that don't exist i mean i remember when i saw mysterious island that in in the third grade i raced home and started doing my own version of mysterious island yeah so yeah i think that's the creative impulse you take it in you i don't want to copy it in a slavish fan way i want to create my own version it was it always had to do with a pencil and a piece of paper and of course later the eight millimeter movie camera but you were processing the world back out in the form of something visual exactly that was that that's that's a blast because you know you do the same thing when i sit down to storyboard i come up with my best ideas in the process of making my sketches i mean ideas that weren't even in the script and weren't even in my imagination will come out as i'm actually drawing [Music] the science fiction artists are often overlooked in the history of science fiction but artists have influenced authors in their own right because they're bringing their ideas and characters like visually but if you think back to everything you probably visualize about science fiction you're probably going back to what a science fiction artist has done chesley bonnie still was considered the father of space art or astronomic art he started producing the 1940s these paintings that were extraordinarily realistic [Music] you'll find even today astronomers astronauts astrophysicists engineers who will say that you know they got into doing what they're doing because as kids they were inspired by chesley vanessa [Music] the great advantage of science fiction is that you can draw anything on this vast campus of space it's all open you know for you to throw your imagination in with world building you are creating a society from scratch a planet from scratch a people from scratch they may not look like people like you and me but they are people every plant that you see in that remarkable forest on pandora even if you see it for half a second has an english name a latin name a na'vi name and probably a two-page description on its ecology on how it reproduces and how it's used by the navi so if you're going to go into that much detail then you're not going to skimp on the language you've got to make sure that everything really holds together the language i wrote it it's like 400 words and i make a little dictionary and that was interesting because the only two person who can speak the language at the time was was mila and me we were kind of fluent after a couple of weeks what is your name that's her name [Laughter] i think there's like a first middle and last somewhere in there but don't ask me which working with luke bassan who wrote and directed fifth element it changed my life it just seemed so realistic to me which i was really impressed by it's the the white page that you can write everything you can make everything beautiful again in space i like the fantasy of it and i just take a subject like the law the police the food we're fortunate for you and then i start writing you know 10 15 pages on each and then you give that to the actors and and it gives some life and polish on the story even if you never talk about it science fiction is probably the best way to open your mind about everything and sci-fi is just an oil so the doors open easier it doesn't like so hard to push space is the biggest canvas to write whatever you want to push all the limits because by definition future doesn't have a limit or if there is one we don't know it when i was eight or nine years old i was obsessed with creating different planets creating these worlds and these universes and building them up from the ground even at that young age and i wrote up the visuals of guardians of the galaxy hundreds of pages of documents with the different cultures and what they do and how do they think where you're creating a world in outer space based on real rules that is still filled with imagination and fantasy oh yeah when you're dealing with a raccoon in a tree you are in some ways dealing with space fantasy but within that let's say there is a talking raccoon what would it be and how would it be and i came up with racket raccoon is a result of experiments on his body to turn him into something that's designed to kill ain't nothing like me except me i'm rude you said that grew some most popular character from guardians of the galaxy he's probably the soul of the movie i mean i remember like it was yesterday we were getting ready to shoot this scene where groot grows into sort of like this nest and protects us from this impact that was just going to completely kill us that day when we're shooting that scene that we couldn't stop crying this character that doesn't even exist but risking his life for mine was very moving why are you doing this it's very much of a christ story we have this character who gives his life and is born again we [Music] we are groot is the line of dialogue that every single other thing in the movie is hanging on it's about seeing a raccoon and a human being and a green assassin and a big oaf and they find a family with each other for the first time an outer space family that's what makes it science fiction is that it's an outer space family today it is you learn the power of mars tomorrow it will be the whole world we're dreaming is it about mars the angry red planets we're heading straight for mars mars is burning up 50 years ago space is an extraordinarily hostile environment and then we go through the trajectory of science fiction which includes exploring the rest of the universe but the solar system is now very much within our reach the