Disclosure Day with Steven Spielberg & David Koepp

Have aliens already secretly visited us? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp to discuss their new film Disclosure Day, alien contact, and why Spielberg believes there’s more out there than meets the eye.

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  People have a right to know the truth. It belongs to seven billion people.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is it?

• 0:10Speaker 00

  You won't believe me if I told you. So I'm gonna show you.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you gonna do?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Full disclosure. To the whole world. All at once.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we've got something special brewing. Oh, yeah. We're gonna talk about Disclosure Day. Not just in the abstract, but I've got with me here the one, the only Steven Spielberg. It's his story, and he directed it. But we also have the writer David Kep, who not only wrote Disclosure Day, but wrote many other science fiction films, not only in collaboration with Steven, but also of his own. So we know this episode is gonna serve your geek underbelly.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's coming right up on StarTalk.

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steven, good to see you again.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Good to see you.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming on to the podcast. We did a little bit of homework, and I did not know that your first student film was called Firelight, about aliens.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was called Firelight. I made it an 8mm, on 8mm film. I was 17 years old, I was in high school.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, aliens have just been a thing?

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Well, it was more about UFOs. It was, and it wasn't peace-loving aliens. The first one I did was much more of the formulaic, you know, monogram movie exploitation. And, but it was, it was in an area of interest ever since I was a kid.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, I mean, why wouldn't it be? Because everybody's interested in aliens at some point. But you have the power to bring it to life on levels that no one could have imagined.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Well, it's not really so much my interest in aliens. It's been my interest in the unknown. And the feeling I've had, you know, for a very long time, having been a consumer of everything involving the unknown, not the unknown, you know, a million light-years from here, but the unknown right here. And it's always been something that's really interested me. And I've always wondered, you know, if the unknown is known by a very small group of people, the injustice of not everyone knowing what they know is kind of what drives me especially to tell the story of Disclosure Day.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It never occurred to me to think of people left out as being the consequence of an injustice.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  And inequity, maybe, is a better word for it.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, but still, I'm applauding the term, because when it's an injustice, you want to correct that as a viewer. You want to right the wrong. And you clearly establish that in Disclosure Day. I mean, that was the greatest feeling any of us had as we watched this. A question that I've always had, as a director, what is the value of the eyes of whatever it is you're looking into? Not only in Disclosure Day, was there a lot of eye contact from animal, you know, non-human animals to human animals, but also

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  human to human, where you're kind of seeing into their soul, imparting a bit of empathy, I guess, for lack of a better word there?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  That is the word.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is the word of the day.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  That is the key word of the day.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But aliens tend, as we now think of them, they all have big eyes. And eyes seem to matter. Can you just speak a little bit as a director? And let me throw in the mix, the eye contact with a velociraptor.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? I mean, at my museum, the velociraptor is not much bigger than a big dog. But they were sort of pumped up in Jurassic Park so that you're making eye contact with something that's going to eat you. So not only is it a source of fear, but as a source of, a potential source of empathy. Just, how does that feel?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Well, with, with human beings, you know, eyes are the mirrors of the soul. And to animals, I guess, eyes are the mirrors of the appetite. But, but they both serve a similar purpose.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Animals with teeth.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  They both give a kind of satiation, you know. And, and I've, I think everything is in the eyes. It's all, it's, it's in the eyes, you know, it's from, it's from anything you've, any movie experience anybody's ever had. It's all about the, E.T.'s eyes in my film, was, was critically important. The design of those eyes were critically important. It's a little bit harder with what people report, when they report, um, um, non-human entities. They, there's no iris or pupil. So, so it's

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never thought about that. They're never drawn with anything inside the eye.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  No, but, but, but there are other things happening when people have close encounters of the third kind, which is that, that, how that, that, that sort of, you know, defines itself. Um, that there is something that is also a psychic part of looking into an eye of a non-human, uh, uh, as, has been reported, and still feeling something without needing the pupil or the iris.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, in Disclosure Day, uh, because they actually had a, an alien, uh, I always felt like, what's the need to even disclose any video if you've got the alien? What do you need the video for?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  You need the context. You've got to have 80 years of context.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  You've got to be able to, he steals 80 years of the truth that, that has been hidden from the public and even from the government. Because, you know, it's very hard for elected officials to keep secrets, you know. But in a, in a way, contracted, you know, you know, deep state, contract companies, contracted companies, they're pretty good at keeping secrets. There's not a lot, lot of leaks from The big tech companies or even

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless there's a mutiny as in Disclosure Day.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  And there had been whistleblowers that went to the, you know, House Intelligence Committee and gave their testimony, you know, Grush, Fravor and Ryan.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sworn under oath, yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Sworn under oath.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twenty twenty-three, yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Twenty twenty-three in front of, in front of Congress and the American public.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So that's quite the setup for this movie, but presumably the movie was percolating even before then, right? Takes time to make a movie.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  It does.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were those testimonies the trigger for this whole idea?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  The trigger for the whole idea was the New York Times article.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that article that came out in the New York Times in twenty seventeen.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, and that was, that was the trigger for me, which was the, the first time we ever heard the term Tic Tac being used instead of UFO. Because first it was UFO and then it was Tic Tac and then we hear something called UAP. It's all confusing, you know, unidentified anomalous phenomenon.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's who they fooling.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  I like UFOs. Can we go back to UFOs?

