Planet of the Apes

We’re going ape this week when host Neil deGrasse Tyson talks to Andy Serkis from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and primate expert and paleoanthropologist Dr. Ian Tattersall. Read more and listen to the full show at: http://www.startalkradio.net/show/planet-of-the-apes

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm your personal astrophysicist. I serve as director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. My co-host today, the one, the only, is there more than one of you?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Not that I know of.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one, the only Eugene Mirman.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Today, we'll be talking about the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and my interview with, guess who? I got, I got an interview with like the lead ape.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  The person who plays the ape?

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it was the lead.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Just to be clear.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Andy Serkis, he played Caesar in the movie. You know, he's considered the king of performance capture technology.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it wasn't just some animation that he just then voice-oversed.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was him.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  He was moving around. It's him.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was moving around and-

• 1:17Speaker 01

  He's the best at that.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think so, because like, it's not just, he wasn't just Caesar. Before he played Caesar, he was Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Gollum.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I remember him. He really wanted the ring. He thought it was very important. He spoke, he didn't have the best grammar, but he was very passionate.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true. All these little creatures, they don't have, like, like, like Yoda didn't have good grammar either.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but very powerful. Like, I wouldn't fight him, but I'd be like, your sentence structure is very, very confusing.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was also King Kong in the, in that, in the latest King Kong there.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he was Caesar in both of the Planet of the, so it was the Planet of the Apes from a few years ago.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and then, most recently, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And, you know, he created, he founded his own performance capture technology studio called Imaginarium Studio. So, this is becoming a big thing now.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just some side novelty.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  No, it's a huge thing, and there's only one person who does it, and now he controls the one studio. He's like a robber baron.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I caught up with him. We were in the, we were in the wrong place at the right time to each other. He's normally in Europe and of course I'm a native of New York where my day job is. I happened to be vacationing in Paris while he was in New York. So that pissed me off, although I wasn't gonna leave Paris to come to New York to interview him. Right. So I said, let's try a Skype interview and that's exactly what we did. And so over Skype, I asked him, what led him to this sort of techie path as opposed to following a traditional acting career? Cause usually a slip on something or somebody pushes you in one way, something, something, there's always a story. So I wanted to hear what he had to say. What is in your background, other than an actor, that may have led you to go down

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  this tech path, rather than pure acting path?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Before I became an actor, I went to college to study visual arts and graphic design and I wanted to be a painter. In my first year, I had to actually do another-

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a failed painter?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  I'm a failed painter and I thought I better give something else a shot, which I happened to be acting and lucked out, basically.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your back of plan worked.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, that was the B plan. And so it was, in the first year, you had to do another subject and theater studies was the one that I thought, oh, that looks quite interesting. So I started to design sets and posters for theater productions and then got involved in acting. And then by the end of the first year, I'd been in a play where I'd had this kind of epiphany moment where it was just like, I have to act. So, but we get to your point, performance capture technology and it seems in a way at filmmaking and directing and creating the imaginary, all of those things have come out of a desire to tell stories. And actually now having this technology which allows you to, to step into any sort of character and, you know, and for any act, no matter what size they are, how tall, how short, what color or sex they are, they can absolutely

• 4:12Speaker 02

  play philosophically, they can play any character. I think that's really, really healthy as a, as a notion. You're free as an artist to be able to express yourself in any character.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the guy's ready for, ready to take this to a whole other level.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's like you said, he's got the monopoly.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I didn't, I didn't know this until we did some homework for this show. That in Lord of the Rings, the two towers, it was the first feature film to use real time motion picture capture. So this streamed the actions of Andy Serkis into the computer generated skin of Gollum as it was being performed. So it's not just some separate clips.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  It was happening live.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was happening live. And so this is a whole other frontier for movie making.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Hopefully there won't be any people in movies in the future.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  That's one of the things so many movies, you're like, ah, actors.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't know, does everyone know what performance capture?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I do, it's like you probably have balls all over you and you're in a green suit or something.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  I just don't really know.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they glue stuff on you, little sensors on your body and they track how you move. They know exactly where you are and how you're moving at all times. And then they can layer some other

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Thing on it.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Form on top of you. And, but I always wondered, since we're human.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll be moving the way a human moves. I mean, how could you be a grasshopper or something or, or, I mean, well, if, if you're something that's not otherwise human, I, I always

