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Nathaniel Kahn: The Cosmos, Filmmaking, Art, Humanity, Transcendence
April 18, 2024
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Nathaniel, there's a quote in the beginning of your film, Deep Sky, which follows the launch of the James Webb telescope. The quote, well, I'll paraphrase it. It's something like this telescope tells us about the bigger picture of who we are and how we came to be. So I ask you, Nathaniel, who are you and artistically speaking? Yes. How did you come to be? It's a fantastic question. Well,
That's it. It's way too existential for a Sunday morning. It's too tough. All that I know is it's an existential day. It's Easter. It's the beginning of the renewal. Well, so it's spring. I think of it that way. It's spring and everything is starting again. And I guess I would say that one of the things about the film that makes me feel somehow better about everything is to know that we're all made of stardust.
So how I came to be, how we all came to be is that we are of the stars and the material that is in us, the material that makes us, the calcium in our bones and the nitrogen in our blood and the oxygen that we breathe, all of these things, the iron in our blood, all of these things came from stars. So somehow when I look up at the night sky,
And I hope that people get a little of that from the film that when you look up at the night sky and you see this, you know, this, this, this beautiful sort of mysterious show of lights in the sky, you realize that we're from there. We're part of this. We're not separate from it. So I think for me, astronomy has always been something
That rather than feeling sort of alienating and distant and somehow too vast, you know, I mean, it is enormously vast and really too vast for us to comprehend in many ways, but somehow I find it also comforting.
to know that I am from there. We all are. Everyone on this planet is from the stars. We're all one. And maybe that sounds Pollyanna or it sounds like Pablum, but it's not because it's true. It's not just an emotional thing. It's a scientific fact that we are from the stars. So I guess what I would say is that, I mean, for me making this film,
Um, it was, it was a chance to reconnect with some things that I felt as a child. I became fascinated by astronomy when I looked through a neighbor's telescope and saw the moon and saw the rings of Saturn and that they were really there. It wasn't just a photograph. I was actually seeing it, the light from.
From saturn and the rings was actually coming to me through this instrument and it was hitting the back of my eye and that was real so i was captivated by that i'm also got the birds by bird watching by the by the things of nature and and somehow being able to make a film now about these things sort of brings me full circle in a way to the wonder that i had as a child.
Yeah, OK, because your interests are quite expansive. So you had a film called My Architect, which is about architecture and neurological disorder with two hands and then Deep Sky, which is about astronomy. Those two were nominated for Academy Awards, by the way. So it's not as if this is a newfound interest of yours. You've had it since you were a child. That's right. And just to be to be clear, My Architect, as much as it's about architecture, it's really about my search for my father.
So, you know, the fact that it's about architecture, I always find that with films, the films that I most gravitate towards are the films that aren't, it's not what it's about that is most captivating. It's somehow what is sort of buried beneath. My architect, of course, is about architecture and is about an architect who happened to be my father. But really, in the end, it's a search for a parent.
And all of us have, I think, in one way or another, all of us at one time in our life or other want to know more about a parent, whether the parent is there or absent. In my case, my father died when I was 11 years old, actually 50 years ago, just a few days ago, which is a very long time ago. But the film explores my journey to get to know him. Now, he was an architect, so architecture plays a large part in the film.
But it's not really about architecture. It's about the search. And I would say on a certain level, you know, deep sky, as much as it's about astronomy, it's also about our desire to understand the human desire to understand the universe and our place within it. So it's not, it's not a sort of procession of facts.
that I think, for the films that I like, the films that I like are not sort of stringing facts together. You can get that in another form. I love films which are really about filmmaking, about cinema, that use the techniques of filmmaking to get at things that only films can get at, the kinds of emotions that only films can get at.
So i think part of that is where you suddenly feel this sort of you know spine tingling feeling in a film that she that's me. Or or or you feel the spine tingling feeling says wow.
I feel it with the stars. I feel it that we come from the stars. Not just someone's telling me that, but I feel it. One wants to use the techniques of filmmaking to evoke, to try to evoke anyway. That's my job is to try to evoke those things. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't, but the hope with Deep Sky
was to use the images to evoke those kind of feelings that one realizes that this this vast sort of, you know, the vast universe that's out there is really there. It's not science fiction. It actually exists out there and we can see it if we bother to go find out. And that sort of gets at this deep piece of humanity, which you as a scientist immediately, of course, identify with, which is that we want to know.
We're mystified and we don't want to just receive the knowledge and say, oh, here's how it is. We want to go find out for ourselves. So to me, documenting the telescope being built is very much about documenting this human desire to understand the universe and our place within it. Was documenting it in IMAX important?
Very, very, very much so, very much so. So explain to me this, because you used the word cinema earlier. And that to me is a word that people use when they valorize film. And I mean, film for people who are listening. There's film in the sense that you go to watch a movie, quote unquote, but there's film like the actual chemical film that is filmed on versus video. And people like Paul T. Anderson and Quentin Tarantino and Nolan, they lament the death of film. I want you to speak on the necessity for IMAX and then your broader thoughts on
The death of film. Well, I don't think there's any danger that there'll be a death of film. The death of the particular chemical medium, I don't think there will be the death of that either. And I'm absolutely with the marvelous filmmakers that you named. I think there is a quality to film, which is utterly unique. It's ineffable. There's something about it that has the aura
of um it has the aura of something that you can't quite put your finger on but it has a feel and and part of it is also even just the colors you know when you look at when you look at say an old super eight film um and that film uh much of it is you know reversible so-called reversal film right so there is no negative the film is is the final you know the final product is the film it's it it you film it and the colors are the colors
There is a vibrancy to them there's also a translation it's not exactly reality we have this kind of this kind of obsession now with everything being real with read the reality of everything. But but any kind of film whatever it is it's always some kind of there's some kind of artifice there is some creation there it's not.
It's not reality it is an interpretation of reality a representation of reality the same way a painter represents reality so i think part of what we respond to in film is that there is. Where somewhere it's very very fundamentally aware that we're seeing a representation of reality and there's something that beautiful beautiful translation that happens in there where we're supplying details maybe that are missing or work we're somehow doing this calculus in our head when you see black and white film for instance.
Well, reality isn't black and white for us, it's color. Yet you see it and it has this kind of feeling that something is happening in your mind where you're translating what you're seeing in black and white into a reality. But it's like the reality of dreams. It's somehow heightened. At its best, film becomes art. So it has the same quality that other works of art have. So I think that the filmmakers you've mentioned
They're all artists. They see film as a medium, like paint is for a painter. Try taking a certain kind of blue away for a painter. They're going to be upset.
So I think this is, you know, so when you talk about the depth of film, I think we'll always have film as one of the great, it is a great medium. And so many, there are other mediums. We filmed, for instance, the IMAX, my IMAX film was filmed digitally. It was not filmed in IMAX film. Christopher Nolan filmed, you know, magnificently, beautifully, Oppenheimer in IMAX film. I dream to be able to do that someday. I hope I'll be able to.
But my film was done digitally and in terms of the resolution, the resolution is there in digital medium to be able to blow it up to IMAX size. I would argue that it does miss a little bit of that really wonderful sort of mysterious transformation that happens with film. So I'm a film stock aficionado as well. But the importance for making Deep Sky and IMAX
is somewhat different from the actual sort of whether it's celluloid or whether it's digital. The part that is essential is the scale. So IMAX allows you to create sort of experiences that are very different from, certainly very fundamentally different from how most of us experience things today, which is the way you and I are doing it right now. I mean, I'm on a smartphone.