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please, completely.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember speaking of a Tic Tac at the time and a few weeks later at my office, a whole crate of Tic Tac showed up.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's free advertising for, for them. I just had questions about this story, you know, all the places are mentioned, we've heard tension occur and all of the Korea and Russia and Ukraine and, and so that's kind of this buildup behind the disclosure because that's the backdrop, that's the landscape.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Landscape.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On which this is unfolding.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What were you, what was your goal there?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Well, my goal was not to lay it on thick. My goal was to suggest that there was something approaching critical mass happening in the world.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh-huh.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Uh, that at least was bringing back the word DEFCON.

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  You know, and, and that, that, you know, we, people tend to take these things in their stride. I remember during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was in high school and when it was hitting the tele, my parents went to a dinner party and I, I was home with my three sisters worrying about the world ending. My parents weren't worried about that during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  And, and, and so there are people who aren't going to really be focused on the DEFCON situation, but there is a crisis happening in the world which has something to do with the timing. Of Disclosure Day.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and it's coincidence surely that the government is releasing files right around when you've got your movie coming out.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  That is complete coincidence.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless you have access.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I know, no, no.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can tell me, I won't tell anybody.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  No, my movie is not a holistic review of the entire UFO phenomenon as fed to me by, you know, by any actors inside or outside, you know, the government. I had no, I've had no government contact about this at all.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna have quality time with your writer, your longtime partner.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  David Koepp.

• 9:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let me just ask, what would you say of this movie is your imprimatur as director and storyteller?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Well, I wrote the story.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  So I wrote it from scratch, based on my deep interest in this subject and so much was starting to come out in 2017.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  And I was very satisfied with Close Encounters, very satisfied having made E.T. and then even War of the Worlds, which was more analogous to 9/11.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Than to Aliens. But this, when I saw that everybody that has a smartphone has been photographing and capturing some extraordinary things happening.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're crowdsourcing any possible alien invasion.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  It's incredible how much is out there right now. And some of it, yes, can be faked, but a lot of it, I don't think is. And it just, my interest, I didn't think I would get interested again in this subject. And then when the 2017 New York Times article came out, I thought, well, you know, something's about to happen. May not be this year or next year, but something is going to happen. And I really would like this movie to be my summation story in my entire, I guess, filmography of UFOs and extraterrestrials.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let's explore empathy some more.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that really mattered in this film.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yes, it does.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who trusts whom?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How and why? Trusting a stranger, complete stranger?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, how did empathy land as a running theme?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Well, because I've often, I've dwelled a lot about not just empathy, but the lack of empathy. And the feeling that empathy is sort of in short supply. It used to be a lot more taken for granted, and now you have to kind of find it, reach for it. The way the world's, our country's divided and the way people go to their silos and they stayed with their groups and it's kinda like-

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heels dug in?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Heels dug in, it's sort of like sports too, you know, in that sense. There's not a lot of empathy between, you know, crowds competing against each other in any sporting event. Empathy is toward your team, toward your home team, but not toward the opposition. And so, more and more, we're having less and less common ground that we can find. And I do a lot of philanthropic work through our Hearthland Foundation, trying to fund things that bring people of different ideologies and beliefs together. Not to change their minds, I'm not interested in changing anybody's mind, just finding common ground so we can start joining together as opposed to separating further and further.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Disclosure Day has a lot to do with that, and empathy is the key.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, how would you draw the line between national security and the public's urge to know?

• 12:23Speaker 02

  I think the public's urge to know is more like a right to know. And I think when, you know, you could always look back and look at all of the conspiracy theories and all of the urban myths, and you could look at all of the legends that haunt us constantly that television shows are made from. It's great, it's great material-

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have no entertainment with that.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  It's great material for us, you know, but when you look at it, the one thing that hasn't changed, the one thing that could be considered mythology, which is ufology, could be considered by some mythology, but when you look at the consistency of the reporting, how it's so consistent for 80 years, you know, I am on much firmer ground now, certainly with all the circumstantial evidence that's out there, for me to believe that, you know, they're here.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now empathy is something that the aliens in War of the Worlds did not have.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just came and they just want to slaughter with abandon.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a 19th century book written by the great H.G.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not blaming you.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm saying, no, but I'm just saying that I made a choice to, you know, to make it a very aggressive.