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Well, motion capture is used mostly to, uh, to be things that aren't human. But, but I guess human-esque.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it human-esque? Okay. Or, or animated characters that are human, but they're animated, I suppose. So, so I, I was so enchanted by his performance as Gollum, I had to ask him just what, what, what, what's up with Gollum?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he even treated me to a little performance. Uh, let's check it out. Andy, you were Gollum, for goodness sake.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an amazing role.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely creepy, yet still bring sympathy from the viewer.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  You know, he's he's much misunderstood Gollum, I think. You know, he was loved by his mother, of course, and it wasn't all his fault.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me compare with other Gollums that I know.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Well, right. I think the interesting thing about Gollum is that it is a little bit of there, but for the grace of God, go I. But, you know, equally, when he finds the ring or discovers the ring, or his cousin, Deagle, discovers the ring, it's a really interesting moment. And when we blocked out the fight for that, when there's this big tussle for the ring, you know, there's a moment where it could have gone either way, and Deagle could have been the possessor of the ring. And and there would have been a different story, I think, or maybe not. But I mean, I suppose as Sméagol, he was susceptible. He was not strong enough to withstand the power of the ring, for sure.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, can you bend your body in those positions?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Not anymore, no. But, um, yeah, well, do you want me to do it now? Do you want me to get up on the chair? Do you want me to do it now? Look, like this.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, don't get a hernia or anything. I don't want to be responsible.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Oh, God, nurse.

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep, he climbed up on the chair, squatting like like Gollum.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  I thought you meant he did the voice. I didn't think you meant that he squatted through Skype, but I'm glad he did.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he squat, he squat, he Skype-squatted.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  He's like the the good thing that could happen to a failed painter. He's like the good version of that.

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other options are you kill yourself. Yes.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cut off your ear and kill yourself.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yes, or become a dictator.

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, we'll be talking about Andy's latest movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and explore some of the similarities between ape and human nature. We'll see you in a moment.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson with Eugene Mirman, my comedic co-host, Eugene.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You tweet at Eugene Mirman, don't you?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I do.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I follow you.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Great.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Loving it. And we're also featuring my interview with Andy Serkis, who was Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And in this segment, and for the rest of the show, in studio with us is my friend and colleague. Dr. Ian Tattersall, he's a paleoanthropologist, way too many syllables for a word, I think. Paleoanthropologist, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. Ian, welcome, your first time on StarTalk Radio.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yes, indeed it is.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It will not be the last. Plus, when did you become emeritus? Are you that old?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  I am that old.

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  More years ago than I care to mention.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You never told me you became emeritus. We're gonna talk about apes and humans and things, and you're like the right guy. You've written 20 books on anthropology, and your latest is Masters of the Planet.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Only 18 on anthropology, two were romance novels.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  I wish, I wish.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Masters of the Planet, The Search for Our Human Origins. And so you're like the right guy to come here and talk about Planet of the Apes. And so Andy, after he played Gollum, went on to play King Kong, there's an ape for ya, if there ever was one. And also, as we already said, Caesar in Planet of the Apes. And...

• 9:45Speaker 03

  It's gotta really be tough to play an ape, because as you mentioned earlier, humans don't have the same body proportions as apes do. So to move away around in a way that expresses being an ape, without exact ape body proportions is quite a trick.

