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?"
Think it answers something elemental
in human beings, which is, "We love danger."
Aaah!
Space travel sounds rather perilous.
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.
Whoo!
Science fiction holds out hope
for even more incredible discoveries.
I think we're curious in our bones
about going into the galaxy.
What has the galaxy ever done for you?
Why would you wanna 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.
* Eeeeee
We belong there, too.
**
I hate space.
**
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 sorta think about science f--
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"
or "Star Wars," they're adventures.
The -- The -- The big bogeyman is the unknown.
Right. Because the thing about humans --
it'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. Yeah.
And the things have to mean something.
So this is a primal attraction, is what you're saying.
Yes. And man has curiosity.
Curiosity and imagination bring you things like stories.
So you're saying it's a mystical connection.
Yep, yep. But th-- 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?
Yeah. Take -- 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?
Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission.
What Alfonso Cuarón does with the camera
at the very beginning of "Gravity"
is you have this extended single-camera shot
where you watch both George Clooney
and Sandra Bullock float around space,
and you have these images of 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.
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.
So, what do you like about being up here?
The silence.
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's
making this movie. Maybe your sister would talk to her."
And my little brother said, "She's been up there
for a couple of months with five guys,
and I think she'd love to talk to Sandra Bullock."
How ya feeling?
Like a Chihuahua that's being tumble-dried.
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 newbie.
Space travel 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 space craft from the Earth even to the moon.
George Méliès was originally a stage magician
who got enamored
with the brand-new art form of 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.G. Wells and Jules Verne.
Jules Verne 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'
"The 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, uh, outer space and space travel,
so, as early as the 1920s,
you have films like "Woman 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.
No time for count-off! Stand by.
Fire!
Tell us about this trip to the moon.
Do you -- Do you think this is possible?
Oh, yes. Yes. It's quite possible.
-We're here, aren't we? -Yeah.
Not only are we here, but, uh,
it can be done.
It can be done as soon as anyone
is willing to foot 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.
The pre-chain reaction is out of control.
We're rapidly expanding.
Multiple satellites are down and they keep on falling.
The Cuaróns wanted to recreate the good, the bad,
and the ugly of space travel.
Look, we need to get the hell out of here.
-All right. -You need some help there, Matt?
-No, don't wait for us. -It's stuck!
One of the things I discussed
with the Cuaróns was the Kessler syndrome
and the notion that a destroyed satellite
can lead to debris, which destroys more satellites
and more debris.
Space debris is a real concern for any spacecraft
that has to travel through low Earth orbit today.
Explore.
At the speeds debris can travel, a small object like a bolt
can hit you with the kinetic energy
of a howitzer round.
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.
No!
The only really big mistake they made
in that movie is that, if you were up on a space station,
the last thing you'd 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 gotta get out of our solar system.
We've gotta get to another solar system.
Yeah, but Einstein says you can't travel
faster than 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... Right.
no matter what you've learned,
throw all that away and say,
"I can do anything I wanna do.
You're in a completely different universe."
Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' 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 "baloneum" that we --
baloneum is that stuff you make up to make the story work
and it's different from "handwaveum,"
which is how you distract
the reader or the viewer,
but, uh -- and it's not "unobtainium."
That's a diff-- But baloneum is that stuff.
If we had the right baloneum,
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 gonna get around it to explore the universe?
Science-fiction writers said,
"Okay, well, we have to create a speed
faster than light speed."
Are you ready to say goodbye to our solar system?
Execute jump.
I'm not sure what's wrong here.
Is the parking brake on?
Compressor.
Whoo!
**
What a rush.
And with that rush, science fiction
launches an age of exploration.
We're down to 0.3896th of light speed.
"Forbidden Planet" is one of those rare,
big-budget science-fiction movies
from a time when most science-fiction movies
looked 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 that 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 a kind of utopian future that you l-live and let live.
Captain Kirk: 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.
Captain Kirk: 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. That's not our own society.
We did wanna 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 "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-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-racial crew,
both the network and Desilu Studios,
which had it at that time, came in, saying, uh,
"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 a mammy, was head of communications.
Captain, I'm picking up a sub-space 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 Gene
The Next Generation,"
was because of what Nichelle Nichols showed me,
which was that I had a future in the world.