• 13:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Indeed, it was.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  A very dark, a very dark film.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  About, about invasion and annihilation and genocide.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have any feelings? Oh, that's the wrong word. Do you have any thoughts on whether aliens would be sympathetic, empathetic, evil? What might be their motives or their attitudes towards us? Just given your sense of the world.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Well, my, my sense of the world is, is obviously, you know, already on film with Close Encounters. A benign, you know, non-human civilization coming here and E.T. is as benign as you could possibly imagine. Any entity could be. And, and I, I believe that what's been going on is, is, is not something that we should fear. It's something that we should be very open to.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In spite of how cinema has trained us to, to just completely believe in an evil aliens. I mean, that's, that trophy is with us.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, if I hadn't made War of the Worlds, that was not in my filmography, I would say, well, I've been trying to train us too between three movies, but War of the Worlds kind of makes me a hypocrite to say.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally undoes your line there.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  It undoes my, my, my, my good intentions and yet I do have good intentions and I, and I, I am optimistic that whatever is interacting with us, whatever is here, out there, under the water, wherever it, and whoever knows the truth, knows that this is not something, you know, that we need to flee in panic. There's going to be a lot of ontological shock if this ever gets announced and the stuff that the government or the Pentagon has been releasing in trips and drabs is kind of, kind of hard to see what it is. But, but what they're releasing is not causing, going to cause any, you know, social dislocation. Because it's not enough and nobody's coming out and making that big public announcement.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  They're here, they've been here, they've always been here. That's, short of that, there is no, you know, culture shock. But ontological shock happens when your fundamental, fundamental beliefs of what you consider reality are shattered by a new world reality. And, and-

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was, of course, comically addressed in Men in Black.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your whole understanding of the world is changed.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  That's right. That's why they have to keep it quiet.

• 16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And they got that magic light thing.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  They have the neuralizer and of course-

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neuralizer.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Neuralizer and of course it can only happen in New York City.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A quick, another element about empathy.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You expect everyone to want the government to disclose aliens.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  No, there are people who don't want the government to disclose any of this.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and-

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Because it's not going to shake up our core truth of our core reality.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's want to keep the rest of us in the dark.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are people who don't really want this disclosed. Not just government people, but there are people in the country that would rather, you know, get the price of eggs down. You know, not have to worry about all this.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, you know, in America, our movies are our culture. They're, they're our binding force among us. So with Disclosure Day, you've already disclosed the aliens. I don't need the Pentagon anymore because Steven Spielberg has done so. At least some people are surely going to feel that.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Well, I've told a story that, that, that is, is, I've told a story from my imagination based on credible things that I have seen and heard about and read for years. But it did go through a process to be able to find a great story. It's a, this is a chase film. This is an action picture.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  You need to put on a seatbelt and a chest harness when this film starts. And it shoots you kind of out of a cannon and, and you got to really pay attention and keep up and don't go on your phones and, and text other people. You got to go see this movie. Wait until the movie's over before you talk to anybody. Watch the screen. And that's very important to be able to comprehend it all. But at the same time, you know, this is not a documentary. This, this, this is a story. But, but you're, you asked great questions because that's what you've done your whole career. And you know, you're, you're one of the greatest, uh, uh, science- People that I know.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, thank you. I'm just trying to keep it real.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  You do.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steven, thank you.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Great to talk to you again.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would you do if a spacecraft appeared in the sky tonight and it wasn't ours? Would you panic or would you prepare? And how might you prepare? In my latest book, Take Me To Your Leader, I offer a guide to things you might say or do in a first encounter with an alien species. What we might look to them, what they might look to us, what habits you should just leave at home because they won't understand them, what bits of science that you might be able to share, to see and explore if you have things in common, things you should and should not say, things you should and should not do

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the presence of aliens in a first encounter. You can grab a copy today of Take Me To Your Leader. Not only the print version, but the audio version that I narrated. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, welcome to Startalk. Thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, it's not often we get to hang out with a screenwriter. Well, we keep to ourselves. Oh, apparently. We hide in our room. Because the actors get all the shine and the red carpets. And but they're just speaking your words. They, on a good day.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're nice to them, they'll do that. You've got quite the portfolio here, especially in the Geekiverse, if I may. Going back to Jurassic Park, we love it. Spider-Man, personally, that was my favorite of all the Spider-Mans, the first one, if I may say that.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Ah, well, thanks.

• 20:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I may say that.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  It's okay with me. The advantage of novelty and getting to tell how something started is everything.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and we got War of the Worlds, of course, in the remake from '05. And is Steven Spielberg your primary guy that you collaborate with? Or you have other... Or you freelance and he just plucks you when he needs you?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Well, we've done, I think this is nine or 10 together, so that's quite a bit. Yeah, it's been a great collaboration. I've over 30-some years since Jurassic Park. I have worked repeatedly with a few others, you know, Steven Soderbergh, Brian De Palma. There's like, and there's different, because there's different aspects of yourself and your interests that people are suited to, but Steven's the one our interests most frequently line up.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And could you correct something in my understanding? Or at least highlight for me, when you're a screenwriter, you're not just writing the words people speak. Aren't you also conjuring the scene in which those words are communicated?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Thanks for asking, Neil. Most certainly, yes, you are. The screenwriter's responsibility is everything an audience sees or hears.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't think people think that. They think it's just what the script line. But you're putting the image in front of us.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if you're writing a scene really well, you're not using so much dialogue. You're using images, visuals, movies or visual experiences. Those are the powerful memories that we have from them.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, I've heard that you can always tell a first-timer. When they, they put everything in the script. They, they don't know how to use the visual medium.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For all that it's worth.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, those things, the things in audio, we, the only things we can perceive in a movie are what we see in here. Those are the two senses we bring to a movie.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so therefore, where does the director come in?

