Original subtitles

Space, the final frontier.

Science fiction is basically saying

there are no limits.

-Space is anything we want it to be. -Yes!

The scale of the universe is unbelievably stunning.

We are asking those big questions,

like "Where are we going?"

and "What does it say about us as humans?"

Think it answers something elemental

in human beings, which is, "We love danger."

Space travel sounds rather perilous.

They will never get me onto one of those dreadful starships.

Science fiction inspired the rocketeers

who brought us to the moon.

And that's just the beginning.

Science fiction holds out hope

for even more incredible discoveries.

I think we're curious in our bones

about going into the galaxy.

What has the galaxy ever done for you?

Why would you wanna save it?

Because I'm one of the idiots who lives in it!

Humanity is hardwired to explore

and to exploit.

We are citizens of the universe.

We belong there, too.

I hate space.

I've been thinking about this idea

that space is anything we want it to be.

It's the great unknown, and we can project

our fantasies and our ideas, our sociology,

and, you know, we can use it just as an excuse

to get to a completely different culture,

or we can take it at face-value

as a problem we need to solve. Yeah.

And I sorta think about science f...

Space science-fiction as, you know, on the one hand,

you got the hard-tech stuff, like "2001,"

and then, at the other end of the spectrum,

it's more space as a kind of

complete unfettering of the imagination.

You got... You got two things.

No matter how you do it, whether it's "2001"

or "Star Wars," they're adventures.

The... The... The big bogeyman is the unknown.

Right. Because the thing about humans...

It's always been with us...

Is we have an imagination.

The night sky has always been the great mystery.

One, it's terrifying because you walk out in it

and you get eaten.

And the other part is that there's...

There's things up there.

I mean, the stars, the planets. Yeah.

And the things have to mean something.

So this is a primal attraction, is what you're saying.

Yes. And man has curiosity.

Curiosity and imagination bring you things like stories.

So you're saying it's a mystical connection.

-Yep, yep. -But there's a mystical connection with the sky

and with stars and all things,

so they relate directly to us.

Isn't that what we try to do with our movies?

-Yeah. -Take... Capture a little bit of that awe

and bring it into a movie theater

and... and feel what it might be like to go out there?

Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission.

What Alfonso Cuar�n does with the camera

at the very beginning of "Gravity"

is you have this extended single-camera shot

where you watch both George Clooney

and Sandra Bullock float around space,

and you have these images of how small a human

can be in front of the entire planet,

and then the camera will spin around

and you'll see how small a human

is in front of the vastness of the universe.

Can't beat the view.

That movie really brought people to space.

It showed them not only what the view looked like,

but also what it felt like to have the view,

and that was so important to me to be able to share

because the view is unimaginable.

It was so clean and pristine, it almost hurt your eyes

because the edges are so sharp,

and it's giant.

So, what do you like about being up here?

The silence.

When I was living up on the space station,

my little brother met Sandra Bullock's brother-in-law.

He said, "Well, you know, my sister-in-law's

making this movie. Maybe your sister would talk to her."

And my little brother said, "She's been up there

for a couple of months with five guys,

and I think she'd love to talk to Sandra Bullock."

How feeling?

Like a Chihuahua that's being tumble-dried.

Some of the things that she wanted to know

were what's it like for me when I wake up in the morning,

what's a hard thing, what's an easy thing,

so that she understands how she can make space look real.

Sandra, I thought, looked purposeful

and not like a newbie.

Space travel has been a science-fiction theme

for a long, long, long time.

It is really fantastic the lengths

that the early science-fiction writers went to

to get a space craft from the Earth even to the moon.

George M�li�s was originally a stage magician

who got enamored

with the brand-new art form of cinematography.

And not only, did he invent the science-fiction movie,

he essentially invented movie special effects.

And it was really based on the two giants

of science fiction at the time...

H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Jules Verne provided the plot and story

for the first half of the movie

with his "From the Earth to the Moon."

