Disclosure Day with Steven Spielberg & David Koepp

27:02But then once I've written it, now there's another round of research. Let's make this as close to reality as we can. Okay, interesting. So the entertainment, because someone has to pay to see the movie, and they want to do that willingly. Yeah. And it's not a documentary. It's not a documentary. 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. So you have a little black book with your science consultants in there? Is that how that works?

27:37Yeah, 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, I found one through friends. As one does. It's not your microbiologist. 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. Okay. Okay, so 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.

28:27And 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. Yes. Rather than constrained. Exactly. Because the universe is often stranger than you have imagined. It's a pretty wondrous place. Yes. And life forms are pretty unusual and varied. And you can draw more 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. So 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.

29:11as you go forward. Yeah. Well, in this case, there was a lot of research first because there's been a lot. There's a lot of material. And you have access, right? Then you have access. That gives you 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. Henceforth, when we say it's a David Kemp movie, that gets one kind of return phone call. But a better one is it's a Spielberg movie. 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.

29:47In 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? 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. We were trying to reinterpret the book 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.

30:29How do I make this a movie experience? And the 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. That's brilliant because now I'm in suspense the whole time. Right. And, you know, Stephen's done very well by suggesting more than he shows. Right. So if— That's a trademark. It's a trademark. It's born out of necessity, which is what's brilliant about it. The famous story is about Jaws and the shark not working. Right. 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.

31:08Right. So if you're going to restrict a point of view, that's the rule. Do it with someone interesting. Right, right. So let's go to Jurassic Park for a moment. Okay. I work at the Museum of Natural History. You're a neighbor. Yeah. And surely you've seen our velociraptor. Yes. 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? Ooh, that's not where I thought you were going. That's good. That's very good.

31:44It can be love or you could be the person's next meal. Yeah. Eyes are everything here. Particularly, I mean, one of the ideas behind Jurassic Park, there's the central brilliant Crichton once-in-a-lifetime idea of the preservation of the DNA in amber, which is fantastic. Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton, 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.

32:25And you're bringing that back to life. Please, yeah. Flicking us all up. Exactly. let's tap into something 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 they grab those kids attention and hold on to it and I think I kind of or the superheroes they're all orphans right yes 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 velociraptor is the eye.

33:06Eyes really are portals to everything. Okay, so you're affirming what I suspected is that this is an important part of the intensity of a scene. Yeah. 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. Oh, it's everything. It was Stephen's notion, which is embodied in a beautiful monologue Coleman Domingo delivers. Oh, don't condescend to me. I'm listening to you, Noah. Something I've learned quite a bit about.

33:53From your friends? Yes. They regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage, as the foremost evolutionary advantage. In fact, the core of animate existence, our rejection of this understanding is leading us to our extinction. 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 human rights.

34:37What we call civilization. Civilization, building a bridge. No one can do it unless we do it together. And I think that 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. 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. That's what Mr. Spielberg is so good at is insisting that every character is a character, even a villain.

35:18Why are they a villain? What is it that's pushing them? They don't, please let no one twirl their mustache. And 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, Stephen, the early drafts of the script didn't have that scene. And he said, but this is the most frightening thing that's ever happened to them in their entire lives.

35:59There would be emotional fallout. Can we see that? And that's just being attuned to character. I deeply remember that scene because it was wholly unexpected. They drop into a boxcar. It could have been anything. And it's a quiet, tender scene. Yeah, emotionally violent inside. but there are people working together to try to resolve those feelings. Yeah, 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.

36:42He makes a fair point. We have not traditionally done well with sudden, dramatic cultural change. And we're not doing well right now. So speak to me, again, the importance of being able to sympathize or empathize even with people branded as evil in a story. 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.

37:27And 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. 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.

38:20Would we still feel as much as we did were it not for that just one squealing alien? 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. To join the mutiny. 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. Right. 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.

39:05Because we're dicks. Sometimes. Sometimes. Okay. Sometimes. Yeah, okay. 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 E.T., you know, they grab them, and 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.

39:47No. We didn't look it in the eyes yet. So why did that work so well? 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. But you see 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 - No one has sympathy for the jaws. 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.

40:30It needs to eat, sleep, and make baby sharks. And that's what it's doing. You can't judge it for that. Right, right. You just got to deal with it. Yeah. It's just being a... Maybe stay out of its lane, you know? It's just being a shark. Yeah. You can't blame a shark for being a shark. And maybe it's because we know the alien has intelligence, and that's a threshold above which we care about or we resonate with. Do you agree with that? 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.

41:06And the more we study animals, the more intelligent we find out that they are. Yeah. My daughter, who's a vegetarian, would say we are all kidding ourselves and we're horribly cruel. Okay. So you'll never be as woke as your daughter. No, maybe not. Have you considered the possibility that the evil alien trope, which was not what Disclosure Day was about, but we, when we've encountered other humans of lower technological prowess, it's never boded well 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?

41:56Yeah, 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 going to happen to us. And that's just one of many examples that could be given. So for Stephen, in multiple movies, War of the Worlds accepted to have an alien that does not want to harm you. This is a little weird given the tropes we are fed. Yeah, it's another way of thinking about it, which is, but that's, and it's fairly consistent across his four movies where he's touched on the subject. In three of the cases, maybe they are, I don't know if they're benevolent or not, but they're certainly not malevolent.

42:40And then in War of the Worlds, it's, you know. Anything goes. Yeah. But that's just for diversity of viewpoint. 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? 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 going to come in. Well, first of all, your story's better that way.

