Original subtitles

If you're looking at the future,

I think you kinda gotta look at the dark future of it all.

This is the world as it exists today.

And if you look at all the things

that could take us out... Overpopulation,

climate change, the planet overheating,

maybe AI emerges but is used a weapon.

Science fiction can be a metaphor

for the human's darkest side.

I need you to know me.

To me, a dystopian story is a warning.

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

You realize that that's absolutely terrible.

Let's not let that happen.

Your move, creep.

Not every advancement is going to be used to better society.

It's human nature. There are evil people in the world.

Where is she taking them?!

Some people's dystopia can be someone else's utopia.

Surviving can be much more of a burden than a blessing.

Damn you all to Hell!

Why are we so fascinated with these dark futures?

It's who we are in our intimate rage... Yeah.

-And our social rage. -Yeah.

So the angst that we have is really

the fear of the end of humanity.

Yeah. You know, with nuclear energy

and the potential for pathogens and... and so on,

all the things that we've been dealing with

for the last, you know, 50, 60 years...

are manifesting in these post-apocalyptic fantasies.

-Yeah. -And I would submit

that everybody that watches these movies

believes that they are gonna be

that 1 in 10 million people that survives.

-100%. -And has the... The apartment, you know...

-Yeah. -In Manhattan with the steel door and all that.

Yeah. Sure, you gotta shoot a few vampires,

but it's actually a pretty good life.

It is. It simplifies the lifestyle. Yeah.

And at the end of the day is the fantasy

of having to hunt to survive.

I mean, the quintessential fantasy in the 20th century

for post-apocalyptic is you, your car, and your gun.

I had been aware of "I Am Legend" for years.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had it for about 10 years,

and he... he wasn't letting it go.

And I was like, "Come on, man. Come on, you the Governor, man.

You not gonna make it."

And eventually Arnold was like

"Okay, okay. I'm not gonna make it."

Dr. Robert Neville, he was a virologist,

and he was supposed to save humanity, and he missed.

There has been a worldwide epidemic

and it has turned the population

into these vampire zombie-like things.

And Neville is the last man on Earth.

What will the world look like,

after we have finally found a way

to make sure it has rid itself of us?

Is at the heart of the narrative.

How does a guy survive

after losing all of that,

and make it day to day to day to day?

Being the last person on Earth

speaks to the concept of existential loneliness.

It speaks to a very terrifying reality for human beings,

that we actually are born and we die alone.

Morning, Hank.

Surviving can be much more of a burden

than a blessing sometimes, and part of the beauty

is that's how a lot of us feel in life.

When Will and Akiva and I kind of crafted the movie,

we wanted to keep elements that made "I Am Legend,"

"I Am "... "I Am Legend."

one of my favorite ideas in the novel is at the end,

Neville discovering,

"The things that I thought were the monsters

aren't really the monsters. I'm the monster."

This idea that this creature that he has down in his lab

is the, you know, love of the sort of alpha creature

that's, you know, stalking him.

And he discovers that if he gives this creature back,

this guy may let him live, and he does.

I'm sorry.

The same way he saw them as monsters,

that's how they saw him.

Now conceptually, that is a spectacular idea.

That is the truth of all conflict.

But the audience just short of booed.

Just, like, right on the edge

of... of booing.

So we... we went back, and the eventual ending,

he sacrificed himself to save the cure.

There was something about the difference

of science fiction in a novel

versus science fiction in the cinema.

The genre actually shifts when you add the images.

"I Am Legend" is a novel

which was published in 1954,

and is not only one of the most important

disease apocalypse stories of all time,

it is the most influential.

It's had many adaptations.

The first adaptation

was in the early '60s with Vincent Price.

Another day to live through.

Better get started.

Then we had the really popular '70s version

called "The Omega Man."

If you look at apocalyptic ideas in science fiction,

they tend to come in waves...

-and the '70s was a very strong wave of apocalyptic thinking. -Sure.

But you're coming out of the '60s,

and... and a certain unleashing of human consciousness.

-Yeah. -So, you know, of course it was gonna manifest itself that way.

And after September 11th,

there was a big resurgence of it...

-Sure. -Almost immediately.

Things like "I Am Legend," things like...

-It was a big wave... -Right, right.

And very, very concerned back to that '70s idea of,

"You know what? We may well screw this all up."