The second half was based on H.G. Wells'

"The First Men in the Moon."

Early depictions of space travel show characters

just moving about freely, opening up the door,

and walking out into space with no trouble.

But within a couple decades, things change pretty quickly

in cinematic depictions of, outer space and space travel,

so, as early as the 1920s,

you have films like "Woman in the Moon"

by Fritz Lang,

where characters are strapped into their seats,

and as the ship is taking off,

they can feel the pressure

of the g-force on their chests,

struggling to breathe as they lift off.

And then you've got writers that worked

for John W. Campbell Jr.

When he began editing "Astounding Science Fiction,"

who were held to a standard of scientific verisimilitude,

and that's when you start getting realistic,

believable space adventures.

No time for count-off! Stand by.

Fire!

Tell us about this trip to the moon.

Do you... Do you think this is possible?

Yes. Yes. It's quite possible.

-We're here, aren't we? -Yeah.

Not only are we here, but,

it can be done.

It can be done as soon as anyone

is willing to foot the bill to do it.

Robert Heinlein was the guru of hard science-fiction,

but I think, before that and beyond that,

he was the guru of logical science-fiction.

Heinlein asked the question...

Which is the classic hard science-fiction question...

How do you do it? How do you solve that problem?

Even today, that's a key theme in science fiction.

The pre-chain reaction is out of control.

We're rapidly expanding.

Multiple satellites are down and they keep on falling.

The Cuar�ns wanted to recreate the good, the bad,

and the ugly of space travel.

Look, we need to get the hell out of here.

-All right. -You need some help there, Matt?

-No, don't wait for us. -It's stuck!

One of the things I discussed

with the Cuar�ns was the Kessler syndrome

and the notion that a destroyed satellite

can lead to debris, which destroys more satellites

and more debris.

Space debris is a real concern for any spacecraft

that has to travel through low Earth orbit today.

Explore.

At the speeds debris can travel, a small object like a bolt

can hit you with the kinetic energy

of a howitzer round.

The film "Gravity" is visually compelling

because it really sets up the unforgiving dynamic,

how just the smallest step in the wrong direction

is going to send the entire series of events tumbling.

And it only takes that much.

No!

The only really big mistake they made

in that movie is that, if you were up on a space station,

the last thing you'd do is let George Clooney go.

There's a lot of secrets in the universe.

We don't know anything.

That's the one thing I do know for sure.

But we've gotta get out of our solar system.

We've gotta get to another solar system.

Yeah, but Einstein says you can't travel

faster than the speed of light.

Science fiction is basically saying

there are no limits.

-That's right. -Think outside the box.

-No matter what somebody tells you... -Right.

No matter what you've learned,

throw all that away and say,

"I can do anything I wanna do.

You're in a completely different universe."

Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy.

We sometimes forget that space

is cosmologically big.

Traveling to the rest of the universe would take

tens, thousands of years with current technology.

The reason we measure them in light-years

is because it takes that long

for the speed of light to travel that distance.

Faster-than-light travel is the holy grail of space travel.

And right now, it's the "baloneum" that we...

Baloneum is that stuff you make up to make the story work

and it's different from "handwaveum,"

which is how you distract

the reader or the viewer,

but... and it's not "unobtainium."

That's a diff... But baloneum is that stuff.

If we had the right baloneum,

we could make faster-than-light travel work.

So, here is a perfect limitation for an artist.

You can't go faster than light speed.

How are we gonna get around it to explore the universe?

Science-fiction writers said,

"Okay, well, we have to create a speed

faster than light speed."

Are you ready to say goodbye to our solar system?

Execute jump.

I'm not sure what's wrong here.

Is the parking brake on?

Compressor.

What a rush.

And with that rush, science fiction

launches an age of exploration.

We're down to 0.3896th of light speed.

"Forbidden Planet" is one of those rare,

big-budget science-fiction movies

from a time when most science-fiction movies

looked pretty cheesy.