And, you know, I feel that I'm there with you and we're together. But when you, you know, and it's fine for this kind of interaction, it's good. But when you talk about trying to represent or somehow experience the feeling of these vast cosmic spaces, to put that on a smartphone is, is you're, you're robbing audiences of, of this kind of awe inspiring wonderment.
And also, I would argue, getting closer to the actual experience of what's really out there, it has to be big. So the IMAX format, it does something really interesting, which is it's big enough that you, the audience member, can choose where to look on the screen.
So you're not just focused right dead ahead. You know, so much of filmmaking is, you know, we use shots, whether it's a wide shot or a close shot or medium shot or a panning shot or a push in, whatever it is to somehow focus the audience's attention at something very specific, someone's eyes and emotion, some, you know, some little squiver of the lips, which is, you know, that's the soul of cinema. Look at Ingmar Bergman's films. It's all about, I mean, a lot of it's about the human face. Um, but
For something like a vast nebula in the middle of space or a vast galaxy, it's actually better to have it be so big on the screen that you can choose where to look. Your eyes are actually not being focused on one thing. You're actually surrounded by it. So it envelops you.
And that doesn't work for a lot of things. It wouldn't work for intimate sort of cinema of sort of very tight emotional things between human beings, which is the soul of a lot of great cinema. But in this case, it made much more sense to create an immersive experience where you could look around and kind of feel it. It does something else too, which is that the images that have come back from the telescope,
are so extraordinary and the resolution of them is so, you know, is really incredible. You can blow them up really big and they don't pixelate. But there aren't that many of them. You want to honor them. They're like, you know, great cosmic tapestries. And we had, I mean, there will be more and more of them as time goes by. But when we made the film, there weren't that many of them.
So we sort of created the story around these sort of iconic hero images if you will.
And we were able to, because of IMAX, linger on them longer than you would in a film that was, say, made strictly for television, in which people expect faster cutting and they get bored, they can't look at something for a long time. We can't. We can't because you can't look around so much. It's like, OK, next, next. But with an IMAX thing, you can sit on an image and you see people in the theater exploring it.
Right there's one image but it's so large it's as if there's several different focal points exactly that's it exactly and there is you don't want to say there's one focal point there are moments when we draw attention when somebody says look at this john madder says look at this little hook here in the in the cosmic cliffs image that's super interesting and i never thought about it like that before i watched dune recently
I watched it in 70 millimeters. Yeah, sure. I had a not a great seat. Quite close up. That's another problem. Yeah, right. So for the first 10 minutes or so, it's a bit jarring. But afterward, it's like you're watching four different images, because you can only capture a quarter of the screen at any point. And so it had its advantages.
No, that's wonderful. That's one of the few advantages of having a bad seat is sometimes it's a big format film. If it's a small format film, bad seats are just bad seats. But with a big format film, suddenly you're seeing different things. There's another huge, go ahead. Yeah, tell me about a film that you watched recently that many people wouldn't know about, but it struck a chord with you. Oh, my gosh. Let's see something I've watched recently.
Well, I re-watched... I mean, are old films okay with this? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Iqmar Bergman? Yeah, another Bergman film. Yeah, yeah, yes. Well, I watched Versona again recently. And I've seen the film many times. But I'm just astonished by how he's able to create this incredible sense of tension and foreboding.
Um, and this feeling that something is going to happen with just two people on an island. Um, it's so fundamental, so simple, and there's a sequence in it which involves a broken piece of glass. Um, and, uh, uh, the, the, the sequence is, is, um, uh, BB Anderson is waiting for, uh, Liv Oman has decided she's not, she's made a decision not to speak.
I'm and bb anderson is her nurse and the nurse of course they have this kind of relationship that is constantly sort of shifting who's in charge who has the power and live on this silent actress.
It was famous, you know, and it's been taken care of by this nurse on a remote island. You feel she's in charge. She has power. And this becomes something that is very upsetting to BB Anderson. She feels manipulated and used. And at one point, Liv Ullman reads a letter that BB Anderson has written, and there's this kind of, or I think it's a diary, and there's this kind of confessional feeling. And then Liv Ullman is written about the nurse. And so the nurse feels very compromised, suddenly like she's being seen in a way and judged.
by this famous person. And there's a broken piece of glass, the glass breaks and there's a broken piece of glass on the patio. And B.B. Anderson just sits there. It's a sunny day. She has a hat on and she just watches as Liv Holman walks back and forth and almost hits the glass. And the tension you feel like when is she going to step on this glass? And she steps on the glass and she finally makes a sound.
She makes a sound and suddenly the power starts to shift in this, in this scene. So it, you know, you watch something like that and you realize, well, okay, that's cinema. That's cinema. Yeah, that's cinema. It's also difficult to write a scene with plenty of tension when there's not much going on. So it's easy when there's action or the threat of violence. Well, what I was about to say, it's a counterexample to what I was about to say is that in in glorious bastards, the opening 10 minutes or so,
That's one of the most tense pieces of cinema or of film that I've ever seen, but there is the threat. Oh, absolutely. Well, Tarantino, of course, I mean, you know, part of what I love so much about his filmmaking is he makes films within films and they're very, very long sequences. You know, he's willing to commit to a long sequence like that. At least 10 minutes. Right. It's at least 10 minutes, maybe even more. But, you know, you have the farmer there and he's got his three daughters and you and you you
You begin to realize that there are people in the basement hiding, Jews that are hiding underneath the floorboards. And Christoph Waltz is just, you know, the tension between the farmer and the hunter Christoph Waltz is so, you're absolutely right. The tension is so palpable and so, and so somehow in trend, you can't look away. You don't, you don't want the scene to keep going, but you can't look away.
And so that's, you know, in fact, they're related. What happens in that scene and what happens in the scene in persona are profoundly related. And that's something that, I mean, I think that, you know, great artists are able to create this, this kind of trance in the audience where you are, you are somehow you're stuck in this narrative, inexorable movement of time.
And that's something that I mean, to me, you know, the best cinema is cinema that gives you the experience of time, what time is actually sort of made up human time anyway. And in a great film, you know, you have the feeling you look at, you know, Seven Samurai or something like that, you know, it's a long film, three and a half hours nearly from nearly four hours. But when you finish watching it, you feel like you've lived. Hear that sound.
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Yeah, it's much easier to do that in television, but it's extremely difficult to do that in film. I agree with you in a way, but I think that one of the things that's happened in television that's kind of, it's both wonderful and also maybe sometimes a little deceptive
is that it's true that long form television allows us to create, you know, much more sort of nuanced relationships and to slow things down and to kind of have more of the cliffhangers and all those things. And they're wonderful. But then I also feel a lot of times things are extended artificially and it's manipulative. It's manipulative in a way that actually is like, it almost becomes like real time.
So you're just kind of waiting for it to happen. Whereas I feel in a great film, it does something else, which is, and I think this is very important, which is that a cinema, the theater itself, and that's the thing that will never die. Mediums will change, but the cinema, the place we go to, which to me is is a temple.