closest mars ever gets to us is 36 million miles which doesn't seem so huge when you think about light years it's a tiny distance by comparison stories like the martian make us believe that we can and will do this in our own lifetime i got to figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here on a planet where nothing grows in the martian what you see is a smart person actually acting smart using his brain to solve problems instead of a lightsaber or a ray gun they say that once you grow crops somewhere you've officially colonized it so technically i colonized mars one of the other great things that andy weirs the martian does is make the experience seem like an everyday experience almost you can see yourself as mark watney he doesn't power through problems without hitting a hitch he hits every single hitch there is and you get to see him work through them and you find yourself thinking i could do that so it's inspirational but it's also just very practical i forgot to account for the excess oxygen that i've been exhaling when i did my calculations because i'm stupid the whole story is just one prolonged cascade failure basically his solution to this immediate problem leads to the next problem and the next and the next and so on i would say that the problem-solving style of arthur clark and also robert heinlein influenced how i wrote the martian although i would say one of the biggest influences on the martian was apollo 13 both the real events and the movie uh this is houston uh say again please houston we have a problem my father is particle physicist and my mother is an electrical engineer so i was pretty much doomed to be a nerd there is one joke where they tell him everything he's typing is being broadcast live to the entire world yeah in the novel he says look a pair of boobs and draws like these ascii art boobs it's open parentheses period y period close parenthesis they didn't put that in the movie they just had everybody look up and go oh oh my god as if he'd written something really profane the face of overwhelming odds i'm left with only one option i'm going to have to science out of this i'm going to have to science out of this what does that mean well it equates with his thrill of terror saying i'm either going to die here i can survive yeah and so he leans heavily on what i call gallows humor i'm not going to think too much about this i'm going to take it day by day hour by hour yeah and i'm going to have to science to get my survival going that kind of humor yeah probably keeps in check terror and fear which will stop him functioning you know what i got out of it we're all that guy our oh that our state right now of affairs on earth yeah is such that we have no choice but to science to get out of it correct in order to survive that's the threats in front of us yes are threats that will be sold that are they're caused by technology for the most part and they need to be solved by science yes yeah that's a good point i think the drive for the realism of the martian is the fact that we will get to mars quite soon so suddenly it's come right back to our doorstep that we now have the technology and are building the sophisticated means for getting to mars and colonizing mars that's why the martian is is important and why it has that realism to it this is space it does not cooperate at some point everything's going to go south and you're going to say this is it now you can either accept that or you can get to work if we don't figure out how to get to mars and live there and then build another spaceship that can go to another solar system yeah we're toast yeah in the long-term way and i say yeah we've only got a million years to figure this out we better we're way behind schedule here so you have to get people to sort of buy into the idea and we didn't have these movies to say this is an adventure this is really going to be fun yeah do you think we'd be dumb enough to go in a spaceship off to mars where there's nothing there but a bunch of red dirt yeah no it's like the adventure the whole idea of it we have to do this the human race depends on it well thank you for doing this my pleasure this has been an amazing brain jam yeah well this is all i have to do now and i don't get to do it very much
0:01[Music]
0:07space the final frontier science fiction is basically saying there are no limits
0:16space is anything we want it to be yes the scale of the universe is unbelievably stunning we are
0:24asking those big questions like where are we going and what does it say about us as humans
0:30i think it answers something elemental in human beings which is we love danger
0:37space travel sounds rather ahead of us they will never get me onto one of those dreadful starships
0:43science fiction inspired the rocketeers who brought us to the moon and that's just the beginning science
0:50fiction holds out hope for even more incredible discoveries i think we're curious in our bones about
0:59going into the galaxy what is the galaxy ever done for you why would you want to save it because i'm one of the idiots who lives in it
1:06humanity is hardwired to explore and to exploit we are citizens of the
1:13universe we belong there too
1:20i hate space
1:34[Music]
1:58i've been thinking about this idea that space is anything we want it to be it's the great unknown and we can
2:03project our fantasies and our ideas our sociology and you know we can use it just as an excuse to get to a completely
2:09different culture or we can take it at face value as a problem we need to solve yeah and i sort of