• 10:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so whatever that is, that's gotta be easier than playing a ladybug or something.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  It's true. Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, the number of legs is more associated.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  When Andy plays a ladybug, then I'll be impressed.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out what, we'll bring in the ladybug expert to come in. Let's find out what he says about his transition from Gollum to apes, and then we'll pick you up again. Let's check it out. So it's one thing for an actor to do that, it's another one for someone to pioneer the whole movement. You know, most actors just become actors, and you have a whole other pathway.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I happened to step into an arena that was an expanding universe, which was that of performance capture technology. But I still considered myself just an actor at that point. So I was, you know, going on set and shooting all my scenes with Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, and then I was coming back. And sometimes, you know, a few months later on, I'd go to a motion capture stage and put on the suit. And for the first time I saw Gollum moving, it was a real epiphany. It was like, this is incredible. If I move my right hand, I can see Gollum moving his right hand on a screen. That was an amazing moment. The following film... And I've been talking about this recently because it's quite an interesting moment where I just thought Gollum was gonna be an anomaly role. When the third film was finished, I just thought, well, it's been an amazing role, an amazing experience.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  I'm now gonna go back to my normal acting career, working the stage, work on British films or other films. And then Peter Jackson asked me to play King Kong, and that was like, alright. And that was the big moment because it was, okay, so this wasn't just a one-off event.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you discover you might have some gorilla in you.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. Then it was like, okay, so I'm gonna go from playing a three and a half foot ring junkie to a twenty-five foot gorilla. And how does that work? And actually, what was amazing about that was, you know, Peter asking me to do that was, was like saying, well, typecasting is dead, and this performance capture technology is the portal to that. This is the way through. And that's why, you know, I've enjoyed and embraced the technology because of what it offers philosophically as an actor. Is the potential to play anything.

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ian, let me ask you, how many apes are there? Ape species?

• 12:03Speaker 03

  How many ape species? Uh, it depends, but there's four genera.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so which are they?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  We speak about the orangutan, the, uh, and the gorilla and the chimpanzee, which are the great apes. And then there's the gibbons, which are the lesser apes. And then there's a number of species of, uh, of each.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do the gibbons know that they're the lesser apes?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, what do you mean by lesser?

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lesser?

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Fortunately, they didn't have any, uh, any, any, any, any part in calling themselves lesser.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, apparently not.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  People rarely are that way. Creatures rarely do, but what makes them lesser?

• 12:37Speaker 03

  They're smaller for a start.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So size is everything in your field?

• 12:41Speaker 03

  Size, uh...

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so we are lesser gorillas to King Kong?

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Well, in a sense, we're, uh, we're lesser gorillas. We're certainly smaller than gorillas. But we're a part of the same group that gorillas belong to.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  And, uh, we're part of the same group that orangs and chimpanzees belong to as well, and they have a lot in common with us.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, so it's not, we have a lot in common with each other, right? Right, it's not that they have in common with us. We're, we're like, have...

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we...

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, it's a two-way street.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Well, we're the ones sitting around the table talking about them, but if they were sitting around the table and talking about us, I think they might be, uh, uh, yeah, talk in the same terms, if perhaps a little less complementarily.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So which, so we, so how much DNA do we have in common?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  We have more than ninety-nine percent of our structural DNA in common with the apes. But it turns out that the difference between us and the apes is more a matter of how active the different DNA that we have is.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we can go into a human, flick some dip switches, turn some, activate some genes, deactivate others, and we can come out as functional gorillas at the end of the experiment.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Would we be unable to talk but very strong? Like, what kind of DNA? How can I make super soldiers?

• 13:59Speaker 03

  How can you make super soldiers?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, obviously, listen to what I say.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Well, if we can figure that out, we can all make a lot of money here. But the fact is that we have extraordinarily similar to DNAs. And if we could deactivate a bit of our DNA and superactivate some of it, we could come out looking pretty much like an ape.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Could we superactivate ape DNA to make them able to learn just French or something?

• 14:25Speaker 03

  I wonder if you could superactivate my DNA to learn some French. It would be very handy.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a first.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  We could at least learn to say "house."

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Oh, we could.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out how Andy Serkis, how he studied to learn to play the role of apes. So you studied apes for the first Planet of the Apes movie, correct? Did you just visit the zoo and hang out and, you know, reach into your diaper and throw your poop?

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is all we think of when we think of...