You know, it is a sacred space when we go to a cinema, even the ones that are designed poorly. I mean, I'm an architect's son, so, you know, I like beautifully designed spaces, you know, or things that I consider to be beautifully designed. But, you know, you go to the cinema and you're sitting there with other human beings and we're collectively experiencing a dream. We're agreeing to collectively go through and experience together with people we don't know.
Maybe you go with somebody you know, but there are lots of people around you you don't know. And these collective experiences, that's like a fundamental, we're fundamentally touching our humaneness when we're sitting in the dark watching dreams play out on the screen. That is something absolutely, there's something very, very deep about that. And I do think that part of what
Um, you know, part of what a great film does for you is that you feel you've gone through something together with these other people, not by yourself in the room, you know, but, but, but there's a, there's a collective experience, the collective gasp, you know, when you first see the shark and jaws or, or, you know, I mean, of course it happens in, in movies like that, but there's a collective gasp when live home and steps on the piece of glass. People gasp.
There's a collective gasp when you realize that Christoph Waltz knows that there are people under the floorboards, just suspects it enough to ask the right questions. Those experiences that happen together, you don't get by yourself sitting with your surround theater, and as much as we think that's just the height of luxury and the height of whatever it is, there's something, the humanness of it,
It can often be lacking. And I think that's also in the longer form television things that are very extended. I, you know, I, for me, there's nothing like a movie in which you go in and you're going to be inexorably stuck. You can't turn it off. You can't stop the process. You can't stop the process of time. And in that sense, it's like the universe. We can't, we can't stop the earth from spinning. We can't stop the earth from orbiting. We'll never be able to do that.
So I'm a horrible person to watch TV or movies with at home. Cause I pause all the time. Why did that person say that way? Who's that person? Sure, sure, sure. And my wife, she cannot stand it, but I love pausing it. I love discussing it, but in the cinema, it's in the theater. It's a different experience. You have to stay focused. Yes. You, you, you, you must stay focused and you must also know you're absolutely right. And you must stay focused, but you must also accept that time goes on.
and that you can't stop it. And I think that that's one of the things about great films that, not manipulative ones, that just kind of play with you for two hours and then let you go. You just feel wrung out at the end, but you don't really get any sort of transformation. But a really great film when you watch it, you feel you've been through something, that you feel like you're changed when you come out. And part of that is that you can't stop it.
That it is inexorably, even if you know what's going to happen, even if you know that the character is doomed, somehow going through it. I mean, it's the Greek idea of catharsis, right? That we need to experience these things together. The Greeks know perfectly well how the play Medea ends. It's not good. It's not good. We know how Titanic ends.
Exactly. We know how Titanic ends, the ship's going to go down, but going through that, there is a catharsis. Part of that experience is life, and that's why you want to watch the film again and again. You know what's going to happen, yet going through it is something that you crave repeatedly. That's interesting. It's remarkable that the theaters have survived COVID.
Now they've shrunk and like many have closed, but it's remarkable that there are any at all and they're suffering though. Barbenheimer was great for them. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I mean, but I think that just goes to show people crave that collective experience. We need that collective experience. We can't do without it.
Um, you know, we, we've, we've got to have it. Uh, and I think that, so that, that will never die. I mean, it goes back to Plato's myth of the cave. I don't know if you, if you've read that, but you know, right. So, I mean, it's, it's sort of this, this idea that, that, that people are together watching these shadows on the wall and it's entrancing. We, we can't, you know, we can't get enough of it. Um, you know, so I think that, and, and as in the myth of the cave, the relationship between those shadows on the wall and reality is very interesting. It, it reminds us that.
There's a difference between representation and reality and those two things, and those are things I wanted to play with in deep sky in the sense that here are these images that come back from the telescope that are of these vast cosmic places that we truly can't comprehend, but we're able to get a little feeling of them from these images and somehow
When you when you when you get that feeling it's something that you know, it it tingles your spine a little bit and You know, you're just grasping a tiny piece of it but you feel like you're on to something and it makes you want to Go back again and and you know and and and see them again or or somehow go out under the night sky and realize The way it changes your consciousness that now we know that every single star in the sky Virtually every star has at least one planet around it
That's not something we knew 20 years ago. So when I was growing up, you know, the, the idea that we knew that we knew the, at that point, nine planets in our solar system. Now they're only eight because they demoted Pluto, but you know, eight planets in our solar system. Those were the only planets that we knew existed in the entire universe. People postulated that there must be other planets around stars, but we didn't know.
Only through building telescopes like the Kepler Space Telescope and now JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes too, we've actually found that there are planets around virtually every star. So when you go out at night, think about that. When you look up at the stars, every one of those stars is another star system. You know, it really, it makes you sort of feel
both our uniqueness but also that we're not so special right so our solar system is like many other solar systems so why would it be then that looking at the stars provide significance because it seems like in some ways it can provide significance but yeah in order for us to feel like there's something consequential about us being made of star dust we would have to first value the stars it's not clear to me why we would value the stars outside of
It's just a holdover from our religious ancestors outside of some explanation like that, like rationally speaking, why should we value the stars? So that's one question. And then second, why would it be that rather than imbuing us with something that makes us larger than life, it makes us smaller because there's so many of them. Why doesn't it make us feel insignificant? Well, I, it's sort of a combination, isn't it? You know, because the, the idea that every star has other planets around it.
Could tend to make you feel insignificant. You're right. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that we now know that there are plants around virtually every star, we still only know of one place in the entire universe where there's life. So there is a great significance to that. It's hugely significant. It's everything that we know.
So it's this kind of duality of significance, insignificance that I think, you know, hopefully a film like Deep Sky begins to touch on that we are everything and we're nothing. And, you know, how can those two things coexist? Well, I don't know, but they do.
They do they do coexist and and it's okay as as John Mather the Nobel laureate who's who's in the film says and he was he was the director for much of the mission He was actually won the Nobel Prize for proving that the Big Bang really happened You know, it's a fascinating person, but when he says we are recycled, you know, and then he says it's okay It's okay There's something
extraordinarily moving about that for a scientist to recognize that the fact that, you know,
dust to dust that we are made of stardust and we return to stardust and you know the earth forms and then eventually the sun engulfs the earth and you know the earth is gone hopefully by that point we've gotten our act together enough that maybe we'll be able to go to the stars i don't know but you know but the idea somehow that we are from stardust and we return and we recycle and that it's okay and a scientist's understanding
Not just the facts of it, but also the emotional component of it that he says it's okay. There's something to me that's very, very beautiful and very comforting about that. So we're both everything. We're both significant and insignificant in the universe. And I think that, you know, we live in a time when sort of contradictions like that or dualities
You know, we tend not to like those things. We want everything to be good or bad or this way or that way. But, but so much of life is not like that at all. But most of life is it's this and it's that it's, it's two things at once. You know, um, I mean, you look at, you look at Shakespeare, arguably, you know, the, the greatest writer in the English language anyway, you know, um, all of his plays.
Could we say that it's okay, but then it's also it's not okay?
Like in play with this duality. Sure. Yeah, I think it's okay. And it's not okay. I think I think I think that's I think that's true. But it's it's okay. It's not okay. But in the end, that's okay. Yeah, your base has to be that's okay. But that's in order for you to have some inner peace, which may be an article of faith that I think needs to be there in order for you to keep yourself sane. Yeah, no, but I think I think we have a lot of trouble with that right now in our in our sort of current discourse.
