If you're looking at the future,
I think you kinda gotta look at the dark future of it all.
This is the world as it exists today.
And if you look at all the things that could take us out --
overpopulation, climate change, the planet overheating,
maybe AI emerges but is used a weapon.
Science fiction can be a metaphor for the human's darkest side.
I need you to know me.
To me, a dystopian story is a warning.
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
You realize that that's absolutely terrible.
Let's not let that happen.
Your move, creep.
Not every advancement is going to be used to better society.
It's human nature. There are evil people in the world.
Where is she taking them?!
Some people's dystopia can be someone else's utopia.
Surviving can be much more of a burden than a blessing.
Damn you all to Hell!
Why are we so fascinated with these dark futures?
It's who we are in our intimate rage...
and our social rage.
So the angst that we have is really
the fear of the end of humanity.
Yeah. You know, with nuclear energy
and the potential for pathogens and -- and so on,
all the things that we've been dealing with
for the last, you know, 50, 60 years...
are manifesting in these post-apocalyptic fantasies.
And I would submit that everybody that watches these movies
believes that they are gonna be
that 1 in 10 million people that survives.
And has the -- the apartment, you know...
in Manhattan with the steel door and all that.
Sure, you gotta shoot a few vampires,
but it's actually a pretty good life.
It is. It simplifies the lifestyle.
And at the end of the day
is the fantasy of having to hunt to survive.
The quintessential fantasy in the 20th century for post-apocalyptic
is you, your car, and your gun.
I had been aware of "I Am Legend" for years.
Arnold Schwarzenegger had it for about 10 years,
and he -- he wasn't letting it go.
And I was like, "Come on, man. Come on, you the Governor, man.
You not gonna make it."
And eventually Arnold was like
"Okay, okay. I'm not gonna make it."
Dr. Robert Neville, he was a virologist,
and he was supposed to save humanity, and he missed.
There has been a worldwide epidemic
and it has turned the population
into these vampire zombie-like things.
And Neville is the last man on Earth.
"What will the world look like,
after we have finally found a way
to make sure it has rid itself of us?"
Is at the heart of the narrative.
How does a guy survive
after losing all of that,
and make it day to day to day to day?
Being the last person on Earth
speaks to the concept of existential loneliness.
It speaks to a very terrifying reality for human beings,
that we actually are born and we die alone.
Morning, Hank.
Surviving can be much more of a burden
than a blessing sometimes, and part of the beauty
is that's how a lot of us feel in life.
When Will and Akiva and I
kind of crafted the movie,
we wanted to keep elements that made "I Am Legend,"
"I Am " -- "I Am Legend."
one of my favorite ideas in the novel is at the end,
Neville discovering,
"Wow, the things that I thought were the monsters
aren't really the monsters. I'm the monster."
This idea that this creature that he has down in his lab
is the, you know, love of the sort of alpha creature
that's, you know, stalking him.
And he discovers that if he gives this creature back,
this guy may let him live, and he does.
I'm sorry.
The same way he saw them as monsters,
that's how they saw him.
Now conceptually, that is a spectacular idea.
That is the truth of all conflict.
But the audience just short of booed.
Just, like, right on the edge
of -- of booing.
So we -- we went back, and the eventual ending,
he sacrificed himself to save the cure.
There was something about the difference
of science fiction in a novel
versus science fiction in the cinema.
The genre actually shifts when you add the images.
"I Am Legend" is a novel
which was published in 1954,
and is not only one of the most important
disease apocalypse story of all time,
it is the most influential.
It's had many adaptations.
The first adaptation
was in the early '60s with Vincent Price.
Another day to live through.
Better get started.
Then we had the really popular '70s version
called "The Omega Man."
If you look at apocalyptic ideas in science fiction,
they tend to come in waves...
and the '70s was a very strong wave
of apocalyptic thinking.
But you're coming out of the '60s,
and -- and a certain unleashing of human consciousness.
So, you know,
of course it was gonna manifest itself that way.
And after September 11th,
there was a big resurgence of it...
...almost immediately.
Things like "I Am Legend," things like --
It was a big wave...
...and very, very concerned back to that '70s idea of,
"You know what? We may well screw this all up."
I'm fascinated by the way that science fiction
is always, you know, manifesting our -- our angst,
our dreams and our -- and our nightmares.