2:15think about science space science fiction as you know on the one hand you got the hard tech stuff like 2001 and then at the
2:23other end of the spectrum it's more space as a kind of complete unfettering
2:28of the imagination you got you got two things no matter how you do it whether it's 2001
2:35oral star wars their adventures the the the big boogie man is the unknown
2:42right because the thing about humans that's always been with us is we have an imagination
2:47the night sky has always been the great mystery one it's terrifying because you walk out in it
2:52and you get eaten and the other part is that there's there's things up there
2:58i mean the stars the planets and the things have to mean something so this is a primal attraction
3:04yes and man has curiosity curiosity and imagination bring you things like stories so you're
3:11saying it's a mystical connection there's a mystical connection with the sky and with stars and all things so they
3:17relate directly to us isn't that what we try to do with our movies to capture a little bit of that awe and bring it into a movie theater
3:24and and feel what it might be like to go out there how small a human can be in front of the
3:31entire planet and then the camera will spin around and you'll see how small a human is in front of the vastness
3:37of the universe can't beat the view [Music]
3:42that movie really brought people to space it showed them not only what the view
3:50looked like but also what it felt like to have the view and that was so
3:55important to me to be able to share because the view is unimaginable it was so
4:02clean and pristine it almost hurt your eyes because the edges are so sharp and it's giant
4:10when i was living up on the space station my little brother met sandra bullock's brother-in-law he
4:16said well you know my sister-in-law is making this movie maybe your sister would talk to her and my little brother said she's been up
4:23there for a couple months with five guys and i think she'd love to talk to sandra bullock
4:29how are you feeling while that's being tumbled some of the things that she wanted to
4:35know were what's it like for me when i wake up in the morning what's a hard thing what's an easy thing
4:42so that she understands how she can make space look real
4:49sandra i thought looked purposeful and not like a space newbie has been a
4:56science fiction theme for a long long long time it is really fantastic the lengths that the
5:01early science fiction writers went to to get a spacecraft from the earth even to the moon george
5:08melies was a originally a stage magician who got enamored with the brand new art
5:14form the cinematography and not only uh did he invent the science fiction movie
5:19he essentially invented movie special effects and it was really based on the two
5:24giants of science fiction at the time h.d wells and jules verne jules were provided the plot and story
5:32for the first half of the movie with his from the earth to the moon the second half was based on h.g wells's
5:38first men in the moon early depictions of space travel show
5:45characters just moving about freely opening up the door and walking out into space with no trouble
5:55but within a couple decades things change pretty quickly in cinematic depictions of outer space
6:01and space travel so as early as the 1920s you have films like women in the moon by fritz lang where characters are
6:09strapped into their seats and as the ship is taking off they can feel the pressure of the g-force on
6:14their chests struggling to breathe as they lift off and then you've got writers
6:19that worked for john w campbell jr when he began editing astounding science fiction who were held to a standard of
6:25scientific verisimilitude and that's when you start getting realistic believable space adventures stand by fire
6:38tell us about this trip to the moon you do you think this is possible oh yes yes it's quite possible we're
6:44here aren't we not only are we here but uh it can be done it can be done as soon as anyone is
6:50willing to put the bill to do it robert heinlein was the guru of hard science fiction but i think before that
6:56and beyond that he was the guru of logical science fiction heinlein asked the question which is the
7:02classic hard science fiction question how do you do it how do you solve that problem even today that's a key theme in
7:08science fiction debris chain reaction is out of control and rapidly expanding
7:13satellites are down and then wanted to recreate the good the bad and
7:20the ugly of space travel it can hit you with the kinetic energy of a howitzer round [Music]
7:28the film gravity is visually compelling because it really sets up the unforgiving dynamic how just
7:35the smallest step in the wrong direction is going to send the entire series of
7:41events tumbling and it only takes that much
7:47the only really big mistake they made in the movie is that if you were up on a space station the last
7:52thing you do is let george clooney go
7:58there's a lot of secrets in the universe we don't know anything that's the one thing i do know for sure but we've got to get out of our solar
8:06system we've got to get to another solar system yeah but einstein says you can't travel fast in the speed
8:11of light science fiction is basically saying there are no limits that's right
8:18think outside the box no matter what somebody tells you what you learn throw all that away and say i can do anything i want to do
8:24you're in a completely different universe traveling through hyperspacing like dust and crops boy we sometimes forget that