I'm fascinated by the way that science fiction

is always, you know, manifesting our... our angst,

our dreams and our... And our nightmares.

Every generation has its own version

of the apocalypse,

some horrible event that basically annihilates

a bunch of people all at the same time.

Apocalypses are a big theme in science fiction

and always have been.

The reason they're interesting is because we always feel like

the clock is at 5 minutes to midnight,

that the apocalypse is gonna come.

The science fiction authors and filmmakers

may have given us the ammunition

by illuminating for us the dark possibilities

which are now becoming more and more real.

I think that one of the most powerful,

dazzling, nasty ends for... for humankind

is "Planet of the Apes."

The book on which it's based, by Pierre Bool,

it's just a vision of another world.

But at the end there's, of course,

this famous big reveal

that makes... makes your heart turn upside down for a moment

when you discover that they didn't travel to another planet.

Unwittingly, they have traveled

to the future of the Earth itself.

Damn you all to Hell!

So it turns out to be a story about our own future,

about our destiny.

It's a far, far, far future post-apocalypse

where humans have been replaced by apes

and... and humans are now kind of dumb animals.

Within the first series,

but especially in the second series of films,

we discover that humanity's demise,

it's not just caused by a rain of nukes from the sky.

It's just caused by a zombie pandemic.

It's actually a whole bunch of different factors.

A hallmark of really good science fiction

that stays with us is this idea that

the apocalypse is complicated.

And the series is a great example of a-an apocalypse

which also has an element of hope in it.

We think of "Planet of the Apes"

as this cynical movie

where humans are going to ruin everything.

But there's that lovely moment at the beginning.

From the very first film,

Charlton Heston is speaking aloud

to the humans of the future, who he thinks are gonna

discover him in 700 years, and he says...

You who are reading me now

are a different breed...

I hope a better one.

And the optimism of that just breaks my heart,

especially when you're rewatching the film

and you know what happens.

It's trying to warn us about what's gonna happen

if we screw up today.

It's almost like you drop a stone in a pool,

and he wakes up at the 20th ripple,

where what's happened in 1972 has ruined the world.

It's frighteningly a promissory note.

I think we all watch those movies...

Kill them all! And feel some truth,

some inevitability to the idea of it all going away.

Us rendering us...

dispensable and dispensed with.

If you look at all the things that could take us out...

-Sure. -Overpopulation,

climate change, or nuclear war.

Maybe AI emerges but is used as a weapon.

-It won't be one thing. -That's right.

I think dark futures in what we do, as entertainment,

the engine of that is paranoia.

Yeah. Right.

Is it healthy paranoia or unhealthy?

It's very healthy.

-It's healthy... -It's very healthy.

-'cause you're constantly saying, "what if?" -Yeah.

And if you're not saying, "What if?" you're a fool.

There's so many different kinds of stories

that are basically about a really bad future.

So there's an apocalyptic story, and then there's dystopia.

How did it come to this?

Soylent Green is people!

Dystopia is, "Something went wrong along the way,

and things are not working out right."

And it's about a future looking at

a worst case scenario of society

where often this is something humans are doing to humans.

Primrose Everdeen.

Prim!

No! No! I volunteer!

I volunteer as tribute.

The world of "The Hunger Games"

is a very brutal, hard, dystopic world.

You have a tyrannical government

and they are just gonna, at random,

once every four years, grab one of your kids

and... and make them fight to the death.

I think Peeta's a great character.

I really connected with his idea of even though

this insanity is happening around him

and this is, like, absolute dire circumstances,

he still doesn't change who he is.

Katniss, go!

Get out of here! Go! What are you doing?!

When entertainment turns into this kind of dark spectacle,

it can become an instrument of oppression.

The idea of violence as political distraction

comes from Octavian Caesar Augustus,

who literally said, "Give the people bread and circuses.

"Make sure their bellies are full

"and they've got something to watch and distract them.

Then they're not gonna take to the streets and protest."

One of my favorite years.

And one of my favorite arenas.

Suzanne Collins, in the creation of the book series,

she was flipping channels during one of the wars in Iraq.

You know, embedded footage, live.

And then you'd flip a few channels

and you'd be on MTV watching one of these,

you know, reality game shows...

and starting to see these kids battling one another,

and then she started to put the two ideas together.

"The Hunger Games" really hits right at the core of things

that we worry about today.