It's very easy to see many of the things

that later science fiction,

specifically "Star Trek," if not directly took from,

was certainly inspired by.

The ship on "Forbidden Planet"...

It almost looks like the saucer section

of the Enterprise without the rest of it.

These discs that they stand on...

It looks just like the transporter.

It definitely looks like the designers of "Star Trek"

looked at this and said,

"Boy, this is a beautiful-looking movie."

"Forbidden Planet" is definitely less diverse,

which makes "Star Trek" special.

Space, the final frontier.

The importance of "Star Trek" is that it brought space

into the living rooms of Americans

and people really across the globe.

It made space accessible.

"Star Trek" was a classic, humanistic vision

of a kind of utopian future that you l-live and let live.

These are the voyages

of the starship Enterprise.

Gene Roddenberry said he wanted

to do an all-inclusive series in space

with all the ideas that could more easily be done

in science fiction in the '60s than in realistic fiction.

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

So, you could deal with controversial issues,

but they weren't controversial because they're distanced.

They're not us. That's not our own society.

We did wanna get into racial issues, sexist issues,

that were going on at the time.

And I think it opened a door into an alien world

that people could say, "Yeah, I get that."

It offered lots of story opportunities

to tell stories about

things going on right here on Earth.

This is no game, Captain.

Half a million people have just been killed.

There's an episode called "A Taste of Armageddon"

about these two planets that have...

That are conducting a virtual war.

Computers, captain.

They fight their war with computers, totally.

Computers don't kill a half-million people.

Deaths have been registered.

Of course, they have 24 hours to report.

To report?

To our disintegration machines.

At the very end of it, Kirk says...

We're human beings

with the blood of a million savage years

on our hands.

But we can stop it.

We can admit that we're killers,

but we're not going to kill today.

So all of these different stories,

they all had a social message buried in them.

Gene knew what he was doing,

the writers knew what they were doing.

It's up to you.

"Star Trek" was a way of saying,

"Look, we can do better.

Things, the way they are,

it's not necessarily the way they have to be."

What about the cast of the show?

I'm told that NBC only wanted white males on the bridge.

No women, no blacks.

When I brought in a mixed-racial crew,

both the network and Desilu Studios,

which had it at that time, came in, saying,

"What are you doing?!

You're going to ruin us!"

I can tell you what happened to me the first time

I saw "Star Trek." Really, before "Star Trek,"

there were no people of color in the future.

We didn't really exist at all anywhere,

and Gene Roddenberry created this group

where this beautiful black woman,

not a mammy, was head of communications.

Captain, I'm picking up a sub-space distress call,

priority channel. It's from Space Station K7.

So to see her in that position, for me,

was, like, extraordinary.

And it's why I went to Gene

The Next Generation,"

was because of what Nichelle Nichols showed me,

which was that I had a future in the world.

What about you? Do you speak Romulan, cadet?

Uhura. All three dialects, sir.

The day that I met Nichelle Nichols,

I was very nervous

because that was a first time for me

to step into someone else's shoes.

And she suspended any kind of judgment.

If anything, she handed me that torch

and she said, "Run with it."

The jamming signal's gone.

Transport abilities are reestablished.

The main attribute that "Star Trek"

gives people is hope.

May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.

What I took from the original series

was the love humanity is able to have,

even if it's set in a time that they may never recognize,

they may never meet, the strive for that is tangible.

Live long and prosper, Spock.

Live long and prosper.

The cultural importance of the "Star Trek" franchise

can't be underestimated.

We've had, to date, seven different series, 13 films,

and hundreds of novelizations, comic books, board games,

video games, costumes.

Fans love "Star Trek" because it does suggest

that there will be opportunities for us

to meet each other in space and to learn from each other.

The most powerful message, to me, of "Star Trek"

was just the idea that, by stepping out into the universe,

we put our old problems behind us

and we become better people through cooperation

and, you know, believing in a certain set of values.