8:30space is cosmologically big traveling to the rest of the universe would take
8:35tens thousands of years with current technology the reason we measure them in light years is because it takes that
8:41long for the speed of light to travel that distance faster than light travel is the holy
8:47grail of space travel and right now it's the bolonium that we bolonium is that stuff you make up to
8:54make the story work and it's different from hand wavium which is how you distract
9:00the reader or the viewer but and it's not unobtainium that's a dif but uh
9:05bolonium is that stuff if we had the right bolonium we could make faster than light travel work
9:11so here is a perfect limitation for an artist you can't go faster than light speed how
9:16are we going to get around it to explore the universe science fiction writers said okay well we have to create a speed
9:23faster than light speed everybody ready say goodbye to our solar system execute joe
9:30i'm not sure what's wrong here is the parking brake on compressor
9:48rush and with that rush science fiction launches an age of exploration we're down to 0.3896 of
9:56light speed forbidden planet is one of those rare big budget science fiction movies from a time when most science fiction
10:02movies look pretty cheesy it's very easy to see many of the things that later science fiction
10:08specifically star trek if not directly took from was certainly inspired by
10:13the ship on forbidden planet it almost looks like the saucer section of the enterprise without the rest of it these discs they
10:19stand on it looks just like the transporter it definitely looks like
10:25the designers of star trek looked at this and said boy this is a beautiful looking movie forbidden planet is definitely less
10:31diverse which makes star trek special space the final frontier
10:38the importance of star trek is that it brought space into the living rooms of americans and people really across the
10:44globe it made space accessible
10:50star trek was a classic humanistic vision of the kind of utopian future that you live and let live these are the
10:56voyages of the starship enterprise gene roddenberry said he wanted to do
11:02an all-inclusive series in space with all the ideas that could more easily be
11:08done in science fiction in the 60s than in realistic fiction to boldly go where no man has gone before
11:14so you could deal with controversial issues but they weren't controversial because they're distanced they're not us it's
11:20not our own society we did want to get into racial issues sexist issues that were going on at the
11:26time and i think it opened a door into an alien world that people could say oh yeah i get that
11:33it offered lots of story opportunities to tell stories about things going on right here
11:39on earth this is no game captain half a million people have just been killed
11:45there's an episode called uh a taste of armageddon about these two planets that have that
11:51are conducting a virtual war computers captain they fight their war with computers totally computers don't kill a
11:58half a million people deaths have been registered of course they have 24 hours to report to report
12:05to our disintegration machines at the very end of it kirk says we're human beings with the blood of a
12:11million savage years on our hands but we can stop it we can admit that
12:18we're killers but we're not going to kill today so all of these different stories they all had a social
12:24message buried in them gene knew what he was doing the writers knew what they were doing
12:29it's up to you star trek was a way of saying look we can do better things the way they are
12:35it's not necessarily the way they have to be what about the cast of the show i'm told that nbc only wanted
12:41white males on the bridge no women no blacks when i brought in a mixed ratio crew both the
12:47network and dizzy lou studios which headed at that time came in saying what are you doing you're going to ruin
12:53us i can tell you what happened to me the first time i saw star trek
12:58really before star trek there were no people of color in the future we didn't really exist at
13:04all anywhere and gene roddenberry created this group where this beautiful black woman
13:12not uh mammy was head of communications captain i'm picking up a subspace
13:17distress call priority channel it's from space station k7 so to see her in that
13:22position for me was like extraordinary and it's why i went to jean to do star trek
13:29next generation was because of what michelle nichols showed me
13:35which was that i had a future in the world what about you you speak romulan cadet
13:41uh all three dialects sir the day that i met michelle nichols i
13:46was very nervous because that was the first time for me to step in someone else's shoes
13:52and she suspended any kind of judgment if anything she handed me that torch and she said
13:57run with it the jamming signal's gone transport abilities are reestablished
14:04the main attribute that star trek gives people is hope may we together become greater than
14:11the sum of both of us what i took from the original series was the love humanity is able to have
14:18even if it's set in a time that they may never recognize they may never meet the strive for that is tangible
14:26live long and prosperous spock live long and prosper
14:31the cultural importance of the star trek franchise can't be underestimated we've had to date
14:36seven different series 13 films and hundreds of novelizations comic books