Reality TV being something that's more cruel

than it is entertaining, but us not even noticing.

And the idea of surveillance culture for control

has its roots in George Orwell's novel "1984."

"1984" is a stunning book and film.

Its vision of the future

has been used to describe the age we live in

since it was published.

With the rise of fascism, the rise of war technologies,

suddenly, science fiction shifted from optimistic futures

to futures that nobody wanted to live in.

Spreading the rumor...

Orwell updated totalitarianism for the media age.

Things like telescreens and Big Brother show us

how surveillance would become part of a technological network.

Now we can see you!

Clasp your hands behind your heads!

What was frightening about it is that he didn't insist

on a radically new world.

He said, "Look, we can do this

with the technology we have now."

The house is surrounded!

Science fiction has never been about predicting the future.

It's about choosing a future.

It's about the world that we're in now

and what direction we take.

Dystopian science fiction

grows into a launching pad for social dialogue.

And even then, it grows into real world experience.

We turn to Thailand,

where protestors have been inspired

by the "Hunger Games" movie.

A 3-fingered salute is now a symbol of uprising.

Is "The Hunger Games" about revolution? It absolutely is.

Suzanne created these stories about war

and the consequence of war for teenagers

and didn't hold back.

High school feels like the worst kind of dystopia.

Someone else is controlling what's possible for you

and telling you what to do and where to go and who to be.

But in young adult literature like the "Hunger Games"

and in "Divergent," I think, these are stories

in which young people, especially young women,

have agency and the power to do something

about the world around them.

Katniss is this great character and fights in a plausible way

This is what they do, and we must fight back!

She is given skills that allow her to take down a monster

in the form of that society, that's so much bigger than her.

"The Hunger Games" does not end with a pretty little bow on top

where the world is just a better place and everybody's happy.

Prim is gone!

She's dead and she's not coming back! Get out!

It takes a lot of casualties and typically a lot of death

and a lot of pain to make any kind of change.

But the people that remain will always be damaged

because those scars definitely remain.

I don't think the human mind is mean to exist

in two different... dimensions?

It's very confusing. You don't know what's real and what's not.

But you know what's real now.

Yes, sir, I do.

The darkest thing about

the science fiction of the future is the idea

that you might be in the dark future already and not know it.

Where do you draw the line

between reality and memory and dreams?

And I think the fundamental message

of every dystopic sci-fi novel is,

you're living in a dystopic world

and you either see it or you don't.

Now this is gonna be very difficult

for you to accept, Mr. Quaid. I'm listening.

I'm afraid you're not really standing here right now.

You know, Doc, you could have fooled me.

"Total Recall" was adapted from a short story

called "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"

by Philip K. Dick.

And he was the most outstanding, surreal,

satirical science fiction writer of the age.

People claim to remember past lives.

I claim to remember a different, very different present life.

And there were subsequent Hollywood adaptations

of his stories. I'm placing you under arrest

for the future murder of Sarah Marks.

And again and again, characters are thrust into

what they learn later is a constructed universe,

fooling the people who wander into it

into thinking it's actually real.

When we're asleep, our mind can do almost anything.

That's what good science fiction does.

It makes you do a double take on reality.

And the things you have taken for granted your whole life,

it makes you look at them

in a new and sometimes very paranoid way.

What the hell?

You can see that Philip K. Dick's ideas

are popping up in something like "The Matrix."

There is a sense of paranoia,

the sense that there's no ground truth to hold on to.

You take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed

and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill,

and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The Wachowskis gave me the script.

I read it.

This idea of reality not being reality...

This is the world as it exists today.

What's really cool about "The Matrix"

is you get to see what's behind the curtain...

Enslavement of humans to support machines.

How do you define real?

So you've got virtual reality

and agents and Morpheus and...

And then kung fu.

Laurence Fishburne and I had been training the dojo sequence

for about 7, 8 months.

So it was really exciting to actually be there on the day

and start doing it.

Because you can train, but then there's the game, right?

And then someone says, "Action," and it's...

It's on, right?

I know kung fu.

In the synthetic world of the Matrix,

we're not limited by our bodies.

We're limited just by what we can imagine,

which is how you can have these innovations like bullet time...

I think what's really interesting

about "The Matrix" is that it employed special effects

in a way that was inherent to the narrative.

The reason that bullet time exists in the Matrix

is as an exemplar that this is not reality.