It's a very romantic notion,

it's a very idealistic notion,

but that's a universe I wanna go live in.

I wanna go get on a starship,

I wanna be part of the Federation.

"2001," as far as I'm concerned,

is the best science-fiction film ever made.

It is the quintessential what space travel is.

Yeah. And it looks great.

You know, it's... it's... It's... it's just...

It's impeccable the way they put it together.

The discovery coming overhead endlessly is basically...

Right. The precursor

of the... of the opening shot of "Star Wars."

Right. It stunned everybody, myself included.

Probably "2001" had more of an influence on me than I realize.

But at the same time,

I was completely stoked by that movie.

It's brilliant.

I think "2001" opened up films to be a much broader

and interesting canvas,

in terms of what space travel might be like,

than anything that had been shown before.

Everything was believable, even though we'd have

our jaws on our laps in amazement,

but everything always had a reality to it.

That's absolutely the most

meticulously accurate science-fiction

movie between Arthur C. Clarke,

the hard science-fiction writer,

and Stanley Kubrick, the visionary filmmaker,

who thought this image was all you need.

Let the audience figure it out.

In that sense, everything was a surprise

and a visual entr�e of unbelievable significance.

But it's really not the... The filmmaking part of it.

It's the "let's go into outer space" part of it.

-That, too. That, too. -And we have the reality now to deal with it,

which is why Mars is becoming more of a thing,

but we have to get people to say,

"This is a fun adventure."

Yee-haw!

I guess I was probably 11 years old when I...

When I first saw "Star Wars."

It was the most magnificent experience

I had ever had in my life.

My... My mind was, you know, searching for those answers

and the world and you're hungry

and I looked at "Star Wars"

and I j... I knew I wanted to live in that world.

I've been chasing "Star Wars" for my entire career.

"Star Wars" is a landmark film

in the history of science-fiction stories

about space because it opened up the excitement

and the adventure of traveling from planet to planet

and made us all want to go there with the heroes.

-Take 555. Take two. -Action.

We built the cameras, we built the optical printers,

we had built the miniatures all under one roof,

which was kind of unusual.

We could fabricate metal, we could do machining,

the chemistry for the explosions.

It was a whole litany of things that were new.

The first shot in the movie was sort of the touchstone

for whether it was gonna work or not.

It had a miniature of the Star Destroyer,

which was three feet long.

When we saw it, everybody went,"

It's great."

That is a shot of pure awe where suddenly, as a viewer,

you're just knocked out by the potential of space

and where this movie could go.

This was revolutionary.

It really felt like you were standing there.

And the ship was coming overhead.

It was so transformative.

Talk about what your influences were

that fed into the creation of "Star Wars."

As much as "Star Wars" seemed to just leap from your forehead...

No. Fully formed,

it had roots that any...

Anybody in the science fiction world knows.

Nothing, nothing, nothing in this world

pops into your head fully formed.

It's an accumulation of all the things you've seen,

and then, when you go to regurgitate it

into your own thing,

you take all the best parts.

The roll-up... that was taken from "Flash Gordon."

The angle that it rolls up the screen

with the way the text was arranged.

Even the number of ellipses.

And he was very much influenced by the movies of Akira Kurosawa.

So, in terms of cowboy films, Lucas was very influenced

by John Ford's "The Searchers,"

which contains a scene that very much mirrors

the scene where Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are murdered.

Martha! Martha!

Uncle Owen! Aunt Beru!

That definitely helped fuel this notion that "Star Wars"

is a space Western.

One of the things that was really critical in "Star Wars"

was, again, this sense of adrenaline

and the idea of trajectory in space.

Almost there.

And that brought some of that visceral quality back to it,

sort of the idea of having that rush.

I can't shake him!

And you know, it's interesting.

The closer you get to something that speed, the faster it feels.