14:42board games video games costumes fans love star trek because it does
14:48suggest that there will be opportunities for us to meet each other in space and to learn from each other
14:53the most powerful message to me of star trek was just the idea that by stepping out of the universe we put
15:00our old problems behind us and we become better people through cooperation and you know believing in a certain set of
15:06values it's a very romantic notion it's a very idealistic notion but that's a universe
15:12i want to go live in i want to go get on a starship i want to be part of the federation
15:192001 as far as i'm concerned is the best science fiction film ever made it is the quintessential what space
15:26travel is yeah and it looks great you know it's it's it's just it's impeccable the way they put it
15:32together the discovery coming overhead endlessly is basically the precursor of
15:38the of the opening shot of star wars that stunned everybody myself included probably 2001 had more of an influence
15:45on me than i realized but at the same time i was completely stoked by that movie
15:51it's brilliant i think 2001
15:56opened up films to be a much broader and interesting canvas in terms of what
16:03space travel might be like that anything had been shown before everything was believable even though it
16:10would have our jaws on our laps at amazement but everything
16:15always had a reality to it that's absolutely the most meticulously
16:22accurate science fiction movie between arthur clark the hard science fiction writer
16:27and stanley kubrick the visionary filmmaker who thought this image is all you need let the audience figure it out in that
16:34sense everything was a surprise and a visual entree of unbelievable
16:42significance but it's really not the the filmmaking part of it it's the let's
16:48go into outer space too and we have the reality now to deal with it which is why mars is becoming more of
16:53a thing but we have to get people to say this is a fun adventure
17:04i guess i was probably 11 years old when i when i first saw star wars it was
17:11the most magnificent experience i had ever had in my life my mind was you know
17:18you're searching for those answers and the world and you're hungry and i looked at star wars and i just i knew
17:26i wanted to live in that world i've been chasing star wars for my entire
17:32career star wars is a landmark film in the history of science fiction
17:37stories about space because it opened up the excitement and the adventure of traveling from planet to
17:43planet and made us all want to go there with the heroes
17:49we built the cameras we built the optical printers we built the miniatures all under one roof which was kind of
17:57unusual we could fabricate metal we could do machining
18:02did chemistry for the explosions it was a whole litany of things that
18:07were new the first shot in the movie was sort of the touchstone
18:13for whether it was going to work or not it had a miniature of the star destroyer which
18:20was three feet long [Music] when we saw it everybody went wow it's
18:26great that is a shot of pure awe
18:32where suddenly as a viewer you're just knocked out by the potential of space and where this movie could go
18:37this was revolutionary really felt like you were standing there and the ship was
18:43coming overhead it was so transformative talk about what your influences were
18:51that fed into the creation of star wars as much as star wars seemed to just leap from your forehead
18:57no fully formed it had roots that any anybody in the science fiction world knows
19:02nothing in this world pops into your head fully formed it's an accumulation of all the things you've seen
19:08and then when you go to regurgitate it into a your own thing you take all the best parts the roll up
19:15that was taken from flash gordon the angle that it rolls up the screen with the way the text was arranged even
19:22the number of ellipses and he was very much influenced by the movies of akira kurosawa
19:38so in terms of cowboy films lucas was very influenced by john ford's the searchers which contains
19:45a scene that very much mirrors the scene where uncle owen and amberu are murdered
19:51[Music]
20:06that definitely helped fuel this notion that star wars is a space west [Music]
20:14one of the things that was really critical in star wars was again this sense of adrenaline and the idea of uh trajectory into space
20:23almost there and that brought some of that visceral quality back to it sort of the idea of
20:29having that rush i can't shake it and you know it's interesting the closer
20:36you get to something at speed the faster it feels it's just like beggars canyon back home
20:42so that was really the idea behind the trench for the death star let's get people down
20:48into a space that's traveling at an extreme speed and give you the excitement that you get
20:55when you do it i mean there's so many great shots in star wars but i think if there's one
21:01that makes my heart ache a bit it's luke seeing the two sunset it just has this
21:07very somewhere over the rainbow kind of wistful vibe to it
21:13that is a shot that i can relate to as a teenager in texas that is a shot that i think any kid can relate to this idea of what
21:19is next for me and how do i go there's this yearning that makes this space story feel like
21:26something that's happening to us one of the reasons why i made
21:31star wars this is made for 12 year olds it appeals to everybody but it was still
21:36made for 12 year olds and we were all 12 once and i tell people don't underestimate 12 year olds they're smarter than the rest of us right