What about you? Do you speak Romulan, cadet?
Uhura. All three dialects, sir.
The day that I met Nichelle Nichols,
I was very nervous
because that was a first time for me
to step into 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 prosper, 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 into 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 wanna go live in.
I wanna go get on a starship,
I wanna 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 -- it's just --
it's impeccable the way they put it together.
The discovery coming overhead endlessly is basically...
Right....the precursor
of the -- of the opening shot of "Star Wars."
Right. It stunned everybody, myself included.
Probably "2001" had more of an influence on me than I realize.
Mm-hmm. 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,
than anything that had been shown before.
Everything was believable, even though we'd have
our jaws on our laps in amazement,
but everything always had a reality to it.
That's absolutely the most
meticulously accurate science-fiction
movie between Arthur C. Clarke,
the hard science-fiction writer,
and Stanley Kubrick, the visionary filmmaker,
who thought this image was all you need.
Let the audience figure it out.
In that sense, everything was a surprise
and a visual entrée of unbelievable significance.
But it's really not the -- the filmmaking part of it.
It's the "let's go into outer space" part of it.
That, too. That, 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."
**
Yee-haw!
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 -- My mind was, you know, searching for those answers
and the world and you're hungry
and I looked at "Star Wars"
and I j-- 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.
-Take 555. Take two. -Action.
We built the cameras, we built the optical printers,
we had built the miniatures all under one roof,
which was kind of unusual.
We could fabricate metal, we could do machining,
the 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 gonna work or not.
It had a miniature of the Star Destroyer,
which was three feet long.
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.
It 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, nothing, 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 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 Aunt Beru are murdered.
**
Martha! Martha!
Uncle Owen! Aunt Beru!
That definitely helped fuel this notion that "Star Wars"
is a space Western.
**
One of the things that was really critical in "Star Wars"
was, again, this sense of adrenaline
and the idea of trajectory in 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 him!
And you know, it's interesting.
The closer you get to something that speed, the faster it feels.
It will be just like Beggar's 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 for real.
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 suns set.
It just has this very "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"
kind of wistful vibe to it.
That was 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"
was it's made for 12-year-olds.
It appeals to everybody, but it was still made for 12-year-olds.
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 --
to allow them to think outside the box.
The whole thing is subjective and dream-like.
Yeah, who said Wookiees can't fly?
Well, I said they can fly. Yeah.
I said, "I'm not gonna 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, again.
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.
Yeah, just look at Chewbacca.
Well, I can guarantee you there's no Wookiees in space.
How do you know?
You single-handedly revolutionized science fiction
in pop culture with "Star Wars," 1977.
'Cause 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 because it's really just, you know,
one of those soap operas, only in space.
Yeah, but it's more than that. Well...
And you know -- and you know it is. All right, all right.
It's -- It's a neo-myth.
But it's -- yeah, yes. It fulfills the role
that myth played in society.
Yeah, it is. 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
'cause it was kind of this optimistic ideal.
And you said, "No, the future has to have been lived in
for thousands of years,"
so the Sandcrawlers are all rusted
and things are kind of broken
and it looked like it had been lived in.
So where did that idea come from?
'Cause there was no precursor to that.
I just felt that it's gotta look like it's a real place.
The transition from the science-fiction space travel
of the '60s to the '70s -- Aggh!
it probably reflects a wider shift in culture at that 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 running out of broken pipes,
it's grimy,
and the place is a mess.
Look, I'm not gonna do any more work
till we get this straightened out.
Grant, 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 could cause trouble for us
on all the other mining operations.
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'd 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 "Starship Troopers."
We break net now and take you live to Klendathu
where the invasion has begun.
It's an ugly planet, a bug planet.
Aaaah!
When Paul Verhoeven and I were talking one day,
"What movies would we like to make?"
He said, "Well, I-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 was 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 -- in Holland, which --
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.
Burn 'em all!
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 like these people.
These are your heroes and heroines.
By the way,
they're probably fascist."
And what's fascinating
about these patriotic newsreels --
they're very shot-for-shot similar
to "Triumph of the Will."
**
It's this galaxy now and always!
The movie 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 Dee
go to outer space, fight giant bugs,
and become Nazis was my kind of logline.
Kill them! Kill them all!
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 through 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...