When you're in the Matrix, you're capable of doing things

which you cannot do in the real world.

And the first time we see Trinity

jump up into that crane pose,

we had never seen that before.

That was technology that was effectively invented

for that film.

And then later on in the film,

when you see the bullet time more and more,

it becomes the distinguishing feature

that tells you you're in the Matrix,

and you're not in the dystopian apocalypse

where we actually exist.

No.

"The Matrix" certainly is a very exciting film

if you're just interested in seeing cool graphics

and kung fu.

But you can also have all sorts of debates with friends

about its philosophical underpinnings.

The Matrix predicted a society

where people could just plug in and lose themselves,

where people see what they want to see,

believe what they want to believe

because it's comfortable and safe even though it's a lie.

I know this steak doesn't exist.

I know that when I put it in my mouth,

the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.

You know, saying, "I just wanna eat some steak"

and, you know, "I wanna stay asleep,"

I mean, I think it's a really seductive choice, right?

I don't wanna remember nothing. Nothing.

"The Matrix" is perfect science fiction

because it has the great moment of personal choice.

Do we plug in

and do we just become mindless cogs in a machine,

or do we unplug and choose to live in a world

that is cold and dark

and complicated and hard and real?

You flirt with science fiction all over the place.

-Very much. -I would submit that "The Dark Knight"

and "The Dark Knight Rises" are actually

-dystopian science fiction. -Right.

Because you're looking at

a hypertrophied corrupt state.

Yeah, "Dark Knight Rises," it's...

It's an experience of dystopian future,

and looking at demagoguery.

You're looking at all these things that could happen.

I think there's an aspect of science fiction that...

That celebrates human potential...

-Yeah. -Where only a hero is your answer, is your salvation.

Yeah, very much.

You wanna play? Come on.

You're terminated,.

The role of the heroes in most dark futures

is to defeat the forces

that help make these dystopian futures happen.

Dystopian fiction often consider just how much one person can do

to change the world around them,

fighting against a system

that has become oppressive and corrupt.

Drop the gun. You are under arrest.

Thank you for your cooperation.

RoboCop is a cop who is ultimately turned

into a half-man, half-machine,

but he's a good cop who believes that there are bad guys,

and he's there to stop them.

Guns, guns, guns!

I kept thinking about a science fiction story

that was kind of set in the business world.

You know, it was the 80's and it was kind of

the beginning of the greed generation.

So in "RoboCop," it was saying that now we live in a world

that is really run by money and corporations, and I thought,

"We should make a movie about how this is inevitable,

but maybe you can stop it."

You are under arrest.

RoboCop thinks he's catching one bad guy,

and then it turns out the bad guy is even bigger than him.

It's a system.

That's the power of sci-fi, it makes it possible

to sit there and kind of think about these very big topics

while you're watching, you know,

robots, shoot guys in the penis.

Your move, creep.

The violence of "RoboCop"

is absolutely startling.

You know, it shows that this is dystopia

and there is something very terrible

that has happened to the world to get us to this place.

I'm always a bit amazed that people ask,

"Why there is so much violence in your movies?"

Then I would answer,

"Why is there not violence in your movies?"

Violence is built into the universe.

And that was, for me, something that I understood

from a, let's say, religious point of view.

I felt that the death of Murphy should be a crucifixion.

This has to be horrifying,

so it had to be extremely violent.

I think it works very well.

Then slowly, you get these electronic movements

and you start to recognize things,

and that is the resurrection.

I can see the beauty of that story

and I wanted to impose that on the movie.

And basically it came to me, the idea,

that he should walk over the water.

And that's what I always felt about RoboCop,

that he was the American Jesus.

"RoboCop" is a political satire,

and the realization that this is an allegory for Jesus Christ

just shows that we really attach cultural significance

to the idea of saviors who sacrifice everything to help us.

Science fiction shows us

an absolutely dystopian and horrific future,

but we find a beacon of hope from the heroes of the story.

You wanna get out of here?

You talk to me.

Mad Max, the reluctant antihero.

"Mad Max" was like, you hear a piece of music,

and you're like, "My God. Where has that been?!"

George Miller,

he was a kid who grew up in Australia.

And when he was a teenager,

he saw a lot of his friends die in car crashes.

And then when he was a doctor, he saw lots of corpses

come in that had been mangled from roads.