Every generation has its own version
of the apocalypse,
some horrible event that basically annihilates
a bunch of people all at the same time.
Apocalypses are a big theme in science fiction
and always have been.
The reason they're interesting is because we always feel like
the clock is at 5 minutes to midnight,
that the apocalypse is gonna come.
The science fiction authors and filmmakers
may have given us the ammunition
by illuminating for us the dark possibilities
which are now becoming more and more real.
I think that one of the most powerful,
dazzling, nasty ends for -- for humankind
is "Planet of the Apes."
The book on which it's based, by Pierre Bool,
it's just a vision of another world.
But at the end there's, of course,
this famous big reveal
that makes -- makes your heart turn upside down for a moment
when you discover that they didn't travel to another planet.
Unwittingly, they have traveled
to the future of the Earth itself.
Damn you all to Hell!
So it turns out to be a story about our own future,
about our destiny.
It's a far, far, far future post-apocalypse
where humans have been replaced by apes
and -- and humans are now kind of dumb animals.
Within the first series,
but especially in the second series of films,
we discover that humanity's demise,
it's not just caused by a rain of nukes from the sky.
It's not just caused by a zombie pandemic.
It's actually a whole bunch of different factors.
A hallmark of really good science fiction
that stays with us is this idea that
the apocalypse is complicated.
And the series is a great example of a-an apocalypse
which also has an element of hope in it.
We think of "Planet of the Apes" as this cynical movie
where humans are going to ruin everything.
But there's that lovely moment at the beginning.
From the very first film,
Charlton Heston is speaking aloud
to the humans of the future, who he thinks are gonna
discover him in 700 years, and he says...
You who are reading me now
are a different breed --
I hope a better one.
And the optimism of that just breaks my heart,
especially when you're rewatching the film
and you know what happens.
It's trying to warn us about what's gonna happen
if we screw up today.
It's almost like you drop a stone in a pool,
and he wakes up at the 20th ripple,
where what's happened in 1972 has ruined the world.
It's frighteningly a promissory note.
I think we all watch those movies...
- Kill them all! ... - and feel some truth,
some inevitability to idea of it all going away.
Us rendering us...
dispensable and dispensed with.
If you look at all the things that could take us out...
...overpopulation,
climate change, or nuclear war.
Maybe AI emerges but is used as a weapon.
It won't be one thing.
I think dark futures in what we do, as entertainment,
the engine of that is paranoia.
Is it healthy paranoia or unhealthy?
Oh, it's very healthy.
- It's healthy... - It's very healthy.
'cause you're constantly saying, "What if?"
And if you're not saying, "What if?" you're a fool.
There's so many different kinds of stories
that are basically about a really bad future.
So there's an apocalyptic story, and then there's dystopia.
How did it come to this?
Soylent Green is people!
Dystopia is, "Something went wrong along the way,
and things are not working out right."
And it's about a future looking at
a worst case scenario of society
where often this is something humans are doing to humans.
Primrose Everdeen.
Prim!
No! No! I volunteer!
I volunteer as tribute.
The world of "The Hunger Games"
is a very brutal, hard, dystopic world.
You have a tyrannical government
and they are just gonna, at random,
once every four years, grab one of your kids
and -- and make them fight to the death.
I think Peeta's a great character.
I really connected with his idea of even though
this insanity is happening around him
and this is, like, absolute dire circumstances,
he still doesn't change who he is.
Katniss, go!
Get out of here! Go! What are you doing?!
When entertainment turns into this kind of dark spectacle,
it can become an instrument of oppression.
The idea of violence as political distraction
comes from Octavian Caesar Augustus,
who literally said, "Give the people bread and circuses.
Make sure their bellies are full
And they've got something to watch and distract them.
Then they're not gonna take to the streets and protest."
Oh, one of my favorite year.
And one of my favorite arena.
Suzanne Collins, in the creation of the book series,
she was flipping channels during one of the wars in Iraq.
You know, embedded footage, live.
And then you'd flip a few channels
and you'd be on MTV watching one of these,
you know, reality game shows...
and starting to see these kids battling one another,
and then she started to put the two ideas together.
"The Hunger Games" really hits right at the core of things
that we worry about today.
Reality TV being something that's more cruel
than it is entertaining. But us not even noticing.
And the idea of surveillance culture for control
has its roots in George Orwell's novel "1984."