• 14:54Speaker 02

  No, absolutely, absolutely.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean chimpanzees?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Thing is, there's a difference between, say, the way that I approached Kong, which was that I wanted to make him a very, very full-on silverback gorilla, and went and studied them very thoroughly, both at zoos for months on end, and then I went to Rwanda and studied mountain gorillas. But when it came to playing Caesar, this was a very special type of ape. Yes, he's a chimpanzee. Well, if you look at Caesar, he is chimpanzee whose mother was experimented on and given an Alzheimer's drug, which enhanced Caesar's intelligence. So apart from playing the chimpanzee, working on behavior and physicality of a chimpanzee, I'm now playing a character that is an ape plus.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's totally into it. And then, he can't only play the one character. In the storyline, the chimps are evolving in front of your eyes. So let's see what he says about playing not only a chimp, but an evolving chimp. And we'll come back and analyze it.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  The journey of playing Caesar, both in Rise, from an infant through to a teenager, through to a young revolutionary character, and then of course in Dawn, sort of jumping forward 10 years, where he's now an elder statesman and carrying the weight of responsibility. Throughout all of that journey, there's a conflicted human mind in an ape's skin almost. I mean, he's brought up with humans. And so the physicality, the emotional intelligence, the responses that he has, the language, the growth of language through being taught sign, American Sign Language, which then becomes the end of Rise, he begins to utter his first human words, all the way through Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, where he starts to use human language more, to the point where by the end of the movie, he's conversing much more fluently than he does at the beginning. It isn't just portraying a chimpanzee, this

• 16:35Speaker 02

  is an evolving chimpanzee, that it becomes more human-like throughout the course of the movie. So that was a very specific journey.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ian.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Well, this is really where you're getting into the course of fiction here, because actually apes learn and develop much more quickly than human beings do for the first couple of years of their life.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As do, as do most mammals, right?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  As do, well, the comparison isn't so close. But there was an American Museum of Natural History curator before the war who brought up a baby chimpanzee with his kids of the same age. And I remember his daughter was totally traumatized.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I knew you guys were weird, but now you're just confirming this. These are my colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History. Okay, so he raised a chimp in his family, okay?

• 17:19Speaker 03

  He raised a chimp at home, and it developed much more quickly, and had much better coordination at a young age. And then after a couple of years, the kids continued to develop and learn, and the chimpanzee didn't.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  The chimp didn't get into vassar.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter how many times it applied.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  It got into trouble, but not into vassar.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The chimp topped out. It matured earlier, but then didn't rise as high.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so clearly Planet of the Apes is fiction, and so they've got something going on there, where their influence, is it, there's a drug that they give them that affects the brain and the motor coordination and everything else. And so is that so outlandish that you could give someone some kind of chemical cocktail that will evolve their DNA?

• 18:04Speaker 01

  It worked in the movie Limitless.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's hold that until we come back to the next segment. You're listening to StarTalk Radio.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk. We're back at you. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Eugene Mirman across the table from me. How you doing Eugene?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Pretty good.

• 18:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always good to have you here. We're featuring my interview with Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And that's not the first time he played a creature. He played Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. He played King Kong. He played Gollum. He's playing all these motion capture creatures.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  For someone who doesn't want to be typecast, he is very ape-heavy.

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we brought in, because I don't know, what do I know about apes? We brought in Ian Tattersall. He is a curator emeritus, paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York. So Ian, we left off, we're asking, in the movie, they're being influenced by a chemical cocktail that is evolving them? And is that biogenetically possible?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  This is sci-fi at the moment. Who knows what's coming down the line? Because nobody would have imagined that we would know this much today about how our genomes work, only just a few years ago. So anything, anything is possible, but beware anybody that comes at you with a syringe today, as of now.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would do that no matter what.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  So don't let someone inject you with what they claim will evolve you.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. No evolution potion.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Caesar was a chimpanzee. Is it fair to say that chimpanzees are close, we are closer to chimpanzees than we are to any of the other apes? Is that correct?

• 20:08Speaker 03

  It's generally reckoned that chimpanzees and bonobos, which are two species of the same genus of ape, are our closest relatives, yes.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're our closest. So that means we have the most DNA in common with them, and you're up around 99%.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  That is true, yeah. 99.7% by some counts. But that little bit of difference really has made an enormous difference.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so we say, but if we were jellyfish looking at bonobo chimps in humans, we would think that we were indistinguishable from one another. If you're a jellyfish.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  That's possible.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but jellyfish are idiots.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Even a cat wouldn't think that. Well, this is true. But a bonobo would think very much the same thing. He thinks so near but yet so far.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you're saying it's so far because we're so close to it and you don't want to be thought of as that close to it. So isn't that human hubris that's saying this?

• 21:04Speaker 03

  What, is it human hubris to say that we're close to apes?