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Uh, the director, it depends. The director can come in from the very beginning and ask you to start. The director then comes in, the good ones, they can come in later after you've written the script. The good ones don't just record what you wrote, they interpret it. So, they will say things that, look at your material from a different point of view. Uh, I was, I wrote this movie called Snake Eyes, Brian De Palma directed. And, uh, he asked me after one or two drafts, can you make this first 15 pages so I can do it in one shot?

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Uh, and I said, no. And he said, okay, give it a shot. So I went and gave it a shot and rewrote it. I never would have occurred to me, I never would have imagined it that way. I never would have interpreted it that way. And that's what the director does.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, then that's a collaboration at its best.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Very much.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tension at first, and then you resolve to something greater.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than either would have been.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I, with Disclosure Day, as presumably existed with other films, there's some mixture of science and fiction. Hence the word sci-fi, science fiction. How do you navigate that boundary?

• 23:13Speaker 03

  I always want to get it right if I can. I think, anything that involves science, I start the idea by doing as much research as I can possibly do. Talking to people is always better than the internet, and certainly it's better than AI sources.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean a human to human conversation?

• 23:28Speaker 03

  An actual conversation with a person.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, novel.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause then you'll come up with unexpected things and little character things and stuff. But I stop at a certain point because I now realize, well, okay, now I have to write the story. And it, the foremost responsibility of this movie is that it be entertaining. So I cannot let reality and truth intrude too much on entertainment. But then, once I've written it, now there's another round of research. Let's make this as close to reality as we can.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, interesting. So, so the... Entertainment, because someone has to pay to see the movie and they want to do that willingly.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's not a documentary.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not not a documentary.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  And they understand that going in, so I don't feel like I'm misleading society. They understand this is not a documentary. But anything I do that's real and grounded in truth and reality and actual research works better.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a little black book with your science consultants in there? Is that how that works?

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, kind of. I'd written a novel once that I needed to talk to a microbiologist for. And I wrote the whole novel and then I gave it to him and said, now listen, I found one through friends. And said, listen.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  F1 does. It's on your microbiologist groups, okay?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Easy to do. I said, read this, I want you to have a good laugh. And then I want you to please, if you're interested, work with me, let's make it closer to reality. And he read it and he called me and said, okay, well, it's not terrible. And I took that as huge praise. I was like, all right, then let's work on it.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's, it's good to know that that can happen. One of my great frustrations is to hear a creative person say, I didn't want reality to constrain my creative plot lines. And often, 80%, not 100% of the time, 80% of the time, had they known scientific reality more deeply, the plot could have even been strengthened.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than constrained.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the universe is often stranger than you have imagined.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  It's a pretty wondrous place.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  And life forms are pretty unusual and varied. And you can draw more from, from reality than you, it's better in reality. Nature has come up with something more interesting than whatever's in your head, I guarantee.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the, the science advice can come in presumably at any phase of this, right? You want to get the story idea down, but then you touch it up as you go forward.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, in this case, there was a lot of research first because there's been, there's been a lot, there's a lot of material.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have access, right?

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Then you have access. And people do want to talk. It doesn't hurt if you can say it's a Steven Spielberg movie, then they really want to talk. They actually return your phone call.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Henceforth, when we say it's a David Kent movie, that.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  That gets one kind of return phone call. Uh, but a better one is it's a Spielberg movie.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is the process you go through as a screenwriter if you're starting with? Pre-existing material, a novel. War of the Worlds, a very famous novel. In fact, it's already been made into a movie in 1951. So, what do you see as your role doing that a second time in a well-established piece of sci-fi?

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Well, the first thing you want to do is reread it. I'd read it as a kid and I knew the book well. But I had not read it with the intention of making it into a movie. So I read it again. I didn't watch the George Powell movie yet because I didn't want to remake that. I wanted, we were trying to reinterpret the book for, for modern times. You reread the novel and start to think, what applies, what doesn't? But you have to have an idea for, how do I make this different from a book? Where everything is explicit and everything is said and you know what people think and you know what they feel? And science can go on for pages. How do I make this a movie experience? And a big thing in that was limiting the point of view. You have to have an idea. Our idea there was, okay, let's go from one person's point of view. And if they don't see it, we don't see it.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's brilliant because now I'm in suspense the whole time.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Right. And, you know, Stephen's done very well by suggesting more than he shows. So if, if.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a trademark.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  It's a trademark. It's born out of necessity, which is what's, what's brilliant about it. It's the famous stories about jaws and the shark not working. And it, and it also didn't hurt that our main character, we had Tom Cruise, who was going to be an interesting person you want to watch anyway. So if you're going to restrict a point of view, that's the rule. Do it with someone interesting.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So, let's go to Jurassic Park for a moment.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I work at the Museum of Natural History. You, you're a neighbor.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And surely you've seen our velociraptor.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a fossil velociraptor on display. It's not much bigger than a large dog. In Jurassic Park, okay, it was sort of pumped up to be human-sized so that eye contact is a thing. Could you describe to me the role of eye contact in storytelling?