"1984" is a stunning book and film.
Its vision of the future
has been used to describe the age we live in
since it was published.
With the rise of fascism, the rise of war technology,
suddenly, science fiction shifted from optimistic futures
to futures that nobody wanted to live in.
...spreading the rumor..
Orwell updated totalitarianism for the media age.
Things like telescreens and Big Brother show us
how surveillance would become part of a technological network.
Now we can see you!
Clasp your hands behind your heads!
What was frightening about it is that he didn't insist
on a radically new world.
He said, "Look, we can do this with the technology we have now."
The house is surrounded!
Science fiction has never been about predicting the future.
It's about choosing a future.
It's about the world that we're in now
and what direction we take.
Dystopian science fiction
grows into a launching pad for social dialogue.
And even then, it grows into real world experience.
We turn to Thailand,
where protestors have been inspired
by the "Hunger Games" movie.
A 3-fingered salute is now a symbol of uprising.
Is "The Hunger Games" about revolution? It absolutely is.
Suzanne created these stories
about war and the consequence of war for teenagers
and didn't hold back.
High school feels like the worst type of dystopia.
Someone else is controlling what's possible for you
and telling you what to do and where to go and who to be.
But in young adult literature like the "Hunger Games"
and in "Divergent," I think, these are stories
in which young people, especially young women,
have agency and the power to do something
about the world around them.
Katniss is this great character
and fights in a plausible way
This is what they do, and we must fight back!
She is given skills that allow her to take down a monster
in the form of that society, that's so much bigger than her.
"The Hunger Games" does not end with a pretty little bow on top
where the world is just a better place and everybody's happy.
Prim is gone!
She's dead and she's not coming back! Get out!
It takes a lot of casualties and typically a lot of death
and a lot of pain to make any kind of change.
But the people that remain will always be damaged
because those scars definitely remain.
I don't think the human mind is mean to exist
in two different, uh... dimensions?
It's very confusing. You don't know what's real and what's not.
But you know what's real now.
Yes, sir, I do.
The darkest thing about
the science fiction of the future is the idea
that you might be in the dark future already and not know it.
Where do you draw the line
between reality and memory and dreams?
And I think the fundamental message
of every dystopic sci-fi novel is,
you're living in a dystopic world
and you either see it or you don't.
Now this is gonna be very difficult
- for you to accept, Mr. Quaid. - I'm listening.
I'm afraid you're not really standing here right now.
You know, Doc, you could have fooled me.
"Total Recall" was adapted from a short story
called "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
by Philip K. Dick.
And he was the most outstanding, surreal,
satirical science fiction writer of the age.
People claim to remember past lives.
I claim to remember a different, very different present life.
And there were various subsequent Hollywood adaptations
- of his stories. - I'm placing you under arrest
for the future murder of Sarah Marks.
And again and again, characters are thrust into
what they learn later is a constructed universe,
fooling the people who wander into it
into thinking it's actually real.
When we're asleep, our mind can do almost anything.
That's what good science fiction does.
It makes you do a double take on reality.
And the things you have taken for granted your whole life,
it makes you look at them
in a new and sometimes very paranoid way.
What the hell?
You can see that Philip K. Dick's ideas
are popping up in something like "The Matrix."
There is a sense of paranoia,
the sense that there's no ground truth to hold on to.
You take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed
and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill,
and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The Wachowskis gave me the script.
I read it.
This idea of reality not being reality...
This is the world as it exists today.
What's really cool about "The Matrix"
is you get to see what's behind the curtain --
enslavement of humans to support machines.
How do you define real?
So you've got virtual reality
and agents and Morpheus and, um...
Oh, and then kung fu.
Laurence Fishburne and I had been training the dojo sequence
for about 7, 8 months.
So it was really exciting to actually be there on the day
and start doing it.
Because you can train, but then there's the game, right?
And then someone says, "Action," and it's...
It's on, right?
I know Kung Fu.
In the synthetic world of the Matrix,
we're not limited by our bodies.
We're limited just by what we can imagine,
which is how you can have these innovations like bullet time...
I think what's really interesting about "The Matrix"
is that it employed special effects in a way
that was inherent to the narrative.
The reason that bullet time exists in the Matrix
is as an exemplar that this is not reality.
When you're in the Matrix, you're capable of doing things
which you cannot do in the real world.