So when George Miller becomes a filmmaker,

this idea of telling life and death stories

set on roads feels very natural to him.

In the very first movie,

society is kind of on the verge of collapsing.

And Max, he was a cop, goes sort of insane

over the course of the film,

trying to stop criminals...

and losing his family.

And then the second movie, "Road Warrior,"

there has been this unexplained nuclear war

and that now gas supplies are incredibly scarce,

and that has given way to this post-apocalyptic wasteland

that Max is now wandering through.

Mad Max might save the situation,

but he world itself just keep getting worse

and worse and worse.

There are certain films that the culture pivots around,

and "Road Warrior" was one of them.

As the science fiction writer J.G. Ballard said,

"It's the Sistine Chapel of punk."

You! You can run, but you can't hide.

I'm a comic book artist.

I write and I draw,

and I'm used to words and pictures all the time.

So when I got a call from George saying,

"I've got some stuff on Mad Max

I'd like to talk to you about," I said, "Yeah."

In the fourth Mad Max, "Fury Road,"

we had to plot every single thing on that movie,

and we did it through nearly 4,000 drawings.

We really changed the hero myth as well.

In "Fury Road," Mad Max, he's much more a product

of sort of a post-traumatic stress disorder,

and there's nothing to live for except to live.

20 years out in the Outback on his own in his beat-up old car.

So this guy is like a feral animal.

He's placed as a hood ornament on a hot rod.

He's used as a blood bank.

That's my property!

Because in "Fury Road,"

the commodity is not oil.

It's actually the human body itself.

You're more than welcome to come with us.

I'll... I'll make my own way.

I feel like when you watch the Mad Max films,

after the first one, he doesn't even see himself

as somebody who could be a hero.

It's not his world.

So it's up to women like Furiosa

to do the work of actually making it a better place.

They're looking for hope.

-What about you? -Redemption.

Furiosa is George's character.

That was George saying,

"I'm gonna make a female road warrior,

and then she's gonna be an icon of the times."

Even though it was a Mad Max movie,

it really allowed this heroine character

to sort of rise up and almost steal the hero role.

Furiosa is a much more compelling hero

than we see with Max.

We understand her backstory a lot better,

and her motivations. No!

She has to protect these women who are trying to escape

from a really cruel, terrible slave owner.

Remember me?

There comes a time when Furiosa, being very injured...

Stabbed in the side, losing vast amounts of blood.

And then Max penetrates her with a knife

and gives her his blood and mingles it with her.

He's now getting invested in spite of himself.

You see the male and the female energy coming together,

it was very powerful.

And in a way, this is their love scene.

And then he leaves.

When you see Furiosa on that platform,

rise above this village,

you realize this might be the first time

where's there's a little bit of hope

at the end of a Mad Max film.

There's a chance now, a real hope

that a new type of society can be formed by these girls,

with the muscle of Furiosa.

These heroic women will now bring forth

a new dispensation to this world.

They're gonna remake the world that exists in their ideology.

What will happen, we don't know,

but that's another story.

We as a society hunger for our nightmares

-writ large on the big screen or the small screen. -Right.

So it seems to me that's a big part of what science fiction is.

-It is. Yeah. -But as we got into the technological age

and the science age, our fear and our angst

of where this was all going,

-this big human experiment. -Right.

We're always worried about where's the world going and...

-Yeah. Yeah. -Is this world coming to an end.

-And a lot of science fiction capitalizes on those fears. -Sure.

-Can we at least retard the apocalypse and delay it? -Yeah. Yeah.

Sound a warning or think twice about a policy.

-All of science fiction are cautionary tales. -Yeah.

The best science fiction are cautionary tales.

What you are about to watch is a nightmare.

It is not meant to be prophetic. It need not happen.

But in this place, in this moment, it does happen.

This is the Twilight Zone.

"The Twilight Zone" was

the first great science fiction show on television. Period.

I mean, we all think of the 1950s as apple pie placid.

But "The Twilight Zone" offered up the dark side of that.

Everybody's dead except... me.

There were always these great twists, and I just loved that.

I loved the poignant irony of...

He's got all the time in the world with his books,

and then he breaks his glasses!

It's not fair.

Before "The Twilight Zone,"

Rod Serling was the great mainstream dramatist

of 1950s television.

But he was censored at every turn

when he wanted to talk about social issues,

racial issues, political issues.