21:42they get stuff much faster than you do yeah and the whole point was to get them to allow to think a lot of them to think outside
21:48the box the whole thing is subjective and dreamy who said wookies can't fly well i said they can fly yeah
21:56i said i'm not going to obey the rules if you can imagine it you can do it but if you can't imagine
22:02it you can't do it yeah because it's the prison of your own mind it's that prison of your own mind that allows you to do it
22:08and you can enjoy that and come up with really crazy stuff chewbacca well i can guarantee there's
22:14no wookies in space how do you know
22:19you single-handedly revolutionized science fiction and pop culture with star wars 1977. because it had been
22:27three decades of downer stuff dystopian stuff apocalyptic stuff
22:33and science fiction was making less and less and less money every year and then all of a sudden you came along with another vision
22:39one of wonder and hope and empowerment and boom star wars is a space opera it's
22:46not science fiction and it's because it's really just you know one of those soap operas only
22:53in space yeah but it's more than that and and you know and you know it is it's it's a neo myth but it fulfills the role
23:01that myth played in society it's mythology but you took it to a new level no film that i can think of had the used
23:09future idea the future was always shiny it was always perfect it always had just been unwrapped
23:14on christmas morning because it was this kind of optimistic idea and you said no the future has to have
23:20been lived in for thousands of years so the sand crawlers all rusted and things are kind of broken
23:26and it looked like it had been lived in so where did that idea come from because there was no precursor to that
23:32i just felt that's got to look like it's the real place the transition from the science fiction
23:38space travel of the 60s to the 70s it probably reflects a wider shift in
23:44culture at the time the sort of general cynicism of the 70s has kind of infected this vision of the future and
23:51it's like okay if we get into outer space probably giant corporations are still gonna be running everything and that's
23:56when you get to movies like alien where you have a spacecraft that looks
24:03like it's been through the mill things are leaking steam's sprouting out
24:08of broken pipes it's grimy and the place is a mess
24:14look i'm not gonna do any more work we get this straightened out brett you're guaranteed by law to get a
24:21share and it's i think no accident that in a lot of these films
24:27it's the military-industrial complex that are the real monster in space this can cause trouble for us
24:35that could put my people out of business don't worry he's a dead man from the moment
24:42that humans set off to lands that they've never been to before immediately what follows that is you see
24:48all of the normal human problems that we have in societies transposed to other worlds
24:54which means you're going to have labor problems you're going to have hazardous environments for workers
25:00you're going to have all kinds of things that reflect what might be the reality of outer space exploration
25:05at some point corporations are going to have to get involved at some point maybe the government will have to take over
25:11and lead to something like a militarized society like the starship troopers we break net
25:17now and take you live to glendale where the invasion has begun it's an ugly planet
25:28when palvero and i were talking one day what movies would we like to make he said well i've always wanted to do a
25:33movie about like what it was like to be you know 15 years old in nazi germany in 1935
25:39when nobody knew it was bad yet it's just a pretty interesting idea it came to me the idea based on being a
25:47young boy when i was occupied by the germans of course in holland which was fascist clearly or nazis
25:53whatever you want to call it i said i remember saying to him well they won't let us do that but then i thought oh
25:58starship troopers we can do that based on the book by robert heinlein
26:07really is a kind of a political tract and fairly conservative political tract where he
26:12said if people who had been in the military ran the world it would be fair and right he really felt that the kind of
26:20mentality that was encouraged in the u.s army was extremely important
26:27for making boys into men starship troopers is an important
26:32science fiction movie because it's one of the few movies that warns us that humans may bring the worst of
26:38themselves into space rather than the best of themselves
26:44we really tried to bring in a level of criticism
26:50about what these people are doing especially in the newsreels continuously telling to the audience
26:58you're like these people these are you heroes and heroines by the way they're probably fascists
27:06and what's fascinating about these patriotic news reels they are very shot-for-shot similar to
27:11triumph of the will
27:26i wanted to do was a movie about war and propaganda and why we go to war and what happens to
27:33us when we do but i wanted to tell it you know almost like a 1950s
27:38b movie starship troopers is troy donahue and sandra d go to outer space fight giant bugs and
27:46become nazis was my kind of logline
27:52the story of humankind is exploration is followed by colonialization
27:57and exploitation so we've always done this he figured that he could get an alien