And the first time we see Trinity
jump up into that crane pose,
we had never seen that before.
That was technology that was effectively invented
for that film.
And then later on in the film,
when you see the bullet time more and more,
it becomes the distinguishing feature
that tells you you're in the Matrix,
and you're not in the dystopian apocalypse
where we actually exist.
No.
"The Matrix" certainly is a very exciting film
if you're just interested in seeing cool graphics and kung fu.
But you can also have all sorts of debates with friends
about its philosophical underpinnings.
The Matrix predicted a society
where people could just plug in and lose themselves,
where people see what they want to see,
believe what they want to believe
because it's comfortable and safe even though it's a lie.
I know this steak doesn't exist.
I know that when I put it in my mouth,
the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
You know, saying then, "I just wanna eat some steak"
and, you know, "I wanna stay asleep,"
I mean, I think it's a really seductive choice, right?
I don't wanna remember nothing. Nothing.
"The Matrix" is perfect science fiction
because it has the great moment of personal choice.
Do we plug in
and do we just become mindless cogs in a machine,
or do we unplug and choose to live in a world
that is cold and dark
and complicated and hard and real?
You flirt with science fiction all over the place.
I would submit that "The Dark Knight"
and "The Dark Knight Rises" are actually
dystopian science fiction.
Because you're looking at
a hypertrophied corrupt state.
Yeah, "Dark Knight Rises," it's --
it's an experience of dystopian future,
um, and looking at demagoguery.
You're looking at all these things that could happen.
I think there's an aspect of science fiction that --
that celebrates human potential...
...where only a hero is your answer, is your salvation.
Yeah, very much.
Ooh, you wanna play? Come on.
You're terminated.
The role of the heroes in most dark futures
is to defeat the forces
that help make these dystopian futures happen.
Dystopian fiction often consider just how much one person can do
to change the world around them,
fighting against a system
that has become oppressive and corrupt.
Drop the gun. You are under arrest.
Thank you for your cooperation.
RoboCop is a cop who is ultimately
turned into a half-man, half-machine,
but he's a good cop who believes that there are bad guys,
and he's there to stop them.
Ooh. Guns, guns, guns!
I kept thinking about a science fiction story
that was kind of set in the business world.
You know, it was the 80's and it was kind of
the beginning of the greed generation.
So in "RoboCop," it was saying that now we live in a world
that is really run by money and corporations, and I thought,
"Oh, we should make a movie about how this is inevitable,
but maybe you can stop it."
You are under arrest.
RoboCop thinks he's catching one bad guy,
and then it turns out the bad guy is even bigger than him.
It's a system.
That's the power of sci-fi, it makes it possible
to sit there and kind of think about these very big topics
while you're watching, you know,
robots, uh, shoot guys in the penis.
Your move, creep.
The violence of "RoboCop"
is absolutely startling.
You know, it shows that this is dystopia
and there is something very terrible
that has happened to the world to get us to this place.
I'm always a bit amazed at people ask,
"Why there is so much violence in your movies?"
Then I would answer,
"Why is there not violence in your movies?"
Violence is built into the universe.
And that was, for me, something that I understood
from a, let's say, religious point of view.
I felt that the death of Murphy should be a crucifixion.
This has to be horrifying,
so it had to be extremely violent.
I think it works very well.
Then slowly, you get these electronic movements
and you start to recognize things,
and that is the resurrection.
I can see the beauty of that story
and I wanted to impose that on the movie.
And basically it came to me, the idea,
that he should walk over the water.
And that's what I always felt about RoboCop,
that he was the American Jesus.
"RoboCop" is a political satire,
and the realization that this is an allegory for Jesus Christ
just shows that we really attach cultural significance
to the idea of saviors who sacrifice everything to help us.
Science fiction shows us
an absolutely dystopian and horrific future,
but we find a beacon of hope
from the heroes of the story.
You wanna get out of here?
You talk to me.
Mad Max, the reluctant antihero.
"Mad Max" was like, you hear a piece of music,
and you're like, "Oh, my God. Where has that been?!"
Director George Miller,
he was a kid who grew up in Australia.
And when he was a teenager,
he saw a lot of his friends die in car crashes.
And then when he was a doctor, he saw lots of corpses
come in that had been mangled from roads.