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's human hubris to say that, no, the human hubris is to say that little bit of difference is a big difference.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Well, we're ones that are studying them and imitating them, not them that's studying us.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  We can make bicycles and they can come nowhere near that.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  There you go, high-tech.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now about motion capturing to become an ape. They have different body proportions, right? I mean, what's the most different thing physiologically about them?

• 21:35Speaker 03

  In general, apes have longer arms and shorter legs than we do. And that's very hard for a modern actor, a human actor, to imitate.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Is that why they don't play soccer?

• 21:45Speaker 03

  It's why they don't play soccer very well.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yes, right. I spoke too soon.

• 21:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, there was sort of some messaging going on, some of it a little heavy-handed, others a little more subtle. Let's get Andy Serkis' take on that. Let's find out.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, in the very original Planet of the Apes, which I took the occasion to see again, it actually held up very well. A lot of movies from the 60s, they fail in some fundamental ways, being transported many decades later. But that one held up in some important ways, socially, culturally, intellectually. And of course, there was a lot of secondary-level messaging that went on. When I first saw it, I was a kid. I wasn't thinking the messaging. I was just thinking, "That's a bad future." So, could you comment on the messaging on Rise? Oh, no, sorry, the current one.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Dawn.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dawn, thank you.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  I mean, it's no mystery, really, that these, that this franchise has endured. Because Pierre Bule's book, and then the films, still live on in my memory, and many people's memories. And people are huge fans of these movies because of that. You know, they are entertainment, yes, but they are so much more than that. And you can appreciate them on so many different levels. In Dawn, I mean, I really do believe that Matt Reeves has created a film for our times. You know, it's very zeitgeist. The core of it is messaging is about empathy, it's about prejudice, it's about the necessity to take the harder, longer route of trying to find a peaceful solution to conflict, and the ability to see the other side's point of view, and not to have knee-jerk reactions which lead to more radicalized behavior. I

• 23:19Speaker 02

  mean, I really do think it couldn't be more pertinent today. And because we can still see ourselves through the portal of these, you know, the apes, we can examine ourselves and have some clarity about ourselves. I think it holds up as a great metaphor.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, at the risk of stating the obvious, some of the best science fiction, again, in my lifetime, which goes back to the Star Trek series, the original for television, every episode had a certain morality to it. It wasn't just, you know, war in space. There was messaging. And sometimes it's easier or more potable to tell a story through that inverted lens than just to come right at you. And clearly, that's the success that you're seeing right now.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it belongs to a tradition. I mean, obviously, it goes back to Grimm's fairy tales, or Aesop's fables.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ian, do apes, do they wage war? Do they kill each other? What do they do? Do they behave badly?

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Apes do a lot of stuff that humans do, including, including behaving badly. We're a kind of super apes. So if we dig down below the, the surface, we're gonna find a lot of chimpanzee in us. And chimpanzees do organize aggression.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will get back to organized ape aggression.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Good.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we return to StarTalk Radio.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio, we're back. We're on the web at startalkradio.net and StarTalk tweets at StarTalkRadio. Check us out there. You can also, of course, like us on Facebook. Where else?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Where else can you like you, other than in real life?

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's StarTalk Radio. We're featuring my interview with Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films, the two recent films. I've got in studio an ape expert, Ian Tattersall. He's a colleague of mine, paleontologist, paleoanthropologist, I think is the full title, Ian. Is that right?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  All the syllables, yeah.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the, paleoanthropologist.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're talking about apes behaving badly. And is there something that we do that apes don't do, other than use our technology to kill one another?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Well, you can, you can make a long list. You know, apes don't hang glide, they don't wear lipstick.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  You know, there's a lot of stuff.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  But they would. If they wear lipstick, they just do it in moderation. So they look, they don't look trashy.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  They could recognize, they can recognize themselves in.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Do they steal?

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Mirrors.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Do they steal? Do they have other crimes? I mean, I know they murder and punch each other, but do they have?

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, they murder?

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Well, they steal, yeah. I mean, they will, they will definitely mug each other in a sense.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  If that's what Sid and said, they don't have a lot of personal possessions for each other to steal.

• 26:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me your wallet. I don't have a wallet.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  They don't have a suitcase they tie up to bike racks or anything like that?

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The motivation for mugging is-

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Do they have morality?