It will be just like Beggar's Canyon back home.

So that was really the idea behind the trench

for the Death Star.

Let's get people down into a space

that's traveling at an extreme speed

and give you the excitement that you get

when you do it for real.

I mean, there's so many great shots in "Star Wars,"

but I think if there's one that makes my heart ache a bit,

it's Luke seeing the two suns set.

It just has this very "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"

kind of wistful vibe to it.

That was a shot that I can relate to

as a teenager in Texas.

That is a shot that I think any kid can relate to.

This idea of "What is next for me and how do I go?"

There's this yearning that makes this space story

feel like something that's happening to us.

One of the reasons why I made "Star Wars"

was it's made for 12-year-olds.

It appeals to everybody, but it was still made for 12-year-olds.

We were all 12 once. And I tell people,

"Don't underestimate 12-year-olds.

They're smarter than the rest of us." Right.

They get stuff much faster than you do.

-Yeah. -And the whole point was to get them to allow to think...

To allow them to think outside the box.

The whole thing is subjective and dream-like.

Yeah, who said Wookiees can't fly?

Well, I said they can fly. Yeah.

I said, "I'm not gonna obey the rules."

If you can imagine it, you can do it,

-but if you can't imagine it, you can't do it. -Yeah.

-Because... -It's the prison of your own mind, again.

It's that prison of your own mind

that allows you to do it, and you can enjoy that

and come up with really crazy stuff.

Yeah, just look at Chewbacca.

Well, I can guarantee you there's no Wookiees in space.

How do you know?

You single-handedly revolutionized science fiction

in pop culture with "Star Wars," 1977.

'Cause it had been three decades of downer stuff...

Dystopian stuff, apocalyptic stuff,

and science fiction was making less and less

and less money every year and then, all of a sudden,

you came along with another vision.

One of wonder and hope and empowerment,

and boom!

"Star Wars" is a space opera.

It's not science fiction.

And because it's really just, you know,

one of those soap operas, only in space.

Yeah, but it's more than that. Well...

And you know... And you know it is. All right, all right.

It's... It's a neo-myth.

But it's... yeah, yes. It fulfills the role

that myth played in society.

Yeah, it is. It's mythology.

But you took it to a new level.

No film that I can think of had the used future idea.

The future was always shiny, it was always perfect,

it always had just been unwrapped on Christmas morning

'cause it was kind of this optimistic ideal.

And you said, "No, the future has to have been lived in

for thousands of years,"

so the Sandcrawlers are all rusted

and things are kind of broken

and it looked like it had been lived in.

So where did that idea come from?

'Cause there was no precursor to that.

I just felt that it's gotta look like it's a real place.

The transition from the science-fiction space travel

of the '60s to the '70s... Aggh!

It probably reflects a wider shift in culture at that time,

the sort of general cynicism of the '70s

has kind of infected this vision of the future

and it's like, "Okay, if we get into outer space,

probably giant corporations

are still gonna be running everything."

And that's when you get to movies like "Alien."

Where you have a spacecraft

that looks like it's been through the mill.

Things are leaking, steam's running out of broken pipes,

it's grimy,

and the place is a mess.

Look, I'm not gonna do any more work

till we get this straightened out.

Grant, you're guaranteed by law to get a share.

And it's, I think, no accident

that, in a lot of these films,

it's the military-industrial complex

that are the real monster in space.

This could cause trouble for us

on all the other mining operations.

That could put my people out of business.

Don't worry. He's a dead man.

From the moment that humans set off to lands

that they'd never been to before, immediately what follows

that is you see all of the normal human problems

that we have in societies transposed to other worlds.

Which means you're going to have labor problems.

You're going to have hazardous environments for workers.

You're going to have all kinds of things

that reflect what might be

the reality of outer-space exploration.

At some point, corporations are going to have to get involved.

At some point, maybe the government

will have to take over,

and lead to something like a militarized society

like "Starship Troopers."