28:03back to a quarantine if one of us was impregnated i don't
28:08know which species is worse you don't see them each other over for a damn percentage
28:14and i think what you see in science fiction is as we reach out into the universe we take all of our baggage with us
28:24my parents thought that television and this is back in the early 50s was the worst influence so
28:31they prevented me from watching television i could only watch like jackie gleason the honeymooners yeah right and so i started to imagine
28:39my own shows i couldn't watch television i would just dream up something for myself to enjoy and that's what kids do
28:45when they're exercising their natural ability to create worlds that don't exist i mean i
28:50remember when i saw mysterious island that in in the third grade i raced home and started doing my own version of
28:56mysterious island yeah so yeah i think that's the creative impulse you take it in you i don't want to
29:01copy it in a slavish fan way i want to create my own version it was it always had to do with a pencil
29:06and a piece of paper and of course later the eight millimeter movie camera but you were processing the world back
29:12out in the form of something visual exactly that was that that's that's a blast because you
29:17know you do the same thing when i sit down to storyboard i come up with my best ideas in the process of making my sketches i mean ideas that
29:24weren't even in the script and weren't even in my imagination will come out as i'm actually drawing
29:29[Music]
29:36the science fiction artists are often overlooked in the history of science fiction
29:45but artists have influenced authors in their own right because they're bringing their ideas and
29:51characters like visually but if you think back to everything you
29:58probably visualize about science fiction you're probably going back to what a science fiction artist has done
30:06chesley bonnie still was considered the father of space art or astronomic art
30:11he started producing the 1940s these paintings that were extraordinarily
30:16realistic [Music] you'll find even today astronomers astronauts
30:22astrophysicists engineers who will say that you know they got into doing what they're doing because as
30:28kids they were inspired by chesley vanessa [Music]
30:33the great advantage of science fiction is that you can draw anything on this vast campus of
30:38space it's all open you know for you to throw your imagination in
30:44with world building you are creating a society from scratch a planet from scratch a people from
30:50scratch they may not look like people like you and me but they are people
30:57every plant that you see in that remarkable forest on pandora even if you
31:03see it for half a second has an english name a latin name a na'vi name and probably a
31:10two-page description on its ecology on how it reproduces and how it's used by the navi
31:17so if you're going to go into that much detail then you're not going to skimp on the language
31:24you've got to make sure that everything really holds together
31:31the language i wrote it it's like 400 words and i make a little dictionary and that
31:36was interesting because the only two person who can speak the language at the time was was mila and me we were kind of fluent
31:43after a couple of weeks what is your name
31:51that's her name [Laughter] i think there's like a first middle and
31:57last somewhere in there but don't ask me which working with luke
32:03bassan who wrote and directed fifth element it changed my life it just seemed so
32:08realistic to me which i was really impressed by it's the the white page that you can write everything you can
32:15make everything beautiful again in space i like the fantasy of it
32:20and i just take a subject like the law the police the food we're fortunate for
32:27you and then i start writing you know 10 15 pages on each
32:33and then you give that to the actors and and it gives some life and polish on the story even if you never
32:39talk about it science fiction is probably the best way to open your mind
32:44about everything and sci-fi is just an oil so the doors open
32:51easier it doesn't like so hard to push
32:56space is the biggest canvas to write whatever you want to push all the limits because by definition future doesn't
33:03have a limit or if there is one we don't know it
33:11when i was eight or nine years old i was obsessed with creating different planets
33:18creating these worlds and these universes and building them up from the ground even at that young age
33:24and i wrote up the visuals of guardians of the galaxy hundreds of pages of documents with the
33:30different cultures and what they do and how do they think
33:36where you're creating a world in outer space based on real rules that is still filled with
33:42imagination and fantasy oh yeah
33:51when you're dealing with a raccoon in a tree you are in some ways dealing with space fantasy but
33:56within that let's say there is a talking raccoon what would it be and how would it be and
34:03i came up with racket raccoon is a result of experiments on his body
34:08to turn him into something that's designed to kill ain't nothing like me except me i'm
34:15rude you said that grew some most popular character from guardians of the
34:20galaxy he's probably the soul of the movie i mean i remember like it was yesterday
34:26we were getting ready to shoot this scene where groot grows into sort of like this nest
34:31and protects us from this impact that was just going to completely
34:36kill us that day when we're shooting that scene that we couldn't stop crying