I think it is criminal that we're not permitted

to make dramatic note of controversial themes

that are inherent in our society.

This dissatisfaction, this frustration

led Rod Serling to create a show

in which he could talk about the issues,

but in a way that the censor and the advertisers wouldn't object.

We are the minorities!

To me, a dystopian story is a warning.

It is a way that it can try to raise its hand and say,

"Hey, everybody, it seems like

"we might be going in this direction,

"and look, it won't be good if we go there.

So maybe we wanna do something about it now."

You're all desperate to point some kind of a finger

at a neighbor.

Believe me, friends, the only thing that's gonna happen

is that we're gonna eat each other up alive!

Anytime you read or watch a dystopic story,

and you think, "Well, we're past that now. That couldn't happen."

Look, I swear it isn't me!

Suddenly, we're handed a curve ball with politics,

with issues of the day,

and we realize we can always be blindsided.

My name is Offred.

I had another name, but it's forbidden now.

So many things are forbidden now.

In "The Handmaid's Tale," we are plunged into this future world

where men are the absolute rulers,

and women are the underclass.

This is a very old-fashioned, religious regime.

They have special clothing that they wear.

They go into supermarkets

where nothing is labeled with letters.

It feels like an alien place. It feels like another world.

And yet, we get these constant reminders

that no, this is Boston.

But it's a very different world.

I think I fell in love with "The Handmaid's Tale"

because of Offred,

really how she was able to keep up her strength

and her belief and her hope in this horrible situation.

God whipped up a special plague.

There's been an environmental disaster

and the fertility rate has gone down precipitously.

No, please! Please don't take her!

-Mommy! -No!

She's ripped away from her husband and her child.

And because Offred is one of the few fertile women left...

This is the new one.

She's kept as a reproductive slave

in the house of this commander.

The handmaid shall lie between the legs

of the commander's wife.

The two of you will become one flower,

waiting to be seeded.

We're flowers.

Lay down.

What? It's nice.

The one thing that I especially love so much about Janine

is that everybody thinks she's a lunatic.

But she's has taken the reality that has been presented to her

that she cannot seem to fight

and fights it in her own way.

Bye. Because the only thing

that is guaranteed in your future as a handmaid

is that you will be going to the market

and you will be raped.

I didn't put anything into the book that human beings

had not already done at some point in history

or that they're not doing now.

For instance, in Nazi Germany,

the S.S. men had assigned biological wives.

She took directly from horrible atrocities

that have been committed against people and put them in her book,

and just formed them into the world of Gilead.

Margaret Atwood was fascinated

with the Salem Witch Trials

and the ways in which women who were considered

deviant from the norm were punished.

It was about sending a clear message to all women

that if you get out of line, the wages of that are death.

The Iranian Revolution was

a very interesting analogue for Margaret.

It was a religious revolution.

You know, one day, women were wearing mini skirts,

and the next day, they were kicked out of college,

all within 24 hours.

Ladies, you can't work here anymore.

It's the law now.

Offred has her job taken away from her

and realizes she has no more control over money or property.

I think this would have very much resonated

with readers in the 1980s

because women had just earned the right to own credit cards

in their own name in 1974.

You realize that we've been there before.

You realize that

there but for the grace of God could go all of us.

It's not that difficult for society

to shift just a little bit

in order to recreate that dystopian future.

Science fiction pieces often portray

the breakdown of society as a warning.

You know, it's a lot easier to look back on a TV show

and see where the important things happened.

It's a lot harder in your life to look back.

When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up.

When they suspended the Constitution,

we didn't wake up then either.

In a gradually heating bathtub,

you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

The idea of the slow burn, that's what makes

"The Handmaid's Tale" so powerful.

It's about the evolution of a very small batch of variables

that becomes kind of like the butterfly's wings

that cause a huge storm.

Why'd they send the army?

I think it's just a warning.

I don't think it's a prediction.

In the very subtle bits of resistance,

that's how the fire stays alive,

because you can take everything away from these women.

You take their families away.

You take their eyeballs away.

But you can't take away their own very unique humanity.

That's why you have to stay awake,

because otherwise, you're left with Gilead.

This may not seem ordinary to you right now,

but after a time, it will.

This will become ordinary.

I'm keeping this group together, alive.

But get one thing straight...

If you're staying, this isn't a democracy anymore.

