(drum music)
- Hi, this is Marya Gullo from the Hollywood Reporter,
and we're in studio today
with Ari Handel and Darren Aronofsky.
Thank you very much for being here, gentlemen.
- Thank you for having us.
- You guys are the executive producers of
One Strange Rock on Nat Geo.
So the first question I wanted to ask you is
who is the first astronaut
you ever encountered in your life?
Who's the first one you saw?
- Actually the first one was probably...
- [Darren] Paolo, for me.
- No, Buzz.
- Oh why, did you meet Buzz?
- Yeah, at some event somewhere, he got (mumbling).
- Oh!
- Oh, that's pretty cool.
- But the first one I met,
it was Jeff Hoffman I met for this.
And, but really, we got to meet eight here.
So it was like a full on blast of astronaut power.
(Marya laughs)
- I met Paolo, who shot original footage for us
on the Space Station.
I didn't actually meet him,
but I got to talk to him on the phone,
and then do some email conversations with him,
but it was exciting because we got to
shoot original footage for the show on the Space Station.
In the kinda visual language that
the rest of the show was shot in.
I'd say the coolest, well I mean, they're all amazing,
but hanging out with Peggy,
who has been in space for 665 days,
and I like to call her the real life Ripley,
as in from the Alien movies,
because she's the person you want
to defend us from aliens invading.
Getting to hang out with her has been great.
- Wonderful, what is it that
all of these astronauts have in common?
Are there any common misconceptions
that this show kinda clears up about astronauts?
- I think one thing that I was surprised is,
how they're not jet pilots.
- Yes.
- And they're not The Right Stuff version,
but they really are a whole varied group
of people with varied backgrounds.
Biologists, doctors, engineers, and yes, jet pilots.
- [Darren] NFL players.
- NFL players, right.
So and then despite that
breadth of experience and background,
then there's this commonality that they all share
from this experience of going into space,
and what it does to them.
The way, their different relationship to the planet,
their different relationship to life support,
different relationship to time on the planet.
The sunrises and the sunsets,
they see 16 of those and we see one.
All those things are different,
and it lets them see the whole intricacies of the earth
in a special way, in new way that changes them.
- It doesn't matter if they've been in space
for eight days like Mae, or 665 days like Peggy.
They all kinda have this transformation.
And we talk about it on the show,
it's called cosmic consciousness, or the Overview Effect,
and it's basically seeing the earth as one system.
Something we all kind of understand and get,
but it's very easy to forget
in our daily lives of carpooling and taking kids all over,
and doing whatever other stuff
we need to do around the home.
Remembering that this is one house,
that we all share Mother Nature,
is something they get to witness firsthand.
And I think the show One Strange Rock tries to
capture that feeling and remind us all what's going on.
- Mm hm, and one of the ways it captures the feeling
is with the amazing footage.
Can you tell me a little bit about
where all of the different footage came from?
- We shot for 100 weeks.
145 countries, six continents,
the hottest place on the planet,
the coldest place on the planet,
up on the Space Station.
So we had six different crews going on at once at all times.
So a tremendous smorgasbord of
incredible places on the planet.
And that was kind of the initial pitch,
were all of these cool things
that are going on that you've never seen before.
So it's very much like looking through an episode,
or an issue of National Geographic the magazine,
how you can see snapshots of different places in the world.
And different scales,
sometimes it's people, sometimes it's animals,
sometimes it's chemistry and microbiology.
And we tried to give that spirit to the show,
but somehow unify it and connect it all,
to remind us all that it's one big system.
- And what did you learn through the process of the show
that kind of shocked you or amazed you?
- Every episode, there's something that's just mind blowing.
That there's been this exact amount of oxygen on the planet,
20.85% or some small fraction,
but that it's maintained this,
for some reason that we actually don't know the reason.
To all that was living on earth
for 3 1/2 billion years was bacteria.
To the first episode has this whole thing about diatoms,
which are these little creatures that basically
are responsible for most of the oxygen that we breathe.
What were some other things?
- Well there's endless, I mean to me,
one of the big things is how connected,
or how responsible living creatures are
for everything that we take for granted as being the planet.
The color of the sky, the dirt,
the ground, the way the rivers flow.
That all comes from life.
And contrapuntally, that everything in us,
the living creatures, are affected by this planet
in ways that we don't understand.
So seeing how interconnected everything is,
it was pretty eye-opening.