We break net now and take you live to Klendathu

where the invasion has begun.

It's an ugly planet, a bug planet.

Aaaah!

When Paul Verhoeven and I were talking one day,

"What movies would we like to make?"

He said, "Well, I've always wanted to do a movie about,

like, what it was like to be, you know,

15 years old in Nazi Germany in 1935

when nobody knew it was bad yet."

It was a pretty interesting idea.

It came to me the idea,

based on being a young boy

when I was occupied by the Germans,

of course, in... in Holland, which...

Which was fascist, clearly.

Or Nazis, whatever you want to call it.

I said... I remember saying to him,

"Well, they won't let us do that."

But then I thought, "'Starship Troopers.'

We can do that."

Based on the book by Robert Heinlein.

Really is a... Kind of a political tract

and fairly conservative political tract where he said,

"If people who had been in the military ran the world,

it would be fair and right."

He really felt that the kind of mentality

that was encouraged in the U.S. Army

was extremely important for making boys into men.

"Starship Troopers" is an important science-fiction movie

because it's one of the few movies

that warns us that humans may bring

the worst of themselves into space

rather than the best of themselves.

Burn 'em all!

We really tried to bring in a level of criticism

about what these people are doing,

especially in the newsreels,

continuously telling to the audience,

"You like these people.

These are your heroes and heroines.

By the way,

they're probably fascist."

And what's fascinating

about these patriotic newsreels...

They're very shot-for-shot similar

to "Triumph of the Will."

It's this galaxy now and always!

The movie I wanted to do was a movie about war and propaganda

and why we go to war and what happens to us when we do,

but I wanted to tell it, you know,

almost like a 1950s B-movie.

"Starship Troopers" is Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee

go to outer space, fight giant bugs,

and become Nazis was my kind of logline.

Kill them! Kill them all!

The story of humankind is exploration

is followed by colonialization and exploitation,

so we've always done this.

He figured that he could get an alien

back through quarantine

if one of us was impregnated.

I don't know which species is worse.

You don't see them each other over

for a damn percentage.

And I think what you see in science fiction is,

as we reach out into the universe,

we take all of our baggage with us.

My parents thought that television...

And this is back in the early '50s...

-Yeah? -Was the worst influence,

so they prevented me from watching television.

I could only watch, like, Jackie Gleason,

-"The Honeymooners." -Yeah, right.

And so I started to imagine my own shows.

I couldn't watch television, I would just dream up something

-for myself to enjoy. -Yeah.

And that's what kids do when they're exercising

their natural ability

to create worlds that don't exist.

I mean, I remember when I saw "Mysterious Island,"

in... In the third grade.

I raced home and started doing my own version

-of "Mysterious Island." -Yeah, yeah.

So I think that's the creative impulse.

You take it in. Y...

I don't wanna copy it in a slavish fan way.

Yes. I wanna create my own version of it.

It was... it always had to do with a pencil

and a piece of paper and, of course, later,

the 8-millimeter movie camera.

But you were processing the world back out

in the form of something visual. Exactly.

That... that... That... that's a blast

'cause, you know, you do the same thing.

When I sit down to storyboard, I come up with my best ideas

in the process of making my sketches.

I mean, ideas that weren't even in the script

and weren't even in my imagination... Right.

Will come out as I'm actually drawing.

The science-fiction artists are often overlooked

in the history of science fiction.

But artists have influenced authors

in their own right because they're...

You know, they're bringing their ideas

and characters to life visually.

But you think back to everything you

probably have visualized about science fiction,

you're probably going back to what a science-fiction artist

has done.

Chesley Bonestell is considered the father of space art

or astronomic art.

He started producing in the 1940s.

These paintings that were extraordinarily realistic.

You'll find, even today, astronomers, astronauts,

astrophysicists, engineers who will say that,

you know, they got into doing what they're doing

because, as kids, they were inspired by Chesley Bonestell.