Post-apocalyptic stories are really about

just trying to restart

and maybe make a better world if we can.

Can we rebuild society after the apocalypse?

You know, you're not gonna get color TV back very quickly,

but the answer with "The Walking Dead" is,

"I hope I can."

But not everyone's going to come up

with a peaceful way of existing.

I wrote the comic about a group of normal,

average, everyday human beings

trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse

and kind of build some semblance of the life that they once knew.

God.

The real reason you go back on "The Walking Dead"

is because those characters fascinate you.

And they're all fighting to find out who they are

in a world in which society has been wiped out

and the rules have all changed.

Please don't.

Do it, Dad. Do it.

Post-apocalyptic stories always talk about

what happens to people

and what these people, become.

And I think that's a classic science fiction theme.

And I think that is something that exists

in the Romero zombie mythology, in his movies.

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

George Romero invented the zombie.

I mean, the zombie did not exist before George Romero...

Not in the way we think of the zombie.

George Romero read "I Am Legend"

and loved the concept of being at war

with a mindless world.

Now what Romero did, which is critical to modern zombie lore,

is Romero put in social commentary.

All right, Vince, hit him in the head.

Right between the eyes.

The great things about zombie movies,

they get into our fear of betrayal,

that paranoia that we all have as human beings

that people that we love are gonna turn on us.

They tap into our fear of a predator.

We're afraid of them because they're going to eat us.

It has the fear of overpopulation.

And the fear of disease.

The chimps are infected!

The thing that really bugged me about those movies

was that you have these really great setups,

with these interesting characters.

And then the time limit runs out on the movie.

And as a writer, I was like, "My God."

Like, you're really missing an opportunity here.

You could follow these people for years and years and years.

I would say,

after eight seasons of "The Walking Dead,"

we have probably created over 16,000 walker make-ups.

When I was younger, I studied physiology

and anatomy quite a bit, and I minored in art.

So for me, it's always been important to elevate

the level of realism

and create something the audience immediately saw as horrific...

I'm sorry this happened to you.

And transform it into something you felt sympathy for.

"The Walking Dead" shows the various ways

we might rebuild society

after an apocalyptic event.

Rick Grimes and his group

encounter many different types of civilizations

over the course of "The Walking Dead."

You have a place like Woodbury, that's led by the Governor.

We get to Alexandria, which is a-a safe haven

that was built for people in Washington D.C.

to kind of retreat to. But the worst of the worst,

when it comes to the societies that we've encountered,

is Negan and his group, the Saviors.

I'm gonna beat the holy hell out of one of you.

As a writer, you know,

sometimes I worry that people think, like,

"That guy, he's just having fun and he's callous.

I like killing these people, I'll kill anybody."

It's really not that easy for me.

I need you to know me.

When the characters die, like, I get upset

the same way that the audience gets upset.

I cry sometimes while I'm writing,

that's a thing that totally happens.

It does wear on me sometimes.

Back to it.

There have to be people

that keep things in balance morally.

Otherwise, it's all chaos.

It's all about groups of people that you can trust

in terms of making a better future.

Everything that they're fighting for

is about building a new society.

There will be something after.

We have to keep our faith in each other.

If we can hold onto that with everything we have,

the future is ours.

"The Walking Dead" captures these amazing little...

Little snippets of what human nature is

at its best and worst, and when it's tested.

And the fact that you might never be redeemed...

You may be beyond redemption.

But look how many other characters

are redeemed in some way.

It is very much about coming from the darkest point

and finding a way to work together

to bring ourselves up out of that darkness,

and the rebuilding of civilization.

And so to me, on a long enough timeline,

it's a very uplifting story about people

who have lived through the worst of the worst

and have become the best of the best.

And so I've always looked at is as an optimistic story.

Science fiction is talking about the human condition.

It's ridiculous to say good and evil,

but I think the idea of competitive, aggressive

versus compassionate, empathic.

-You know, and we have both... -Yep.

And nature has selected for both, in a way...

'cause we're social beings.

We didn't get to survive without taking care of our kids

-and learning how to hunt together... -Right.

And all the things that we give and share with each other.

And... and we all have empathy and we're mindful

and we have deep sympathy,

even if we don't act that way in our lives,

or people don't see that in us, everybody has that capacity.

-Right. -And that is the capacity, I think,

that will always pull us back from the brink.