And as Darren said, every episode has something.
And I know a lot of scientists who watch the show
and say that they learn things,
and I also know a lot of kids who watch the show
and are able to take it in at the same time.
So it's nice to be able to reach that across those divides.
- At one point, they took jellyfish into space,
and the jellyfish that were born into space,
when they came back to earth,
were no longer like the jellyfish in the sea
because they didn't know which way was up or down.
So it made, it poses the question
what is it gonna mean for humans when we're born in space?
Will we still be earthlings?
- Right, and there's so many interesting speculations
about that on the show about what it's going to be like for
the first generation of people who are born off the earth.
- That's right.
Trying to underline a little bit, or ask the questions of
how separable are we from the earth,
and how reliant is the earth on our behaviors
for its ability to keep going in the way that we're used to?
- Are there any theories about space that you
still can't wrap your head around or can't understand?
- [Both Men] Probably most of them.
(laughing)
- Like 98% of everything is dark matter
but we don't know what it is, that's a good one.
- We also did, we had a VR project this year called Spheres,
where we try to take the audience
to far off places in the universe.
You know, being in the center of two black holes colliding.
Way over my head, but really cool experience.
(Marya laughing)
You know, it looked pretty.
- One of the things that all the astronauts said on the show
is that if given the opportunity,
they would go back to space.
Would you want to go to space?
- Absolutely.
- Absolutely, wouldn't you?
- I was gonna ask, have you been to space?
- Depends on how you define space.
- Yeah, exactly.
(laughing)
- Yes, I would too, yes, absolutely.
- I think most people would.
I think there's something really magical about that notion.
I think people do want,
want to break their mindset,
and see things from a different perspective.
And hopefully the show lets people do that,
in a certain way even without leaving.
- How did Will Smith become involved in the project?
- We knew that there was a lot of science,
and we wanted to figure out a communicator who could
really sort of connect with some of the intense stuff,
and make it really exciting,
and Will just seemed perfect for it
because he was able to take all of this information
and really communicate it to
pretty much everyone in an exciting way.
And then beyond that, we were blessed,
because we only had a small amount of time
because of schedules to work with him.
But he's just a complete gentleman, and totally game,
and definitely one of,
just an incredible actor to work with.
- Last question to you.
- Yes.
- If people are moved by this program,
and they're moved into the idea of conservation
or protecting the environment because of watching this show,
where do they start?
Where is a good place to start?
- You mean in their behaviors and in their life?
- In behaviors, in their life, how,
how they can help. - The first thing they do
is to vote for people who believe in science.
That's the most important thing you can do.
And to tell everyone you do.
Science has become political,
but it's not political.
Science is a way of observing the world,
and then turning those observations
into conclusions of how things work,
and then you can invent things
like cell phones and healthcare,
and all of these other things
that have just changed our lives for the better,
since the scientific method was discovered
and has been used.
So, yeah, there are people for
many different reasons now sort of cherry picking science.
And we saw, you know, Galileo they stuck in prison
for a long time for looking up at the stars.
Now people are sort of
voting and making choices
not based on science.
So I think that's the first thing is just to make sure
whoever you're voting, whoever represents you,
believes in science.
- You know NASA doesn't just
send spaceships out to Mars and to Venus and take pictures.
One of the big things that they've always done is
they put satellites around this planet,
and they study the planet closest to us, which is this one,
to understand how it works.
And that part of it, NASA,
the one that monitors and looks at this planet,
the one that gives us all the information
that's in this show, that part has been cut.
Because people...
- They don't want that information--
- They don't want to know because it's going to say things
that aren't gonna let them buy and sell
some of the things they wanna buy and sell.
So, allowing
science to inform us and to be
the vehicle for appreciating beauty and understanding,
that's a key component.
And then just try to live with respect
and awareness of the complexity and the beauty around you,
would also very be a good thing to do.
- Yeah, but that's the small contribution,
but governments are what's going to save us.
And being part of the Paris Agreement
was a huge step forward,
and now that we're the only country on the planet
that is not part of the agreement
just tells you something that's going on.
Why has every other country agreed with it except for us?
- Mm hmm, yeah.
Well, thank you for an informative
and really visually stunning and kind of mind changing,
a game changer of a show.
- Thank you.
- Thank you very much, nice to meet you.
- Nice to meet you too.
- Pleasure.
- Thank you.