So when George Miller becomes a filmmaker,
this idea of telling life and death stories
set on roads feels very natural to him.
In the very first movie,
society is kind of on the verge of collapsing.
And Max, he was a cop, goes sort of insane
over the course of the film,
trying to stop criminals...
...and eventually losing his family.
And then the second movie, "Road Warrior,"
there has been this unexplained nuclear war
and that now gas supplies are incredibly scarce,
and that has given way to this post-apocalyptic wasteland
that Max is now wandering through.
Mad Max might save the situation,
but he world itself just keep getting worse
and worse and worse.
There are certain films that the culture pivots around,
and "Road Warrior" was one of them.
As the science fiction writer J.G. Ballard said,
"It's the Sistine Chapel of punk."
You! You can run, but you can't hide.
I'm a comic book artist.
I write and I draw,
and I'm used to words and pictures all the time.
So when I got a call from George Miller saying,
"I've got some stuff on Mad Max
I'd like to talk to you about," I said, "Yeah."
In the fourth Mad Max, "Fury Road,"
we had to plot every single thing on that movie,
and we did it through nearly 4,000 drawings.
And I think we really changed the hero myth as well.
In "Fury Road," Mad Max, he's much more a product
of sort of a post-traumatic stress disorder,
and there's nothing to live for except to live.
20 years out in the Outback
on his own in his beat-up old car.
So this guy is like a feral animal.
He's placed as a hood ornament on a hot rod.
He's used as a blood bank.
That's my property!
Because in "Fury Road," the commodity is not oil.
It's actually the human body itself.
You're more than welcome to come with us.
I'll -- I'll make my own way.
I feel like when you watch the Mad Max films,
after the first one, he doesn't even see himself
as somebody who could be a hero.
It's not his world.
So it's up to women like Furiosa
to do the work of actually making it a better place.
They're looking for hope.
- What about you? - Redemption.
Furiosa is George's character.
That was George saying,
"I'm gonna make a female road warrior,
and then she's gonna be an icon of the times."
Even though it was a Mad Max movie,
it really allowed this heroine character
to sort of rise up and almost steal the hero role.
Furiosa is a much more compelling hero
than we see with Max.
We understand her backstory a lot better,
her motivations.
She has to protect these women
who are trying to escape
from a really cruel, terrible slave owner.
Remember me?
There comes a time when Furiosa, being very injured --
stabbed in the side, losing vast amounts of blood.
And then Max penetrates her with a knife
and gives her his blood and mingles it with her.
He's now getting invested in spite of himself.
You see the male and the female energy coming together,
it was very powerful.
And in a way, this is their love scene.
And then he leaves.
When you see Furiosa on that platform,
rise above this village,
you realize this might be the first time
where's there's a little bit of hope
at the end of a Mad Max film.
There's a chance now, a real hope
that a new type of society can be formed by these girls,
with the muscle of Furiosa.
These heroic women will now bring forth
a new dispensation to this world.
They're gonna remake the world that exists in their ideology.
What will happen, we don't know,
but that's another story.
We as a society hunger for our nightmares
written large on the big screen or - the small screen.
So it seems to me that's a big part of what science fiction is.
- It is. - But as we got into the technological age
and the science age, our fear and our angst are of
where this was all going,
this big human experiment.
We're always worried about where's the world going and...
...is this world coming to an end.
- And a lot of science fiction capitalizes on those fears. -Sure.
Can we at least retard the apocalypse and delay it?
Sound a warning or think twice about a policy.
All of science fiction are cautionary tales.
The best science fiction are cautionary tales.
What you are about to watch is a nightmare.
It is not meant to be prophetic. It need not happen.
But in this place, in this moment, it does happen.
This is the Twilight Zone.
"The Twilight Zone" was the first great
science fiction show on television. Period.
I mean, we all think of the 1950s
as apple pie placid.
But "The Twilight Zone" offered up the dark side of that.
Everybody's dead except...me.
There were always these great twists, and I just loved that.
I loved the poignant irony of...
Oh, he's got all the time in the world with his books,
and then he breaks his glasses!
It's not fair.
Before "The Twilight Zone,"
Rod Serling was the great mainstream dramatist
of 1950s television.
But he was censored at every turn
when he wanted to talk about social issues,
racial issues, political issues.
I think it is criminal that we're not permitted
to make dramatic note of controversial themes
that are inherent in our society.