We have trouble with the idea of, of ambiguity with, with something being complex. And I'm not really sure why we have, that's an interesting thing. I'm not sure why we, why we have that, but you look at politics, it's all one way or all the other way, but, but to get things done in the world, one constantly has to negotiate. One has to have a conversation. We have to be able to talk about things and disagree.
and then find some way that we can all coexist. Because the alternative is disaster. I mean, one thing I love about science is scientists, to be any good, have to be willing to be wrong. They have to be willing to be wrong and they have to accept the idea that experiment and observation has shown them to be wrong and shown something else to be true.
Um, and that's essential for every scientist that you have to be able to say, look, I have ideas about things. I have notions about things. I think it might be this way, but I must design an experiment. Which I can do. Um, and I'll look at the data and see what the data says. And then other people have to be able to do the same experiment and get a similar result. Yeah. What would the filmmakers version of being wrong be? The filmmakers version of being wrong.
Oh, gosh, that's... I mean, in art, it's very hard. You know, rules are made to be broken in art. So I don't think that... I mean, I think that film isn't really... It doesn't feel to me that it's about right and wrong so much. But it is about inventiveness, innovation, freshness, newness. How about this?
What would make Nathaniel feel like what you did was a success versus Nathaniel is in sorrow because of the failure? I'm always, I'm always seeing the way things fail. Always, always. I mean, I look at, I look at, no, I look at films I've done in the past and I see things I would have liked to have done differently. But, but, but that was then, you know, and I keep going. So, I mean, I'm always thinking about what the new thing, the failure would be not to keep going. The failure is not to start all over again.
The failure is to lose heart or to stop coming up with ideas. Actually failure, to be honest, it's to have an idea that you really want to do and find that you can't get enough money to do it. That's really upsetting. That's great. That's honest. I like that. I think most filmmakers out there would agree that
that failure is not being able to move forward and filming film is as much as it's to do certain things you do need money. There are certainly films you can make without money and they're marvelous. Talk about that process. How does one as a filmmaker go about raising money or acquiring funding?
Well, I mean, many people do it different ways. I mean, you can get grants, isn't it? I mean, there are people who work within a studio system. There are people who are able to continue to make movies because they have a certain level of reputation and people will bank on them. But even people at the top of their profession will tell you, finding the money is always a one-off. It's always, how am I going to find the money this time?
So i think even charlie kaufman so charlie kaufman to me is one of the greatest writers and he. Still has some struggles in that regard oh absolutely major major struggles but artists always do he's i mean he's an original his art is completely original and he's not gonna repeat himself he wants to try something new so you know in the film that i made the price of everything which is about the art world.
One of the main people in it is an artist named Larry Poons, and Larry is still around, thank goodness, and still making art in his own way. But in the film, we learn the story that in the 60s, he was very successful along with a number of other artists whose names you know very much, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, and a number of very
popular artists. And Larry was doing a particular kind of painting at the time, which was composed of a color field with dots on it. And the dots were very carefully orchestrated. Their organization wasn't random at all. They're very beautiful and they're mathematical. You would immediately appreciate their sort of order. There's an order to them, but you can't immediately see it. It's not like it's a simple pattern.
They're complex. In order for you to see them, you have to step back? Sort of both. You know, you sort of step back and you perceive the hole, but then you get closer and you see that there's some occasional patterns, but then they're not. They just have a kind of a, they vibrate. There's like this vibrating quality of spatial. Is something in front of it? Is it behind? They're quite, they're really entrancing and they were very popular. He made quite a number of them. They sold well, they went to auction, everything else. And then he started to change his style.
And to call it style isn't really fair. He started exploring different forms. He kind of moved away from the dots. First they were sort of ovals, then he moved away from them entirely, became something different. And he was told by his dealer, you know, what are you doing? You're the guy who makes the dots. And he's like, well, no, I'm not the guy who makes the dots. I'm a painter. I'm a person. I'm evolving. I'm making something new. And so he actually, you know, spent
I mean, he's always been part of the dialogue, but people wanted the dot paintings. And he started doing something different. Now he's sort of back with, you know, many, many years later with a whole new set of paintings, which are, which are marvelous and beautiful. And we represent that in the film, but to see his story that this, he had to have enormous courage to say, I'm not doing those things I was doing before anymore. You may like them. That's great. I'm glad, but here's what I'm doing now. As an artist, you have to follow those things. And I think
Filmmakers who are artists are constantly wanting to explore something new. And that's scary for the marketplace because the marketplace likes what worked last time. I mean, it's real simple. It's like marketing 101 versus art 101. Marketing 101 is if you find something that works, keep doing it. Art 101 is if you find something that works, do it for a while.
and then do something new. Yes. Because an artist has to evolve to survive. And that's an interesting thing. And I think it's something that perhaps is misunderstood, but that an artist, I mean, you look at the films of any, you know, you look at Scorsese's movies, he's constantly trying something entirely new, not just new stories, new techniques, whole new ways of making films.
You know, um, whole new, all new ways of telling stories, right? So whether it's mixing up time or it's using, you know, it's using, um, different kinds of effects or, or it's telling a story in a reverse order, or it's, you know, it's playing around with, with, with the actual techniques of story of filmic storytelling.
editorial techniques, cutting more quickly, cutting more. So those sorts of things. I used to be a huge fan of Wes Anderson. I've watched so many of his movies that I feel like he's become a character of himself. In my opinion, it's the same exact style, just doubled down on in each film. I'm a huge Wes Anderson. I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan. I love I love his movies. And to me,
His stylistic, his, you know, his, his style, I think he's actually changing it all the time. We're quite a lot. Great. And, and, uh, yeah. So I, I, I, I, I think you should see the latest one is short that he just did. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah. I haven't seen this last two, so maybe my opinion would change if I were to watch them as a marvelous filmmaker.
World Tenenbaums is still one of my favorite films of all time. Yeah, I know. Bottle Rock is the earliest one. Sure. Fantastic. Now we're sounding like we're Larry Poonz with the dots. I love Bottle Rock too, but...
This is a filmmaker who's trying many different techniques, always experimenting with new ways of storytelling. And you see the great actors who want to work with him. So, you know, you know, a director is really
Special when great actors want to work with them. There's a phrase that good artists copy great artists steal. So let's speak about Nathaniel. What's a film like? Tell me about a film that you haven't stolen from, but you would like to because it's so great. There's something there that you want to take and incorporate into your next one. I wouldn't dare say the films that I aspire to because they're too great.
So all that I can tell you is the directors that I returned to again and again, you know, I returned to Kurosawa again and again. I returned to Bergman again and again, you know. Explain to me how they've influenced your documentary filmmaking, because those are narrative films. OK, I'll tell you. Let me be specific about Kurosawa. So. There's a sequence in Seven Samurai.
where Toshiro Mifune, I know you know the film, but Toshiro Mifune who is, you know, he's not really a samurai. He wants to be a samurai, but everybody loves this guy. And then he sort of poses himself as a samurai, but you don't really know his backstory. You really don't know who he is or where he came from. He's clearly not a great swordsman like some of them, but you couldn't live without him because he, he boosts the morale of everybody. He's, he's, I mean, and of course he's such a great actor.