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Oh, that's not where I thought you were going. That's, that's good.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, I mean, because it can be love or you could be the person's next meal.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eyes are everything here.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Particularly, I mean, one of the ideas behind Jurassic Park, there's a, you know, there's the central brilliant Crichton, once in a lifetime idea of, you know, the preservation of the DNA in amber, which is fantastic. The other

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael Crichton.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Michael Crichton, yes, yes. The other idea is rearranging our place in the food chain. That has worked in a couple of Jaws, notably, and certainly Jurassic Park. We love to think about that. I think because it hits us in a very elemental place. We used to hide in caves and worry about the cries of the tigers at night.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're bringing that back to life.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Please, yeah.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which gives us all.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Exactly. Let's tap into this.

• 29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why you get the big bucks.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that's how we know we've got your attention. It's like, you know how Disney movies always kill a parent early on?

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  They grab those kids' attention and hold on to it. And I think I

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the superheroes, they're all orphans, right?

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. But you're quite right. Eye contact is a vital part of that. And I think the sequence, one of the sequences people really remember is when the great hunter is stalked and defeated by the velociraptor that comes around the side of him. And the thing we see that reveals the raptor is the eye. Eyes really are portals to everything.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So you're affirming what I suspected is that this is an important

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  part of your, of the intensity of a scene.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. I'm intrigued as you describe your access to our primal fears and how you exploit that in the storytelling. But there are also perhaps other primal emotions that perhaps serve your storytelling needs. In Disclosure Day, empathy was an important piece of that.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Oh, it's everything. It was Stephen's notion, which is embodied in a beautiful monologue Coleman Domingo delivers. Don't condescend to me.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  I'm listening to you, Noah. Something I've learned quite a bit about.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  From your friends?

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yes. They regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage, as the foremost evolutionary advantage. In fact,

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The core of animate existence. Our rejection of this understanding is leading us to our extinction.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Empathy can be seen as the foremost necessary evolutionary quality. It's another way I think of saying cooperation. Any great human accomplishment is only done through cooperation. You can go back to the agrarian revolution and say the idea that we all must plant and harvest this stuff and then help each other store it is what led to the massive explosion in population. It's what led to the success of the

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we call civilization.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Civilization, building a bridge. No one can do it unless we do it together. And I think that that's, that sometimes gets overlooked as a necessary next evolutionary step, which is increased empathy, understanding others and working with others is the only thing that'll let us succeed and prevent our own destruction.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want to speak for you and your craft, but the greatest of the villains are the ones that you have some feeling for in some way. Otherwise, they're just, you know, kill them off.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  That's what Mr. Spielberg is so good at, is insisting that every character is a character, even a villain. Why are they a villain? What is it that's pushing them? They don't, please let no one twirl their mustache. And he's, there's, there's a scene in the movie that follows a massive train chase. You see it in the trailer, so I'm not giving anything away. It's thrilling. It's great action filmmaking. The traditional end of that scene is the release of they escaped. Oh, thank goodness. But there's another scene that follows it, which is an incredibly emotional scene in the boxcar. And that's Steven, the early drafts of the script didn't have that scene.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  And he said, but this is the most frightening thing that's ever happened to them in their entire lives. There would be emotional fallout. Can we see that? And that's just being attuned to character.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I deeply remember that scene because it was wholly unexpected. They drop into a boxcar. It could have been anything. And it's, it's a quiet, tender scene.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, emotionally violent inside, but there are people working together to try to resolve those feelings.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because at different times, we're asking ourselves, does the Colin Firth character have it right? Is he protecting civilization? Whose side should we be on? And I can tell you that, you know, yes, I want disclosure, of course, but you can see where he's coming from.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  He makes a fair point. We have not traditionally done well with sudden, dramatic, cultural change. And we're not doing well right now.

• 33:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, speak to me, again, the importance of being able to sympathize or empathize even with people branded as evil in a story.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Well, you have to do your honest best to understand their point of view and to actually believe it. We did an interesting process on this script where there were five main characters. And at one point, we did a draft solely from the point of view of that character. I'm not saying we rewrote the entire script, so it's only them, but thinking about every scene and every moment only from their point of view. And that really helps you strengthen their arguments. I think Colin's character is quite right about most of what he says. He goes too far, but I think he's right about what he says. And I don't think if the action of the movie continued after the last moment of the movie, I don't think it's all peaches and cream. I think there's a lot of tumult that's coming.