The great advantage of science fiction

is that you can draw anything on this vast canvas of space.

It's all open, you know,

for you to throw your own imagination in.

With world-building, you are creating

a society from scratch,

a planet from scratch, a people from scratch.

They may not look like people like you or me,

but they are people.

Every plant that you see

in that remarkable forest on Pandora...

Even if you see it for half a second,

has an English name,

a Latin name, a Na'vi name,

and probably a two-page description on its ecology,

on how it reproduces, on how it's used by the Na'vi.

So if you're gonna go into that much detail,

then you're not gonna skimp on the language.

You've got to make sure that everything

really holds together.

And the language I wrote it,

it's like 400 words.

And I make a little dictionary.

And that was interesting because the only two person

who can speak the language at the time was...

Was Milla and me.

We were kind of fluent after a couple of weeks.

What is your name?

That's her name.

I think there's like a first, middle,

and last somewhere in there.

Don't ask me which.

Working with Luc Besson, who wrote and directed

"Fifth Element"... It changed my life.

Just seemed so realistic to me,

which I was really impressed by.

It's the white page that you can write everything.

You can make everything beautiful again in space.

I like the fantasy of it.

I, like, just take a subject, like the law,

the police, the food.

Good fortune for you.

And then I start writing, you know, 10, 15 pages on each.

And then you give that to the actors

and it gives some life and polish on the story,

even if you never talk about it.

Science fiction is probably the best way to open your mind

about everything,

and sci-fi is just an oil

so the doors open easier.

It doesn't like

So hard to push.

Space is the biggest canvas to write whatever you want

and to push all the limits because, by definition,

future doesn't have a limit.

Or if there is one, we don't know it.

When I was eight or nine years old,

I was obsessed with creating different planets,

creating these worlds and these universes and...

And building them up from the ground, even at that young age.

And I wrote up the visuals of "Guardians of the Galaxy."

Hundreds of pages of documents with the different cultures

and what they do and how do they think.

We are creating a world in outer space based on real rules

that is still filled with imagination and fantasy.

Yeah.

Yeah!

When you're dealing with a raccoon and a tree,

you are, in some ways, dealing with space fantasy,

but, within that, let's say there is a talking raccoon.

What would it be?

And how would it be?

And I came up with Rocket Raccoon

is a result of experiments on his body

to turn him into something that's designed to kill.

Ain't no thing like me except me.

I am Groot.

Yeah, you said that.

Groot's the most popular character

from "Guardians of the Galaxy."

He's probably the soul of the movie.

I mean, I remember like it was yesterday.

We were getting ready to shoot this scene

where Groot grows into sort of like this nest

and protects us from this impact

that was just going to completely kill us.

That day when we're shooting that scene, that...

We couldn't stop crying.

This character that doesn't even exist,

but risking his life for mine, was very moving.

Why are you doing this?

It's very much of a Christ story.

You have this character who gives his life

and is born again.

We...

are...

Groot.

"We are Groot" is the line of dialogue

that every single other thing in the movie is hanging on.

It's about seeing a raccoon and a human being

and a green assassin and a big oaf,

and they find a family with each other for the first time.

An outer-space family.

That's what makes it science fiction,

is that it's an outer-space family.

Today, it is you who will learn the power of Mars.

Tomorrow, it will be the whole world.

You're dreaming. Is it about Mars?

The angry red planet.

We're heading straight for Mars.

Mars is burning up.

Good God. I'm on Mars.

50 years ago, space is

an extraordinarily hostile environment

and then we go through the trajectory of science fiction,

which includes exploring the rest of the universe.

But the solar system is now very much within our reach.

The closest Mars ever gets to us is 36 million miles,

which doesn't seem so huge when you think about light-years.

It's a tiny distance by comparison.

Stories like "The Martian" make us believe

that we can and will do this in our own lifetime.