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good question.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  You know, they have a sense of fairness.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  They do.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  And primates in general seem to have a sense of fairness. They don't like it when somebody else is getting more than they are in a way that they consider unfair. So, yeah, there is this-

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're social, but they're not full-blown commies.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  They're very social, but, you know, pinkos. No, no.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Good. They're like, if you can get a nice car, that's fine.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so how about the expression of emotions? Love, hate, indifference?

• 26:53Speaker 03

  The big problem when we're using words like this is we're using what we ourselves experience as humans, and we overload these emotions, these basic emotions, with all kinds of meanings.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry, I don't have ape vocabulary to invoke here.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Do they have 99.7% what we call love?

• 27:10Speaker 03

  They have, they have attachment. They definitely have attachment. They definitely have feelings of dislike, of, they have positive, negative feelings. Yeah, there's a lot of what we are in them.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does it manifest in their facial expressions?

• 27:25Speaker 03

  To some extent, yeah. But humans are unique, have uniquely mobile faces, too.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It may be that if we try to put human faces in motion capture, we are over-dramatizing what an ape might be. Let's find out what Andy Serkis did with regard to facial muscle capture. So, I just remember seeing some behind-the-scenes, the making of, for earlier motion capture films. How many points are on your body that are then captured and portrayed? Because it seems to me the more points on every little muscle tinge, the more accurate is the rendering.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Well, the technology's evolved so much so, in fact, in King Kong days, I had 132 tiny little spherical, three-dimensional markers stuck to all over my face, including my eyelids.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  132 on your face?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, on the face.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so no Botox before then, otherwise it's not.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  No, absolutely. No, actors who have Botox are not very good in performance capture. It's a well-known fact. You know, because they're like that, and they talk, and nothing moves, and they just do that. And so, no, probably not the best career move if you've had a lot of Botox. Not saying it's impossible, would be very restrained performances.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, this is 2014. Why don't they just do this with a continuous laser scan, so that every millimeter of your face is known?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  You know, it is evolving constantly. Facial performance capture is totally evolving, and the use of head-mounted cameras for real high-definition, you know, video reference with markers all over your face, I mean, that's where it's at at the moment. But I think there will be, you know, a sort of a version without that, where it's purely optical, and we would have done away with all of that in the near future.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. Okay, so Ian, I didn't know this. You're saying humans are unique among, in the animal kingdom, for our facial expressions?

• 29:13Speaker 03

  We have amazingly complex muscular arrangements in our face that allow us to...

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A chimp has the same muscles in the face?

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Doesn't have exactly the same muscles in the face, has the same basic muscle pattern, but it doesn't use those muscles in exactly the same way. And again, so you're gonna get a very human-looking chimp when you use video motion capture in the way that is just described.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you put human facial expressions on a chimp in motion capture, that animates the chimp's expressions and emotions far more than an actual chimp would ever express?

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Certainly a lot more than we would ever recognize in the face of a chimpanzee.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Do chimps recognize each other's facial expressions? Do they have the same range of sort of emotions and expressions, we just don't read them as well? Because of how little we talk to chimps?

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, maybe they're more subtle than that.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  That may well be part of it. But in fact, the range of emotions I think that we express with our faces is a lot more diverse than you find in chimpanzees.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more StarTalk Radio.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. So Ian, we've got a follow-up question. We're talking about the emotions of chimps and other apes. Do they wage organized war?

• 30:45Speaker 03

  They certainly wage organized aggression. Whether war and all the implications that we place on it, I don't know, but it's certainly documented that sometimes bands of males organize themselves, go into the territories of other males with apparently the ultimate aim of taking over those territories.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  And do they ever then regroup and attack again?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Usually what happens is one group is bigger than another group and that group wins the conflict and displaces the others.

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the conflict who yells the loudest, or do they draw blood?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  They draw blood. They murder each other. There is some very grisly footage out there.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Do they use stones or sticks, or they're just...