But, you know, and Kurosawa uses him as the great actor that he is, you know, to great effect. But there's a sequence where they're defending the village, the village of farmers, from the bandits. And the bandits are coming through and trying to steal the food. And the samurai have now taught the village how to defend itself. And the village is defended and the bandits are coming and all of the farmers withdraw into the, you know, into the protected area of the village.
And Mifune is there and the other samurai are there and they're getting the farmers to hold, you know, hold the line. And the bandits set an outlying house on fire. And it's an outlying house of one of the farmers that they weren't able to protect because it was outside of the area that they could protect. And Toshiro Mifune and the bandits kind of ride away after setting this house on fire. Sort of it's a mill. And Mifune becomes extremely upset.
sort of almost irrationally, and he runs outside the protected area to this hut that's burning. And one of the great, the sort of head samurai follows him and is angry at him for leaving his post. And he, Mifune runs to this burning mill and they knew that there was an old man there and a mother and a father and a child.
and Mifune runs towards this burning mill and the mother comes out holding the baby. The mother hands the baby to Mifune and then she collapses into the arms of the other samurai who's followed Mifune angrily and they realize that she's been speared by the bandits. She's dead. And Mifune is holding this child in his arms and the head samurai says, come on, we got to go.
Let's get back to the village. We have to go. And Mifune falls in the water, falls in the stream holding this baby, clutched to himself. And he says, this was me. This is my story. I was this little baby. And you realize at that moment that he was a farmer's child. He's not a samurai. He wasn't born to this noble sort of tradition of the samurai. He's a farmer's child.
And he was orphaned because the bandits weren't killing his, his village in that moment. And that's all, all you get wiped to another scene. And, you know, but you realize in that moment who this person is, it's a revelation that happens in the midst of this enormous, you know, this, this enormous epic of, of, you know, feudal period, Japan.
And this great battle, it's as great as any Western. And of course, Kurosawa learned a lot from John Ford. And then it bounces back from John Ford to Kurosawa and Kurosawa goes back to George Lucas and Star Wars. But that's a moment that's so precise. Kurosawa doesn't make the whole film about Mifune's backstory. It's just that one moment.
Not to compare them they're not comparable but there's a moment in my architect there's a moment in my architect which resonates for me with with a moment like that not equating them.
But it resonates. And the resonance is there's a scene where I go to visit a guy on a boat. My father built one boat. It was a concert barge that pulls up the little towns and opens up and they play a concert. And the guy who commissioned my dad to build the boat and also the conductor of the orchestra, I go to see him in the film. And he's the only person in the whole film that I was able to go without telling him
that I was the architect's son. So he didn't know who I was and we're filming it. So we're filming it and he's being kind of a jerk to me. I mean, I'm like trying to talk to him about the architect. He's like, yeah, yeah, you know, I got a concert kid, you know, you know, and he's really kind of blowing me off. Right. And he blows the horn and it was too loud. You know, there's a funny little sequence with me kind of running away from the horn. I didn't realize it was going to get blown right in my ears. And I mean, he's really treating me badly.
And so then, you know, he says, listen, I got to go to play this concert now. I can't talk to you anymore. And I say to him, well, do you know why I came today? And he's like, yeah, yeah, sure. You're making a movie about Louis Kahn, the architect, you know, and this is, he designed this boat and you know, go around, film it. That's nice. You know, and I said, well, no, I'm, I'm here because I'm his son. And suddenly the guy just collapses and he burst into tears.
And he gives me a hug, you know, and he realizes sort of, and then he says, I saw you at the funeral when you were a little boy. And if, for those of you who've seen the film, my parents weren't married and I was kind of a hidden child, you know, so I was at my father's funeral, but I was very much not part of the proceedings. My mother and I were not part of it, but this man saw me years ago when I was a little boy and he remembered always that. And suddenly in that moment, his humanity,
His compassion for me, for the little boy that was me, all comes out. And then he says, I got to go play a concert and he walks away. You know, I mean, it's like this moment of clarity that then moves on and we don't dwell on it. It's not some big maudlin discussion and all this stuff. It's just this moment of emotion and of revelation. And to me, that's, that's the way life is.
You don't get to endlessly sort of take the thing apart and, you know, and somehow the movies that I admire most like this moment in Kurosawa know how to give you the deep humanity in this kind of momentary shock that just, you know, blasts right to your soul. So I look for those moments, for the moments when someone, whether it's an actor or it's a
the person you're interviewing, where someone is talking about one thing and suddenly something else entirely bursts through, something that is deep within them comes out. So in the midst of all this action, which is life, suddenly the soul shines through. To me, those are the moments that just are
You know, transcendent in filmmaking and different from other arts. You know, I don't see that in painting so much or sculpture or something like that, but film, and you see it in the theater, of course, very much as well. But the way it reveals itself in the theater is often more verbal. It can be gesture too, but in the cinema, in great films, many times it's gesture. It's a tiny shift
In an eye or, you know, or somebody somehow pauses. And I can't explain it, but people in the audience cry, you know, or they laugh, you know? So those are, those are these things that, that, you know, you can't really. In scripted cinema, you try to create those things. I mean, you do absolutely, but they don't always work. And many times, you know, you improvise something and it's better when you improvise it. You know, it's better when you, when you sort of creep up on it.
Or it's amazing, amazing how you can film a scene and you think that, and this happens in documentary films all the time, you film the conversation with somebody and you get back and you feel like, you know, nothing happened.
This really was kind of boring, but they just weren't very interesting. You're referring to your impression after you just filmed. Sure. Like you're going now to look at the dailies. Yeah. Now sometimes you know, sometimes you know, you're in the moment, you're like, oh my God, this is like home run. Like I knew at the end of my architect, the conversation I had with the man in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I knew this is like, this is, you know, transcendent. It's magnificent. And he brought everything together.
In his emotion in his world everything everything was right there in the films right there i'm so happy you know but there are other times when you film something and you really think cheese i didn't get anything this. This was like not very revealing and then you look on the editing table.
And if you have a good camera person that you're working with, that's essential. And I'm blessed with being able to work with Bob Richmond, who's one of the very best and another cinematographer. I worked with Claudia Raschka, who's brilliant. And in working with Bob, I know that if something happened, he would have been attuned to it and picked it up.
Chances are, now sometimes that's surprising too, but then I also have a marvelous editor. I worked with an editor, Sabina Cranville, many times in my films. And, you know, when we're looking together, we'll look at shots and we have a similar, suddenly we both have a tear in our eye and was like, Oh yeah, that's a good moment. And, and oftentimes it's something you didn't think you got, you know, you, you did an interview and you didn't realize quite how much emotion was actually there.
And then of course the job in a documentary film is to try to create a whole scene around that.