I gotta figure out a way to grow three years'

worth of food here.

On a planet where nothing grows.

In "The Martian," what you see is a smart person

actually acting smart.

Using his brain to solve problems,

instead of a lightsaber or a ray gun.

They say that, once you grow crops somewhere,

you've officially colonized it.

So, technically,

I colonized Mars.

One of the other great things

that Andy Weir's "The Martian" does

is make the experience

seem like an everyday experience, almost.

You can see yourself as Mark Watney.

He doesn't power through problems

without hitting a hitch.

He hits every single hitch there is.

And you get to see him work through them,

and you find yourself thinking, "I could do that."

So, it's inspirational, but it's also just very practical.

I forgot to account for the excess oxygen

that I've been exhaling

when I did my calculations

because I'm stupid.

The whole story is just one prolonged cascade failure.

Basically, his solution to this immediate problem

leads to the next problem and the next and the next and so on.

I would say that the problem-solving style

of Arthur Clarke

and also Robert Heinlein influenced

how I wrote "The Martian,"

although I would say one of the biggest influences

on "The Martian" was Apollo 13,

both the real event and the movie.

This is Houston.

Say again, please.

Houston, we have a problem.

My father is a particle physicist

and my mother is an electrical engineer,

so I was pretty much doomed to be a nerd.

There is one joke where they tell him everything he's typing

is being broadcast live to the entire world.

Yeah?

In the novel, he says, "Look! A pair of boobs!"

and draws, like, these ASCII art boobs...

That's open parenthesis, period, "Y," period, close parenthesis.

They didn't put that in the movie.

They just had everyone and look up and go,

My God.

As if he'd written something really profane.

In the face of overwhelming odds,

I'm left with only one option.

I'm gonna have to science the out of this.

I'm gonna have to science the out of this.

How... What does that mean to you?

Well, it equates with his thrill of terror, saying,

"I'm... I'm either gonna die here or I can survive."

-Yep. -And so he leans heavily on what I call gallows humor.

"I'm not gonna think too much about this.

I'm gonna take it day by day, hour by hour."

-Yeah. -And "I'm gonna have to science the out of this"

to get my survival going.

-That kinda humor... -Yeah.

Probably keeps in check terror and fear

-which will stop him functioning. -Right, right.

Do you know what I got out of it?

We're all that guy. Are...

That our state right now of affairs on Earth...

-Yeah. -Is such that we have no choice

but to "science the out of it"...

-Correct. -In order to survive.

That's a good... The threat's in front of us.

Yes. Our threats that will be solved...

That are... That are caused by technology,

for the most part, and they need to be solved by science.

Yes. That's a good point. Yeah?

I think the drive for the realism of "The Martian"

is the fact that we will get to Mars quite soon,

so suddenly it's come right back to our doorstep,

that we now have the technology

and are building the sophisticated means

for getting to Mars and colonizing Mars.

That's why "The Martian" is... is important

and why it has that realism to it.

This is space.

It does not cooperate.

At some point, everything's gonna go south

and you're gonna say, "This is it."

Now, you can either accept that,

or you can get to work.

If we don't figure out how to get to Mars and live there

and then build another spaceship

that can go to another solar system...

-Yep. -We're toast.

We're toast. Yeah. In the long term, we are.

And to... And to say, yeah, we've only got a million years

to figure this out. We better...

We're way behind schedule here.

So you have to get people to sort of buy into the idea.

And if we didn't have these movies... Yeah.

To say, "This is an adventure,

-this is really gonna be fun"... -Yep.

Do you think we'd be dumb enough

to go in a spaceship off to Mars

where there's nothing there but a bunch of red dirt?

-Yeah. -No, it's like the adventure,

the whole idea of it.

We have to do this.

The human race depends on it.

Well, thank you for doing this.

My pleasure. This has been an amazing brain jam.

Yeah, well, this is all I have to do now.

And I don't get to do it very much.