Yeah?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. Yeah.
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,"
uh, in -- in the third grade.
I raced home and started doing my own version
of "Mysterious Island." Yeah, yeah.
So I think that's the creative impulse.
You take it in. Y--
I don't wanna copy it in a slavish fan way.
Yes. I wanna create my own version of it.
It was -- it always had to do with a pencil
and a piece of paper and, of course, later,
the 8-millimeter movie camera.
But you were processing the world back out
in the form of something visual. Exactly.
That -- that -- that -- that's a blast
'cause, 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. Mm-hmm.
I mean, ideas that weren't even in the script
and weren't even in my imagination... Right.
...will come out as I'm actually drawing.
**
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 --
you know, they're bringing their ideas
and characters to life visually.
But you think back to everything you
probably have visualized about science fiction,
you're probably going back to what a science-fiction artist
has done.
Chesley Bonestell is considered the father of space art
or astronomic art.
He started producing in the 1940s.
These paintings that were extraordinarily realistic.
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 Bonestell.
**
The great advantage of science fiction
is that you can draw anything on this vast canvas of space.
It's all open, you know,
for you to throw your own 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 or 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, on how it's used by the Na'vi.
So if you're gonna go into that much detail,
then you're not gonna skimp on the language.
You've got to make sure that everything
really holds together.
And 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 Milla and me.
We were kind of fluent after a couple of weeks.
What is your name?
That's her name.
I think there's like a first, middle,
and last somewhere in there.
Don't ask me which.
Working with Luc Besson, who wrote and directed
"Fifth Element" -- it changed my life.
Just seemed so realistic to me,
which I was really impressed by.
It's the white page that you can write everything.
You can make everything beautiful again in space.
I like the fantasy of it.
I, like, just take a subject, like the law,
uh, the police, the food.
Good fortune for you.
And then I start writing, you know, 10, 15 pages on each.
And then you give that to the actors
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
and 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 --
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.
**
We are creating a world in outer space based on real rules
that is still filled with imagination and fantasy.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah!
When you're dealing with a raccoon and 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 Rocket Raccoon
is a result of experiments on his body
to turn him into something that's designed to kill.
Ain't no thing like me except me.
I am Groot.
Yeah, you said that.
Groot's the 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.
Wh-Why are you doing this?
It's very much of a Christ story.
You have this character who gives his life
and is born again.
We...
are...
Groot.
"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 who will learn the power of Mars.
Tomorrow, it will be the whole world.
You're dreaming. Is it about Mars?
The angry red planet.
We're heading straight for Mars.
Ooh, Mars is burning up.
Good God. I'm on Mars.
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 gotta 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 Weir's "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.
Whoo!
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 Clarke
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 event and the movie.
Uh, this is Houston.
Uh, say again, please.
Houston, we have a problem.
My father is a 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 --
that's open parenthesis, period, "Y," period, close parenthesis.
They didn't put that in the movie.
They just had everyone and look up and go, "Ohh."
Oh, my God.
As if he'd written something really profane.
In the face of overwhelming odds,
I'm left with only one option.
I'm gonna have to science the out of this.
Mm-hmm. How -- What does that mean to you?
Well, it equates with his thrill of terror, saying,
"I'm -- I'm either gonna die here or I can survive."
Yep. And so he leans heavily on what I call gallows humor.
Mm-hmm. "I'm not gonna think too much about this.
I'm gonna take it day by day, hour by hour."
Yeah. And "I'm gonna have to science the out of this"
to get my survival going.
That kinda humor... Yeah.
...probably keeps in check terror and fear
which will stop him functioning. Right, right.
Do you know what I got out of it?
We're all that guy. Are -- Oh.
That our state right now of affairs on Earth...
Yeah....is such that we have no choice
but to "science the out of it"...
Correct....in order to survive.
That's a good -- The threat's in front of us.
Yes. Our threats that will be solved --
that are -- that are caused by technology,
for the most part, and they need to be solved by science.
Yes. That's a good point. Yeah?
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 gonna go south
and you're gonna 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...
Yep....we're toast.
We're toast. Yeah. In the long term, we are.
And to -- And to 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 if we didn't have these movies... Yeah.
...to say, "This is an adventure,
this is really gonna be fun"... Yep.
...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.