This dissatisfaction, this frustration
led Rod Serling to create a show
in which he could talk about the issues,
but in a way that the censor and the advertisers wouldn't object.
We are the minorities!
To me, a dystopian story is a warning.
It is a way that you can try to raise its hand and say,
"Hey, everybody, it seems like
"We might be going in this direction,
"And look, it won't be good if we go there.
So maybe we wanna do something about it now."
You're all desperate to point some kind of a finger at a neighbor.
Believe me, friends, the only thing that's gonna happen
is that we're gonna eat each other up alive!
Anytime you read or watch a dystopic story,
and you think, "Well, we're past that now.
That couldn't happen."
Look, I swear it isn't me!
Suddenly, we're handed a curve ball with politics,
with issues of the day,
and we realize we can always be blindsided.
My name is Offred.
I had another name, but it's forbidden now.
So many things are forbidden now.
In "The Handmaid's Tale,"
we are plunged into this future world
where men are the absolute rulers,
and women are the underclass.
This is a very old-fashioned, religious regime.
They have special clothing that they wear.
They go into supermarkets
where nothing is labeled with letters.
It feels like an alien place. It feels like another world.
And yet, we get these constant reminders
that no, this is Boston.
But it's a very different world.
I think I fell in love with "The Handmaid's Tale"
because of Offred,
really how she was able to keep up her strength
and her belief and her hope in this horrible situation.
God whipped up a special plague.
There's been an environmental disaster
and the fertility rate has gone down precipitously.
No, please! Please don't take her!
- Mommy! - No!
She's ripped away from her husband and her child.
And because Offred is one of the few fertile women left...
This is the new one.
...she's kept as a reproductive slave
in the house of this commander.
The handmaid shall lie between the legs
of the commander's wife.
The two of you will become one flower,
waiting to be seeded.
We're flowers.
Lay down.
What? It's nice.
The one thing that I especially love so much about Janine
is that everybody thinks she's a lunatic.
But she's has taken the reality that has been presented to her
that she cannot seem to fight
and fights it in her own way.
Bye.
Because the only thing
that is guaranteed in your future as a handmaid
is that you will be going to the market
and you will be raped.
I didn't put anything into the book
that human beings had not already done at some point in history
or that they're not doing now.
For instance, in Nazi Germany,
the S.S. Men had assigned biological wives.
She took directly from horrible atrocities
that have been committed against people and put them in her book,
and just formed them into the world of Gilead.
Margaret Atwood was fascinated
with the Salem Witch Trials
and the ways in which women who were considered
deviant from the norm were punished.
It was about sending a clear message to all women
that if you get out of line, the wages of that are death.
The Iranian Revolution
was a very interesting analogue for Margaret.
It was a religious revolution.
You know, one day, women were wearing mini skirts,
and the next day, they were kicked out of college,
all within 24 hours.
Ladies, you can't work here anymore.
It's the law now.
Offred has her job taken away from her
and realizes she has no more control over money or property.
I think this would have very much resonated
with readers in the 1980s
because women had just earned the right to own credit cards
in their own name in 1974.
You realize that we've been there before.
You realize that
there but for the grace of God could go all of us.
It's not that difficult for society
to shift just a little bit
in order to recreate that dystopian future.
Science fiction pieces often portray
the breakdown of society as a warning.
You know, it's a lot easier to look back on a TV show
and see where the important things happened.
It's a lot harder in your life to look back.
When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up.
When they suspended the Constitution,
we didn't wake up then either.
In a gradually heating bathtub,
you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
The idea of the slow burn,
that's what makes "The Handmaid's Tale" so powerful.
It's about the evolution of a very small batch of variables
that becomes kind of like the butterfly's wings
that cause a huge storm.
Why'd they send the Army?
I think it's just a warning.
I don't think it's a prediction.
In the very subtle bits of resistance,
that's how the fire stays alive,
because you can take everything away from these women.
You take their families away.
You take their eyeballs away.
But you can't take away their own very unique humanity.
That's why you have to stay awake,
because otherwise, you're left with Gilead.
This may not seem ordinary to you right now,
but after a time, it will.
This will become ordinary.
I'm keeping this group together, alive.
But get one thing straight --
if you're staying, this isn't a democracy anymore.
Post-apocalyptic stories are really about
just trying to restart
and maybe make a better world if we can.