• 31:29Speaker 03

  No, they don't. They're not good at throwing things.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  But they can whack each other with sticks.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like that, they would be awesome pitchers in the major league.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  I can't wait to teach them how to use javelins.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get back to my interview with Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in The Dawn and the Rise of the Planet of the Apes. And I wanted to find out just more about him as an actor and what makes him tick. Let's find out. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm blowing smoke, but consider that your talent at this has its own force on the creativity of others who say, "Wow, look what is possible. I will now write a story that involves more of that." Because if you failed at this, if you were not an interesting character, it wouldn't draw the next generation of creative people to write or tell stories in that mode. So, I mean, you're really doing quite a service here for the industry.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I can't possibly think in those kind of grand terms, really. You know, it is my passion and it is, you know, the Imaginarium is an extension of that. Look, here's the thing. When I started acting, I started in a theatre that had quite a committed sort of social approach to what theatre was and was lucky enough to work with a director who was quite political in many ways, in that he saw the job of the actor as service. And that you go out and you research and you build your characters and you come back and you perform in a play to affect an audience and to engage them and make them think and emotionally connect. That you are lucky enough to be in a privileged position where, you know, if you're taking the stage, you better have something to say and you better have something important to convey. And I've always carried that with me and, you know, and it doesn't always work and sometimes

• 33:06Speaker 02

  you're in terrible projects and sometimes you lose faith completely. But I think the ability to work on in these kinds of movies, which are broad, you know, huge epic fantasies or such a big canvas, to be able to have that play through and actually connect with such a wide audience. We are in very privileged positions, which is why I find it very annoying when, you know, big buster movies don't do anything more than just splurge and become eye candy. I think it's insulting and I think one of the things that, like for instance, Matt Reeves has done with this movie is gone so far beyond in saying to an audience, you can be entertained, but you can think and you can feel at the same time. That's, I suppose, going back to your point, I mean, that's the background for me. That's what was in my makeup that actually has led me down this path. What is storytelling going to be?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  How will children in 10 years, 15, 20 years' time receive stories? I mean, is it interactive? Is it an emotionally engaging, interactive story? These are questions that are really interesting to me.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I asked him, have any Academy Awards ever been given for motion capture actors? I think the answer to that is no. And I wanted to know what his reaction to that fact would be. Let's find out.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will the day come where someone whose face you never see on the screen win an Academy Award for Best Actor?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  I don't know, that's a very, very hard question.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the Academy ready for that?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  What's important about it is that the education of what this process is, performance capture technology, I think that needs to be understood. And I think that is, the perception has shifted and people are beginning to understand that it is an actor authoring the role on set with other actors and a director, creating the scenes. You don't push a button and a character comes out, it's entirely acted. And the visual effects team and the processes that take on that and interpolate are equally as impressive and magnificent and the artistry that goes into that is not to be underestimated, but their visual effects. But the authorship of the role, unlike other animations, for instance, where you have a core or a team of animators, the actor is the guardian, the emotional guardian of the life and the soul of the character that they're playing.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  So that needs to be understood. And whether the final manifestation on screen is, you know, the actor is recognizable because, I don't think it should be, for instance, I don't think one should be discriminated against because your face isn't on screen, because you're still giving as entire a performance.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're gonna portray other animals, obviously apes come really close to us, but there was the movie Bugs Life, and part of what made the insects charming was that they had human body gestures and things. Maybe that's what you need, right? If you were a perfect grasshopper, you wouldn't, it wouldn't be an interesting character to portray.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Ian, you studied chimps and apes and monkeys, don't you have, isn't there like a monkey species named after you?

• 35:53Speaker 03

  No, there's a lemur species named for me, but not a monkey species. Don't give up Ian. I'm working on it.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One day. Aren't lemurs, aren't monkeys?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Lemurs are not monkeys.

• 36:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Are monkeys apes? Apes are not monkeys and neither are lemurs.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I, you know, I thought I understood, so, and how about baboons? What are they?

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Baboons are monkeys and we're all primates.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But baboons don't have, don't have tails though, right?

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Baboons have tails and apes don't.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Okay, so.

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we don't have tails. So we're apes?

• 36:23Speaker 03

  We don't have tails, and we're apes.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some humans are born with tails, vestigial tails. And they quickly snip it off.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  They're baboon humans. They poon them off quickly. It's a, it's kind of, it's a business.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta run. That's this edition of StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Eugene, thanks for being on. Ian Tattersall, always, I want to have more of you in the future. Promise you'll come back?

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've been brought to you in part by a grant from the Sloan Foundation, as always. This is Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you to keep looking up.