So, you know, when we're talking about something like, you know, and glorious bastards with that scene, it's highly orchestrated. I mean, each shot is clearly very worked out in those first 10 minutes. I would assume I never, I never talked to Mr. Tarantino about it, but I'm assuming he had pretty clearly what shots he wanted. But, you know, so I think he knew how exactly what he wanted to build. But in documentary filmmaking, so many times you'll find a moment where the, which is the emotional pivot of the scene. And then you cut everything.
somehow around that to, you know, to highlight that and to make it land. So you might have to build a, you know, a significant ramp to get into it. And then you might have to get out of it in a certain way to make it work. Um, and it's not, it's, it's really, it's like, um, well, it's, it's panning for gold, you know,
You know, you find a nugget and then you're like, Ooh, this is good, you know, and, and, uh, what's the ratio between the footage that you filmed and then what actually gets released for some of the changes? Yeah. No different films. I mean, with my architect, it was a hundred to one. Wow. Holy moly. Yeah. It was those people who are listening, who don't know what we just said. Yeah. 100 hours need to be filmed in order for there to be one hour of footage on screen. Yeah. Yeah. But that had even said, I do want to be sort of clear that
There were things that I filmed that I was, you know, that I kind of knew as I was doing it that this won't work. But you never know. I mean, like it most likely wouldn't work. Who knows what Sabrina or the editor would think. And yeah, so you have to still capture it anyhow. Exactly. And part of that, you see, yeah, because that was a journey film.
And I wanted to sort of really cast a very wide net. I wanted to film a lot more than than I would use because I wanted to really kind of to film, you know, a lot just a lot of things because part of it was my journey. I wanted to hear what people had to say, you know. So that was about 100 to one. But also we gathered a lot of material that had already been shot, you know, archival material and things like that. So I'm counting that as well as part of that. It wasn't just the filming ratio.
With something like The Price of Everything, that's probably more like maybe 25 to 1, something like that. That sounds reasonable. With Deep Sky, much less, much less, much less, much less. Why do you think that is? Well, the planning was better or the writing was different? And also, please explain, what does it mean to write a documentary? People will see you have a writing credit. How can that work? Sure. Well, you know, with a film like My Architect,
Um, it's a lot of this material and then one is working for, you know, over a year, year and a half. I think we worked in the editing room, crafting that, creating it, um, you know, making it. So there is narration that's written that is, you know, that, that is over it, but I don't consider that film to be a written film. That's very much a film that is, that is sort of discovered through, through the process of making it.
Which is really what's so wonderful because because so much of filmmaking is editing. I mean, editing is like, you know, it's I don't want to say anything was the soul of filmmaking, but on a certain level, it's the soul of filmmaking because editing is like the great innovation in a way that you can understand that the car pulls up to the house and the next scene is in the house. We understand that the person got out of the car, went to the door, knocked on the door, came in and sat down. We don't have to show all that. We can just cut it out.
And so editing allows you to create these disjunctions in time that that are extraordinary or disjunctions in point of view, you know, that we can we can go from a close up to something wide or, you know, that we those those things are, you know, that's phenomenal. And so much of actual documentary filmmaking in the verite style.
which is you know this so-called cinema verite this you know it's direct cinema the dream was you're capturing life and i don't believe that because it's it's always there's always an artifice associated with there's always a created reality it's not like it is reality it's a created reality um but it's uh it's filmed without
A script you're not going saying I want this person to say this or this sort of thing and then you create you and you find the story to some degree something like deep sky was different because First of all, it's 40 minutes. So it needed to be a compressed experience So it needed to find ways to compress itself to tell a lot in a short period of time and
Second of all, because of the, the IMAX world of it and realizing we wanted to present those images, that the images had to be the kind of the centerpiece of it. We wanted to create, it needed to tell a story with those images and really in order to do that. And I also wanted it to be a pretty broad story, to be as much of the story of kind of the universe, if you will, that we could put into 40 minutes.
You know, while still having a little bit about building this telescope. So building a telescope to set the stakes and then using the images, you know, part one, the stakes, the mission, how hard it was to build this thing. Then there's the launch at about 11 minutes into the film. And then the back part of the film is the telescope unfolds and these images come back. And I wanted to use as many of those images as I could to kind of tell our universe story.
To do that, I certainly interviewed great scientists and they have, you know, beautiful things to say about those images, but it needed an overarching sort of, you know, story, an overarching sort of sense of the grandeur of this endeavor and the humanity of it. So I knew I needed a great actor to narrate it. So, and that's where, that's where, so I did write the story and then
God asked the great Michelle Williams to narrate it and her narration is magnificent and tells the story in this incredibly somehow emotional, accessible, human way. She's not presenting it as, you know, a set of facts or so many times in, you know, especially in science films, one kind of gets this voice of God thing where the narrator is telling you the facts and this is the way it is. You know, we didn't want that.
So, you know, Michelle and I talked about how we wanted to have it be that the person who was narrating it was also experiencing it along with the audience, not informing the audience. That's super interesting. Explain to the audience what would be the difference between directing it for the I'm telling you version versus the emotional, the voiceover artist is coming along with the journey, discovering it with you. Like, explain to me the difference in direction and then maybe you can articulate one.
Well, maybe, I mean, it's a little, okay, let me try to do that. I mean, I think that the major, it's different in the way that it's written. So it isn't written as a sort of authoritative, it's not written in the authoritative voice. It's written in a voice of discovery. It's written in a voice of sort of finding it as it goes along, right? It's going, the voice is going along on the journey just as much as we are.
The voice doesn't, the, the, the person behind this voice doesn't know everything already. They're finding it too. They're experiencing the emotions of what is, um, you know, what is being discovered. So an example would be, and I love Michelle's reading of this line where she talks about that, that, you know, back to Stardust where she says that the, the, you know, the,
That the stars are made of this material, the planets are made of this material of stardust. And then she says, and us too, are made of this stardust. The way she says us too, it has this quality of reaching through the screen. Interesting. And saying you, you, us, collectively.
Me reading this, me telling you the story and you out there, all of us, all of us. So that was a difference in her intonation and not a difference in script? I think it's combination. It's a combination, but very much it's about acting. It's about knowing how, I mean, when we say acting, it's about emotional connectedness to the material.
that the actor is completely in sync with what they're saying. They're not saying words. They're not using language to convey simply facts. They're using language, intonation, words, pauses to convey story and feelings.
So it's, it's what actors do, you know, it's what it's, it's what a great actor does. Um, they, they take you along on the journey, but they also know how to slow down so that it has, so that it, so things land. So they're not just, you know, because we can all take in facts pretty fast, but emotions take time. Yeah. You have to allow something to land, you know,
Um, and now we're into, we're basically into music. We're into rhythm. We're into the idea that you have to allow something to sit. And now we're sort of back to IMAX. One of the great things about working at IMAX was we could linger on images, linger on an idea. Um, we didn't have to immediately shift to something new because the format sort of
I mean, it not only allows it, it kind of demands it because your eyes simply, you can't take it in if it's shifting too quickly. You know, you need to slow down. So all of those things had to be in sync. The rhythm of the narration, the rhythm of the cutting, all of those things had to sort of work together to make it a, you know, a story that worked and to have the narration
Be part of the picture, not overlaid on top of it. It's in the picture. Yeah. In the story. Tell me about another insight of yours that changed the way that you create film. So I'll give you an example from the physics side. There's a science writer named Amanda Gefter. She would say that, look, I have a philosophy background and I went to study physics afterward. And there's so many disconnected facts, but something that crystallized it all for me early on that made the rest easier to learn.