• 34:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, given the points of view that we were treated to, really, because then at the end, we'd make our own resolution, right? And that's allowed. I kept asking myself, would my level of empathy for the aliens, because that's really what it came down to? I just wonder, suppose that footage wasn't there? And you just had sort of UFO sightings and maybe an alien from a crashed saucer lifted onto a stretcher? Would we still?

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feel as much as we did were it not for that just one squealing alien.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  No, I don't think we would have. And I think it's telling that that's Josh's character says, that's the footage Hugo showed me to get me to agree to do this.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To join the mutiny.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  And that means everything because it's a great turn on every single thing we've always thought about aliens. They're omnipotent, right? Because they can handle interstellar travel.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  They're gods. They can do everything we can't and they're invulnerable. But no, they're not. And their ships can crash and they can be injured and we can do terrible things because we have kind of a history of doing terrible things.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we're dicks.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Sometimes.

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, because that's, I thought that, I don't want to call it a turning point, but that was a key shift in the depth of my empathy that I would have for the aliens. Now, of course, in ET, you know, they grab them and they, towards the end, they want to operate them on them and cut them open or whatever they were going to do, the medical doctors, out of curiosity, I suppose, but it's still, once you've built a relationship with the character up until then, that's just evil at that level. However, in Disclosure Day, we don't yet have a relationship with the alien.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We didn't look it in the eyes yet. So, why did that work so well?

• 36:41Speaker 03

  It's a, I hadn't thought of it that way until you said it. It's a really strong structural underpinning of the script because it subverted our expectations and it demanded that we question things we had just taken for granted. And you see, but you see this kind of, you know, like this kind of deep empathy is in Spielberg's work all the way through. Just as you were talking, I was thinking about jaws. And while the shark is not-

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one has sympathy for the jaws.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  No, but it's, no sympathy for sure. But it's presented as just doing what it does. It's an animal. It needs to eat. It needs to eat, sleep and make baby sharks. And that's what it's doing. You can't judge it for that.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. I just gotta deal with it.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just being a-

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Maybe stay out of its lane, you know?

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just being a shark.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't blame a shark for being a shark. And maybe it's because we know the alien has intelligence.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a threshold that, above which we care about, or we resonate with. You'd agree with that?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah. I mean, I think with some animals, we kind of are kidding ourselves that they don't have an intelligence where they might understand what's happening to them.

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course. And the more we study animals, the more intelligent we find out that they are.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. My daughter, who's a vegetarian, would say, "We are all kidding ourselves and we're horribly cruel."

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you'll never be as woke as your daughter?

• 38:06Speaker 03

  No, maybe not.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you considered the possibility that the evil alien trope, which was not kept- that was not what Disclosure Day was about, but we, when we've encountered other humans of lower technological prowess, it's never boded well for the, you know, in the whole era of colonization. People were enslaved, killed, you know, and so we imagine these evil aliens. Would you agree that that might just be a mirror to ourselves?

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we're imputing our history onto them. I think we assume, "Well, the Spaniards wiped out the Aztecs, therefore this is what's gonna happen to us."

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's just one of many examples that could be given. So for Steven, in multiple movies, War of the Worlds accepted, to have an alien that is not- does not want to harm you, this is a little weird, given the tropes we are fed.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's another way of thinking about it, which is, uh, but that's it- and it's fairly consistent across his four movies where he's touched on the subject. In three of the cases, uh, maybe they are, I don't know if they're benevolent or not, but they're certainly not malevolent. And then in War of the Worlds, it's, you know,

• 39:31Speaker 03

  anything goes.

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  But that's just for diversity of viewpoint.

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you think of people who are capable of great harm? But inside, they think they're doing the right thing. As a screenwriter, what do you do about that?

• 39:46Speaker 03

  Well, you have to have the second part of what you said. You have to have the inside, they think they're doing the right thing. And you have to think of it from their point of view and find real reasons to justify why that might be the right thing. Why might they be correct? Because any good actor is gonna come in, well, first of all, your story's better that way. But any good actor is gonna come in-

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, it gets two-dimensional, right? I mean-

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're not really, you stop paying attention, you don't take the movie as seriously, you're not as engaged. But any good actor is gonna come in and act like their character's lawyer. And they're gonna say, "Now, you're not fairly representing my client's interests here." And you better be right.

• 40:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seriously?

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Single-minded point of view.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd never thought about that. Okay. Because this is, that's their craft.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they have to do it. They have to stand up, Colin had to stand up there and say these things. And find them believable and justifiable. Genuinely, for himself. So, you have to write better material.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  This is Ken the Nerd Neck Zabera from Michigan, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I can't have been the only one to have immediately thought of "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When Disclosure Day comes, and everyone has stopped, and is looking at their smartphone. The world stopped. All I can think of was "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And- Were you thinking that as well? I mean.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Sure, but that is how it happens. I mean, that's what we all remember. Take the pivotal events in history and remember where you were when. We all do. And there are some things that happen that are so consequential, you stop. Everybody stops. Some reference, that movie's a landmark and I adore it. And so some reference, not necessarily that you're consciously referring to those things, but you're not running away from it either. You're not saying, "Well, we can't do that because Day the Earth Stood Still did it." Well, yes, because that's what would happen.