34:43this character that doesn't even exist but risking his life for mine
34:49was very moving why are you doing this it's very much of a christ story we have this
34:55character who gives his life and is born again we [Music]
35:04we are groot is the line of dialogue that every single other thing in the movie is hanging on
35:11it's about seeing a raccoon and a human being and a green assassin and a big
35:16oaf and they find a family with each other for the first time an outer space family that's what makes
35:22it science fiction is that it's an outer space family
35:27today it is you learn the power of mars tomorrow it will be the whole world
35:33we're dreaming is it about mars the angry red planets we're heading straight for mars mars is
35:40burning up
35:4750 years ago space is an extraordinarily hostile environment and then we go through the trajectory of
35:52science fiction which includes exploring the rest of the universe but the solar system is now very much
35:58within our reach the closest mars ever gets to us is 36 million miles which doesn't seem so huge when you
36:04think about light years it's a tiny distance by comparison
36:09stories like the martian make us believe that we can and will do this in our own
36:15lifetime i got to figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here on a
36:22planet where nothing grows in the martian what you see is a smart person actually acting smart
36:29using his brain to solve problems instead of a lightsaber or a ray gun they say that once you grow crops
36:36somewhere you've officially colonized it so technically
36:43i colonized mars one of the other great things that andy weirs the martian does is make
36:49the experience seem like an everyday experience almost you can see yourself as mark watney
36:57he doesn't power through problems without hitting a hitch he hits every single hitch there is
37:05and you get to see him work through them and you find yourself thinking i could do that so it's inspirational
37:12but it's also just very practical i forgot to account for the excess oxygen that
37:20i've been exhaling when i did my calculations because i'm stupid the whole story is
37:28just one prolonged cascade failure basically his solution to this immediate
37:33problem leads to the next problem and the next and the next and so on i would say that the problem-solving
37:40style of arthur clark and also robert heinlein influenced how i wrote the martian
37:46although i would say one of the biggest influences on the martian was apollo 13 both the real events and the movie uh
37:53this is houston uh say again please houston we have a problem
37:58my father is particle physicist and my mother is an electrical engineer so i was pretty much doomed to be a nerd
38:06there is one joke where they tell him everything he's typing is being broadcast live to the entire world
38:12yeah in the novel he says look a pair of boobs and draws like these ascii art
38:17boobs it's open parentheses period y period close parenthesis they didn't put that in the movie
38:23they just had everybody look up and go oh oh my god as if he'd written something
38:28really profane the face of overwhelming odds i'm left with only one option
38:36i'm going to have to science out of this i'm going to have to science out of this
38:42what does that mean well it equates with his thrill of terror saying i'm either going to die
38:49here i can survive yeah and so he leans heavily on what i call gallows
38:55humor i'm not going to think too much about this i'm going to take it day by day hour by hour yeah and i'm going to have
39:01to science to get my survival going that kind of humor yeah probably keeps in check terror
39:09and fear which will stop him functioning you know what i got out of it we're all that guy our oh that
39:16our state right now of affairs on earth yeah is such that we have no choice but to
39:21science to get out of it correct in order to survive that's the threats in front of us yes are threats that will be sold that are
39:28they're caused by technology for the most part and they need to be solved by science yes yeah that's a good point i think the
39:35drive for the realism of the martian is the fact that we will get to mars quite soon
39:40so suddenly it's come right back to our doorstep that we now have the technology
39:45and are building the sophisticated means for getting to mars and colonizing mars
39:50that's why the martian is is important and why it has that realism to it this is space it does not cooperate
39:59at some point everything's going to go south and you're going to say this is it now you can either accept that or you
40:06can get to work if we don't figure out how to get to mars
40:11and live there and then build another spaceship that can go to another solar system yeah
40:16we're toast yeah in the long-term way and i say yeah we've only got a million years to figure this out
40:22we better we're way behind schedule here so you have to get people to sort of buy into the idea and
40:28we didn't have these movies to say this is an adventure this is really going to be fun yeah do you think we'd be dumb enough to
40:35go in a spaceship off to mars where there's nothing there but a bunch of red dirt yeah no it's like the adventure the whole
40:42idea of it we have to do this the human race depends on it
40:47well thank you for doing this my pleasure this has been an amazing brain jam yeah well this is
40:53all i have to do now and i don't get to do it very much
41:30you
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