Was that something is only real if it's invariant in every reference frame. Okay, just carrying that in her pocket helped her contextualize other facts. Now, obviously in art is not the same as let me remember facts and recall them and restate them. But tell me about an insight that you have or that you had that shaped the way that you create film.
An insight to tell me a little bit more about the insight that you were talking about to give me an example, another example from like from from science or something like that. I'll explain for me for filmmaking. I found that the dialogue was much more easier to be natural. So in the fiction film that I made the feature fiction film when it was just bullet pointed out rather than scripted out and the specific words or specific phrases could be scripted out, but rather we're improvising a bit off of an outline and it created much more natural dialogue.
Sure. So that's a small example, but you're a much more seasoned filmmaker. So I'm sure you have a more emotional or meaningful insight. No, no, I don't. I think your insight, I think, I think your insight is brilliant. I think you're absolutely right. Did some of the best, um, some of the very best films. I mean, you look at the films of, of, um, you know, the Italian near realist films. So here's another one.
When you first, at least for me, when I first start filmmaking, you shoot everything, you shoot someone walking for no reason. Like you mentioned earlier, they enter the door. That's like the standard student filmmaker mistake. Sure. Just the insight that every single shot needs to be there for a reason. Oh, especially the opening shot, especially the opening shot, but every single shot and even shot movement. Like I want to plan the movement. This applies in the narrative case. In the documentary case, it's so much more fluid and the editor is much more involved. That stuck with me and
Planned out, what's going to be in frame, what's going to recede from the distance, from what side. The visuals of the film were there before I started filming. Each frame in I'm OK, my feature film was deliberate. If someone's on the left versus the right, it matters. If a shot was a certain duration, it matters to the symbolism, character names, etc. And so that stuck with me.
Okay, so what about for you? What's something that you learned fairly early on? You're happy that you learned it because it helped you out so much. And it's not something that's obvious to everyone else. It's a great question. And I won't pull something from narrative filmmaking, I'll pull something from documentary filmmaking. And it's something that Bob Richmond taught me, the cinematographer, like the very first day. And he said, learn to shut up. And
I think it's the single most important in documentary filmmaking. People go in with their list of questions. I was supposed to ask you this and I'll ask you this and what about this? And you see it in interviewing all the time. You see it in, you know, in news shows, you know, these, these, these, you know, hard hitting whatever interviews of some picture of public figure and they have a list of questions.
And so many times I say, just be quiet. The person isn't done. They have more to say. If you just be comfortable with silence, they'll say what's really on their mind. Not, you know, answering questions. Documentary filmmaking is not about question and answer. It's about truly observing.
The world observing what's going on in that sense it's very much like narrative filmmaking in that you're there with another human being honor that human being. I actually listening to them and looking at them and and allowing them their space. So the difference in the material that i got back.
As a filmmaker, when I learned to sort of get a conversation going, and then, you know, when you have a conversation, you do have certain questions you start to ask, but then you allow the other person to take charge, to take control, to... So you're following them, you're not leading them. Well, you lead them... I mean, it's like playing jazz, right? Sometimes they lead, sometimes you lead. But the idea that somebody sort of says something, and then you leave the silence,
In general, I mean, look, we've been talking here this time. I've been talking so much. The idea that just sitting with another person after they've said something and let the silence fall, let the discomfort in a way with sort of personal intimacy that happens when there's nothing to say, let that be in the room. And then many times the person says something far deeper.
then what your question elicits. They let you know something about themselves. They make a gesture. They look away. They say something else. They asked you something. So to me, sort of the greatest lesson was to allow silence.
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I was practicing some of that right now. It's much more effective in person because sometimes when even right now, we're also not sure. Are you lagging? Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Are we out of sync? You know, yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah. That's something I'll take with me. I appreciate that, man. Thank you. It's a big one. And the other one, which is sort of in a way it's related, it's be willing to go back another time. So, you know, people can't always bring their best.
In one goal, you know, and so many of my films, I mean, there's an example in my architect as well. Um, there's one in the price of everything too, but in my architect, you know, I interviewed my mother who, who recently passed away. Um, and at 94, she lived quite a life and managed to write a book when she was 91 years old. You know, she lived quite a remarkable life and was a single mother and, and, you know, did a lot for me. Um,
And, you know, she's in the film, My Architect, and I went and interviewed her and I thought I got a really good interview with her. And I thought she really revealed an awful lot about the struggle she had, you know, as a professional woman in a period that was not easy for women and certainly not easy for women in her position, unmarried, you know.
Uh, and working for my father as well. Um, very, very complicated circumstance. And I thought she was pretty terrific, you know, and, um, I watched this interview with the editor Sabina and she looks at me and she has this way of, she adjusts her glasses when she's not happy about something. And she looks at me and she adjusted her glasses like this. And she says, um, yeah, it was good, but you didn't go far enough.
And I knew she was right that I hadn't gone far enough. So I went back a second time to my mother almost six months later and just me, I filmed it myself. I didn't bring a camera person. I just filmed it myself and I was able to get to the level of her being that transcended the sort of the first time she presented her story and she told it very well, but she was still presenting it.
The second time she was living it. So both interviews are in the film. They're separated by about, you know, I don't know, half an hour, 35 minutes or so. But, you know, the return visit, certainly in documentary filmmaking, the return visit is essential. But if you find somebody that you really like and that you think there's more there, don't just kind of move on and, oh, let me get somebody else, you know, some other talking head.
Return to the people who, where you feel that there's more. So that's, that's in a way that's related to this idea of listening and silence. Okay. You're on a roll. What's one more? What one more film? No, one more insight. Oh, one more insight. One more insight. What I'm wondering is in the last example, was it the case that it's sure it is also the second time you visited, but was it also the intimacy of you being there yourself only?
Absolutely. I mean, you've given me the next one right there, which is that have the courage to use whatever technology is at hand to capture the moment. These days, a smartphone is so good that we worry ourselves so much about the technology and the perfection of the... I mean, here's one right here.
worry less about
That came with the territory. You watch taxi driver, you know, you watch watch, you know, watch anything filmed in film where there's lower light and there's a good fall off because the depth of field isn't so great. You know, these days with video, everything's in focus and it's kind of a problem, you know, but, but with film things were often out of focus, but people were not, I mean, yes, of course, great cinematographers were always worried about how the background was falling in focus and out of focus, but they weren't turning, they weren't fetishizing it.
I'm turning it into some like thing where, you know, we have to use only prime lenses and we want to have this background view. It's about the emotion. It's about what's happening on the screen that really matters, not the background. So I guess that's the piece that goes along with it. If a moment is happening, don't worry desperately about if you have your new fancy handy-dandy thing that's the latest of the latest to film it. Use the technology at hand so you don't lose the moment.
Don't waste it. That's another one. When you first go to talk to someone, be rolling from the beginning. Don't do a pre-interview. Don't have a whole conversation on the phone. If there's one thing I've learned, you only get one chance of first meeting someone. One of the great thrills of documentary filmmaking is you get to meet these amazing people.
But you only get to meet them the first time once and that's the first time. So you want that first time to have meaning not to be something where you sit down and you talk for three hours and they're talked out and then you say, okay, let's do that again. People don't work that way. They don't repeat themselves, you know, the same with the same cadences and the same emotions a second time. They just don't, you know, even actors. So tell you many times the first take is the one, you know, because it's
It's raw. It's new. You know, now sometimes it's the it's the 20th take. Sure. But, but there's a freshness that happens sometimes right off the bat that is very, very real. And, and with, with, you know, with people, the characters in a, in a, in a, I mean, we call them characters, but people in your film, um, you know, you only get to sort of be them, be there with them the first time.