43:19But any good actor is going to come in. Otherwise it gets two-dimensional, right? 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 going to come in and act like their character's lawyer. And they're going to say, now you're not fairly representing my client's interests here. You better be right. Seriously? Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Single-minded point of view. I never thought about that. Okay. Because this is, that's their craft. Yeah. And they have to do it. They have to stand up. Colin had to stand up there and say these things.

43:50Right. And find them believable and justifiable. Genuinely. For himself. So you have to write better material.

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46:11This is StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

46:20Now, I can't have been the only one to have immediately thought of the day the earth stood still. Oh, yeah. 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. Yeah. And were you thinking that as well? I mean... 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.

47:02And 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 of the Earth Stood Still did it. Well, yes, because that's what would happen. Because it would happen. You're both representing a reality. You're not copying each other. It's a separate reality that you're both trying to capture. Yes. 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.

47:39These are hotbed spots in the current news with Russia and Ukraine and Korea and, you know, South Korea, North Korea. It's there. And when Earth stood still, there were the soldiers looking at their smartphone. There's a moment that everything stops, and no matter who you are. No matter who. And it reminded me. That was conveyed brilliantly. Good. Silently and brilliantly. Yeah, well, a lot of the best things in movies are done without dialogue. Yeah. And it reminded me of who was the astronaut who, most of them, actually, when they are in space and they look back at the Earth, there is an inevitable feeling of, oh my goodness, we're very small and we're all in this together.

48:20Right, 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 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. Yeah, but you don't get that perspective unless you step out. Yes. And so our challenge is how do we get that to happen? but obviously we stay here on earth. 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.

48:57You didn't have to do that, but it was there. So you're kind of setting us up to believe that disclosure might remedy that, I guess. Was this an explicit thought that you had? 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. Wake the fuck up. 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. I smell sequel. 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.

49:43Now, 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 the purpose of the story, and that's what makes us involve ourselves more. 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. That we are aware of. But we all know what aliens look like. I just find that you can draw an alien with big eyes you know bald head just once give me an alien with hair an alien is humanoid that could be mammalian and all mammals have hair give it like a nice hairdo I'll tell you what really fascinates me we do have a sort of universal perception of what we think aliens look like and it's embedded 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.

50:45Here's what's interesting to me. We can perceive, what do we see between about 4 ,000 and 7 ,000 angstroms? Well, let's see the top visible light, yes. Yeah, 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. So we're 20 to 20 ,000 hertz. Thank you. It's very easy to remember. And dogs can hear higher pitches than 20 ,000 hertz. But not lower than 20. No, not lower than 20, right. But feel it because it becomes a pulse. Right, right. So I asked the right guy. But those are fairly crude senses. So we invented some devices that could help us see other things, the telescope, all the things we've invented.

51:28That is modern science. The last hundred years, it's really gone far. That is modern science. 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 is to say these alien life forms don't exist in a form that we can't yet perceive? I find that as the agnostic's most reasonable explanation for why things exist that I don't understand. They sit outside of your sensory. They may well, and not just our sensory, but all the technical equipment that we have to perceive things. Let me pick up on language for a moment.

52:05So 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? Can you give us some place to anchor what was going on there? I think we see with Emily's character, when the bird appears, something happens. They make eye contact. 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?

53:03Where did you learn? I've come here. I've come here today. I'm not going to do this for talking about this topic. However, we have no money to do this for talking about this topic. Maggie, stop, stop. I'll tell you, what do we do, Jackson? Stop it, stop! 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.

53:41So 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. Some long forgotten Russian class she took. Right. This is from deep within or far without. Ooh, I like that. I liked that too as it came out. You must be a writer. I was really happy with that one. 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.

54:18So that's just a... 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? 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. Sure. 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? God, I hope somebody writes that book and wants to learn how to do that language.

55:04We 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. Right, because he's math fluent. 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.

55:46So 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. Yeah. Yeah, you know that's what's going to happen. I do. You'd have to ask Stephen and Gary Rydstrom, the sound designer, who came up with it together, I'm afraid. Okay, all right. Clearly the movie had to address our modern understanding of what is true. 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 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 Was there any subtle thinking about that?

56:46I think so. You know, you're not always conscious of what you're doing and how you're doing it. But building the story, I think we certainly trust what is near to us and perhaps smaller and manageable and with someone we know. Because that's the person reporting on news around the block from me. Right. Somebody's talking about what's happened in Chelsea. I believe it because I can see they're standing in Chelsea and they know Chelsea. And so that's my neighborhood. Got it. So I get that. Especially not a person that's a neighborhood in New York City that he just referred to. Right. The further it goes, the bigger it gets, the bigger the institution, the less we trust it.

57:24And what I think is really interesting about this movie as a bookend to Close Encounters, the 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 - Yeah, Watergate set that up for us nicely. And 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.

58:01And 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. 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. Yeah. And then you see it in all the news outlets. And then people come, they have the moment where they say, oh, my gosh. Well, and the trick is we know, of course, there's skepticism.

58:37the trick is to have such an overwhelming amount of information that it can no longer be denied. Right. So thanks for shedding some light from your literary artistic skills. My pleasure. Delightful to talk to you. And storytelling. I mean, it's a, you know, I write books and I like to think I tell stories, but I'm not, it's 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, you have the world in your palm of your hand, dude. Anybody ever tell you that? Movies do have a responsibility because we touch people, we reach them in an emotional, not just an intellectual way.

59:25And emotions can be very powerful and very positive, and they can be very negative and dangerous. Also be negative. All right. Well, thanks for being on StarTalk. My pleasure. I just heard you're a neighbor of the American Museum of Natural History. This is true, four blocks away. I'm going to 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.

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