Can we rebuild society after the apocalypse?
You know, you're not gonna get color TV back very quickly,
but the answer with "The Walking Dead" is,
"I hope I can."
But not everyone's going to come up
with a peaceful way of existing.
I wrote the comic about a group of normal,
average, everyday human beings
trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse
and kind of build some semblance of the life they once knew.
Oh, God.
The real reason you go back on "The Walking Dead"
is because those characters fascinate you.
And they're all fighting to find out who they are
in a world in which society has been wiped out
and the rules have all changed.
Please don't.
Do it, Dad. Do it.
Post-apocalyptic stories always talk about
what happens to people
and what these people, uh, become.
And I think that's a classic science fiction theme.
And I think that is something that exists
in the Romero zombie mythology, in his movies.
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
George Romero invented the zombie.
I mean, the zombie did not exist before George Romero --
not in the way we think of the zombie.
George Romero read "I Am Legend"
and loved the concept of being at war
with a mindless world.
Now what Romero did, which is critical to modern zombie lore,
is Romero put in social commentary.
All right, Vince, hit him in the head.
Right between the eyes.
The great things about zombie movies,
they get into our fear of betrayal,
that paranoia that we all have as human beings
that people that we love are gonna turn on us.
They tap into our fear of a predator.
We're afraid of them because they're going to eat us.
It has the fear of overpopulation.
Oh! And the fear of disease.
The chimps are infected!
The thing that really bugged me about those movies
was that you have these really great setups,
with these interesting characters.
And then the time limit runs out on the movie.
And as a writer, I was like, "Oh, my God."
Like, you're really missing an opportunity here.
You could follow these people for years and years and years.
I would say,
after eight seasons of "The Walking Dead,"
we have probably created over 16,000 walker make-ups.
When I was younger, I studied physiology
and anatomy quite a bit, and I minored in art.
So for me, it's always been important to elevate
the level of realism
and create something the audience saw as horrific...
I'm sorry this happened to you.
...and transform it into something you felt sympathy for.
"The Walking Dead" shows the various ways
we might rebuild society
after an apocalyptic event.
Rick Grimes and his group
encounter many different types of civilizations
over the course of "The Walking Dead."
You have a place like Woodbury, that's led by the Governor.
We get to Alexandria, which is a-a safe haven
that was built for people in Washington D.C.
to kind of retreat to. But the worst of the worst,
when it comes to the societies that we've encountered,
is Negan and his group, the Saviors.
I'm gonna beat the holy hell out of one of you.
As a writer, you know,
sometimes I worry that people think, like,
"Oh, that guy, he's just having fun and he's callous.
I like killing these people, I'll kill anybody."
Uh, it's really not that easy for me.
I need you to know me.
When the characters die, like, I get upset
the same way that the audience gets upset.
I cry sometimes while I'm writing,
that's a thing that totally happens.
It does wear on me sometimes.
Back to it.
There have to be people
that keep things in balance morally.
Otherwise, it's all chaos.
It's all about groups of people that you can trust
in terms of making a better future.
Everything that they're fighting for
is about building a new society.
There will be something after.
We have to keep our faith in each other.
If we can hold onto that with everything we have,
the future is ours.
"The Walking Dead" captures these amazing little --
little snippets of what human nature is
at its best and worst, and when it's tested.
And the fact that you might never be redeemed --
You may be beyond redemption.
But look how many other characters
are redeemed in some way.
It is very much about coming from the darkest point
and finding a way to work together
to bring ourselves up out of that darkness,
and the rebuilding of civilization.
And so to me, on a long enough timeline,
it's a very uplifting story about people
who have lived through the worst of the worst
and have become the best of the best.
And so I've always looked at is as an optimistic story.
Science fiction is talking about the human condition.
It's ridiculous to say good and evil,
but I think the idea of competitive, aggressive
versus compassionate, empathic.
You know, and we have both...
and nature has selected for both, in a way...
...'cause we're social beings.
We didn't get to survive without taking care of our kids
- and learning how to hunt together... - Right.
and all the things that we give and share with each other.
And -- and we all have empathy and we're mindful
and we have deep sympathy,
even if we don't act that way in our lives,
or people don't see that in us, everybody has that capacity.
- Right. - And that is the capacity, I think,
that will always pull us back from the brink.