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it would happen. Yeah. You're not just, you're both representing a reality. You're not copying each other.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a separate reality that you're both trying to capture.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And it was clearly manifest where, on the front lines, where people might have been ready to fight, which is of course a persistent theme in the background of the entire film. These are hotbed spots in the current news with Russia, Ukraine, and Korea, and, you know, South Korea, North Korea. We, it's there. And when Earth stood still, there were these soldiers looking at their smartphone.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  There's a moment that everything stops and no matter who you are.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter who.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  And it reminded.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was conveyed brilliantly.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Good.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Silently and brilliantly.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, a lot of the best things in movies are done without dialogue.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  And it reminded me of, who was the astronaut who, most of them actually, when, when they're in space and they look back on, at the Earth, there is an inevitable feeling of, "Oh, my goodness, we're very small and we're all in this together."

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there are two layers of that. There's the overview effect that the astronauts have gone into orbit, have experienced. Then there's what I would, I'd pump that up a bit and call a cosmic perspective when you're on the moon and the entire Earth is there, just adrift in darkness. That would be a full-up cosmic perspective.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you don't get that perspective unless you step out.

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  And so our challenge is, how do we get that to happen? But obviously, we stay here on Earth.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the whole movie, you're treating us to chaos of the world with familiar places we've seen in the news where there's conflict. You didn't have to do that, but it was there. So you're kind of setting us up to believe that disclosure.

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Might remedy that, I guess. Is that, was this an explicit thought that you had?

• 44:01Speaker 03

  That's an excellent speculation, and I hope so. What we wanted the end of this movie to be was like somebody clapping their hands together in front of your face. To say, "Hey!"

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wake the [__] up.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  And then in that moment, what's next? I would love to see what's next. I have my own ideas about what's next, but the-

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I smell sequel!

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Because you can't answer every single question all at once. We wanted the whole notion of getting this, what we've been fighting the entire movie to do is to get this information out. Get the truth out to people. Now, what effect will that truth have? It's a part of what you said earlier. It's, you don't have to have the empathy for these extraterrestrials. You don't have to have Earth in such terrible chaos. But that's what, that's the purpose of the story, and that's what makes us involve ourselves more.

• 44:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I have just some more sharpened, technical questions. What's funny to me is, no one has ever actually seen an alien, or brought forth an alien-

• 45:02Speaker 03

  That we are aware of.

• 45:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we all know what aliens look like. I just find that, you can draw an alien with big eyes, you know, ball head. Just once, give me an alien with hair. An alien is humanoid, they could be mammalian, and all mammals have hair. Give it like a nice hairdo.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  I'll tell you what really fascinates me. We do have a sort of universal perception of what we think aliens look like.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and it's embedded.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  It's embedded, it's based on movies, it's based on lore, it's based on what we think, an interpretation of our physical self. Here's what's interesting to me. We can perceive, what do we see between about 4,000 and 7,000 angstroms?

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's say it's a visible light, yes.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  That's what we can see. What we can hear, I don't know how many decibels, but I know our dogs can hear more than we can.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with 20 to 20,000 hertz.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a nice, it's very easy to remember. And dogs can hear higher pitches than 20,000 hertz.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  But not lower than 20?

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not lower than 20, right. But you might feel it, because it becomes a pulse.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Right, right. So I asked the right guy.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  But those are fairly crude senses. So we invented some devices that could help us see other things. You know, the telescope.

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  All the things we've invented.

• 46:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is modern science.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  The last hundred years, it's really gone far.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is modern science.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  But who's to say we certainly aren't still perceiving everything that exists around us? We're perceiving a lot more with the help of our gizmos. But who's to say these alien life forms don't exist in a form that we can't yet perceive? I find that as the agnostics' most reasonable explanation for why things exist that I don't understand.

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They sit outside of your sensory.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  They may well, and not just our sensory, but all the technical equipment that we have to perceive things.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me pick up on language for a moment. So the lead character, Emily Blunt's character, speaks in a couple of different scenes. One fluent Russian, another one fluent Korean. And she's not self-aware of that. She just thinks she's speaking. Is this alien powers imbued within her that they gave her? Do you have, can you give us some place to anchor what was going on there?

• 47:25Speaker 03

  I think we see with Emily's character, when the bird appears, something happens.

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They make eye contact.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  They make eye contact, which is what it's all about. And then she starts speaking in Russian in a way that she doesn't understand. Hey Maggie, you okay? You okay? Are you all right?

• 47:43Speaker 05

  Да, я в порядке. Просто голова болит. Я не выспилась. Нью-Йорк. Не знаю, может быть нам стоит там попробовать или в Чикаго?

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Where? Did you learn?

• 47:56Speaker 05

  Ладно, приехала. Сегодняшний день не годится для разговора на эту тему. Впрочем, у нас никакой день не годится для разговора на эту тему. Я не предложу, что нам делать, Джексон, правда?

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Stop it, stop! I think that notion that something is activated in her somehow or given to her somehow that causes her to have these powers she doesn't even know she is implementing, that she's using. And certainly, we've seen in all the trailers, she is communicating in some sort of language that we understand that isn't based in the sounds that we know from Earth. So I think it's a fair assumption that maybe this is coming from somewhere else. This isn't coming from her elementary school. This is coming from somewhere.

• 48:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some long, long forgotten Russian class she took.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Right. This is from deep within or far without.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  I liked that too, as it came out. I was really happy with that one.

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I just like that because communication, we take for granted that we understand each other when we're speaking, but half the world can't understand the other half of the world because we all speak different languages, though we are the same species. So that's just a...

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Well, it gets to the heart of empathy and understanding. How can you understand someone if you don't even know the words they make?

• 49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, she not only speaks Korean and Russian, she speaks alien with these clicking noises. And I loved it. After I saw a screening, I went home and just started speaking that way to my family. And they're looking at me.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 49:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is that like Klingon? Is that a real language that we can buy a book on and speak to each other at Comic-Con? Or was it just some noises that you just threw in at the...

• 49:51Speaker 03

  God, I hope somebody writes that book and wants to learn how to do that language. We wanted to make a language that was based on sounds we don't normally hear in spoken communication, but they still had to come from a human throat somehow, or out of the human mouth. So, the idea was to create that language. Then, more interestingly, with Josh's character, we see that he hears or interprets those same sounds, but in terms of math.

• 50:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because he's math fluent.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  He is math fluent and that is, you know, math is the language in which the universe was written. And so we wanted to create that language that was based on quasi-human sounds and math, which seemed to us like the best way we would, the best and perhaps only way we could communicate with another species.

• 50:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how much thought was put into the actual sounds or were they just sort of random clicks? Because if you put some thought into it, then some geek somewhere is going to write a whole dictionary.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you know that's what's gonna happen.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  I do. You'd have to ask Steven and Gary Rydstrom, the, the, the sound designer, who came up with it together, I'm afraid.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright. Clearly, the movie had to address our modern understanding of what is true.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this person speaking the truth? Is this video real? Is it a deep fake? Why should I believe this and not that? The medium, the, the, the media vessel through which this was released was local news. Is there some implicit or explicit statement being made there? That we kind of trust our local news people more than we might trust the anchor on a network news? Is there any, was there any subtle thinking about that?

• 51:37Speaker 03

  I think so. I, you know, you don't, you're not always conscious of what you're doing and how you're doing it. But building the story, we, I think we certainly trust what is near to us. Uh, and perhaps smaller and manageable and with someone we know.

• 51:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause that's the person reporting on news around the block for me.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Right. Somebody's talking about what's happened in Chelsea.

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  I believe it because I can see they're standing in Chelsea and they know Chelsea. And so that's my neighborhood. So I get that.

• 52:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chelsea's not a person, it's a neighborhood in New York City that he just referred to.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Right. The, the further, the further it goes, the bigger it gets, the bigger the institution.

• 52:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  The less we trust it. And what I think is really interesting about this movie as a bookend to Close Encounters, Close Encounters, late 70s, great deal of paranoia, is the government, I think the government might be lying to us, we said in the 1970s. In 2026, we say-

• 52:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Watergate set that up for us nicely, yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Right. Then that very much grew out of that. That was the suspicion, they might be lying to us. Now it's 2026. Oh, we know they're lying to us. We know all of y'all are lying to us. We want to know what is true. We've gone further and said, you've been lying, you've been lying, you're busted, we all know, we don't believe a thing, but we're going to find out what's true. And I think this movie's, from the first frame of the movie, there's this desperate urge to find out what's true, to get the information out.

• 52:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you accurately and justifiably represented the skepticism that people might have on their feed when they're looking at their smartphone. Is this true or is it not? Is it a deep fake? You hear the questions being asked, the skepticism, it's all legit, it's what any of us would ask.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you see it in all the news outlets, and then people come, they have the moment where they say, oh my gosh.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Well, and the trick is, we know, of course, there's skepticism, the trick is to have such an overwhelming amount of information that it can no longer be denied.

• 53:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So thanks for shedding some light from your literary artistic skills.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  My pleasure, delightful to talk to you.

• 53:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And storytelling. I mean, it's a, you know, I write books and I like to think I tell stories, but I'm not, not these kind of stories. I mean, you're immersing a person in a world and have them believe it and feel it and think it and possibly change them in a way for the better. I mean, that's, you have the world in your palm of your hand, dude. Anyone ever tell you that?

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Movies do have a responsibility because we touch people, we reach them in an emotional, not just an intellectual way. And emotions can be very powerful and very positive, and they can be very negative and dangerous.

• 54:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 54:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just heard you're a neighbor of the American Museum of Natural History.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  This is true.

• 54:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna find you. I'm gonna find you at a coffee shop and we'll drag you in for another interview. So, this has been yet another episode of StarTalk, Disclosure Day Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.