The first time. So I think it's essential. I'm always, you know, I like to be rolling from the very start. Um, and many times, of course, you cut out the greeting, Hey, how are you? And that stuff. I mean, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the first, the first, and sometimes you use that. Sure. Once in a while, once in a great while, maybe once in a movie, you use that, but it's those first reactions. Somebody says something maybe about you, you know, Oh, what's that thing on your shirt? You know, there's some, there's some human, there's some human response.
Or, you know, like the first time that I saw Larry Poonz in the same film, The Price of Everything, we drove up. I talked to him on the phone a little bit, just, but I said, I look, I don't want to.
I don't want
Um, the cameraman, Bob Richmond and the sound man, Eddie O'Connor and I, you know, we've done this before. I just said, well, let's, let's, let's be rolling right away. So we were, and that first interview where he starts talking about the relationship between art and money was 30 seconds after we met. Literally. I mean, we met and it's like, you know, he starts saying, wow, what are you making this movie, you know, a movie about? And I was like, well, you know, art and money. And he just,
Launched right into it. And there's no way he would have done that a second time. Because there was like this, you see in his face, his skepticism, like, well, how could they, how could art and money be related? He looks at me with this kind of like, what's wrong with you? Of course they're not related. It's not like baseball where your batting average is your batting average. You know, you either you hit the ball or you don't. Art isn't like that. You know, it's, it's got to do with all these other things. Taste and the most expensive art isn't the best art. Of course it's not.
Doesn't make any sense. So immediately, he like encapsulated the theme of my entire movie within 30 seconds of meeting this person. If I hadn't been rolling, I wouldn't have had it, would have been gone. So it's the, I guess what we're coming back to is the preciousness of the moment when you're making a film. There's a precious moment, which is, it could be silence,
It could be the first meeting. It could be, you know, the second time you go back, but these are moments of time that won't repeat themselves. It's not information. It's emotion. It's life, humanity, time, all, you know, sort of all at once. Um, and anyway, that's what I respond to in films is where you feel like life is like this.
This is the way things happen. This is the way it happens. You know, life is composed of these things. Moments like this, you know, like that moment in Kurosawa when, when he collapses, he's holding the baby and he says, this was me. This, this, this could have been me. It's just a moment, but it's like he managed to capture something that, you know,
It felt at that moment like a documentary. Like, it's not an actor anymore. It's a human being revealing their innermost thing, you know. It might as well be Mifune himself, not even the actor. So it has this sort of, you know, this weird sort of thing of like he's an actor, but he's also a person. And it was so, so sort of real in that moment that you almost felt like, oh my God, I'm watching a documentary here. This is really real. Nathaniel Kahn's
Deep Sky, which chronicles the James Webb Telescope, releases nationwide April 19th in IMAX. Nathaniel, thank you for spending so much time with me. Thank you. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, kurtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like.
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Greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts.
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
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"text": " Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.COM today to save on your first order."
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"text": " Nathaniel, there's a quote in the beginning of your film, Deep Sky, which follows the launch of the James Webb telescope. The quote, well, I'll paraphrase it. It's something like this telescope tells us about the bigger picture of who we are and how we came to be. So I ask you, Nathaniel, who are you and artistically speaking? Yes. How did you come to be? It's a fantastic question. Well,"
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"text": " That's it. It's way too existential for a Sunday morning. It's too tough. All that I know is it's an existential day. It's Easter. It's the beginning of the renewal. Well, so it's spring. I think of it that way. It's spring and everything is starting again. And I guess I would say that one of the things about the film that makes me feel somehow better about everything is to know that we're all made of stardust."
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"text": " So how I came to be, how we all came to be is that we are of the stars and the material that is in us, the material that makes us, the calcium in our bones and the nitrogen in our blood and the oxygen that we breathe, all of these things, the iron in our blood, all of these things came from stars. So somehow when I look up at the night sky,"
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"text": " And I hope that people get a little of that from the film that when you look up at the night sky and you see this, you know, this, this, this beautiful sort of mysterious show of lights in the sky, you realize that we're from there. We're part of this. We're not separate from it. So I think for me, astronomy has always been something"
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"text": " That rather than feeling sort of alienating and distant and somehow too vast, you know, I mean, it is enormously vast and really too vast for us to comprehend in many ways, but somehow I find it also comforting."
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"text": " to know that I am from there. We all are. Everyone on this planet is from the stars. We're all one. And maybe that sounds Pollyanna or it sounds like Pablum, but it's not because it's true. It's not just an emotional thing. It's a scientific fact that we are from the stars. So I guess what I would say is that, I mean, for me making this film,"
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"text": " Um, it was, it was a chance to reconnect with some things that I felt as a child. I became fascinated by astronomy when I looked through a neighbor's telescope and saw the moon and saw the rings of Saturn and that they were really there. It wasn't just a photograph. I was actually seeing it, the light from."
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"text": " From saturn and the rings was actually coming to me through this instrument and it was hitting the back of my eye and that was real so i was captivated by that i'm also got the birds by bird watching by the by the things of nature and and somehow being able to make a film now about these things sort of brings me full circle in a way to the wonder that i had as a child."
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"text": " Yeah, OK, because your interests are quite expansive. So you had a film called My Architect, which is about architecture and neurological disorder with two hands and then Deep Sky, which is about astronomy. Those two were nominated for Academy Awards, by the way. So it's not as if this is a newfound interest of yours. You've had it since you were a child. That's right. And just to be to be clear, My Architect, as much as it's about architecture, it's really about my search for my father."
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"text": " So, you know, the fact that it's about architecture, I always find that with films, the films that I most gravitate towards are the films that aren't, it's not what it's about that is most captivating. It's somehow what is sort of buried beneath. My architect, of course, is about architecture and is about an architect who happened to be my father. But really, in the end, it's a search for a parent."
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"text": " And all of us have, I think, in one way or another, all of us at one time in our life or other want to know more about a parent, whether the parent is there or absent. In my case, my father died when I was 11 years old, actually 50 years ago, just a few days ago, which is a very long time ago. But the film explores my journey to get to know him. Now, he was an architect, so architecture plays a large part in the film."
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"text": " But it's not really about architecture. It's about the search. And I would say on a certain level, you know, deep sky, as much as it's about astronomy, it's also about our desire to understand the human desire to understand the universe and our place within it. So it's not, it's not a sort of procession of facts."
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"text": " that I think, for the films that I like, the films that I like are not sort of stringing facts together. You can get that in another form. I love films which are really about filmmaking, about cinema, that use the techniques of filmmaking to get at things that only films can get at, the kinds of emotions that only films can get at."
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"text": " So i think part of that is where you suddenly feel this sort of you know spine tingling feeling in a film that she that's me. Or or or you feel the spine tingling feeling says wow."
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"text": " I feel it with the stars. I feel it that we come from the stars. Not just someone's telling me that, but I feel it. One wants to use the techniques of filmmaking to evoke, to try to evoke anyway. That's my job is to try to evoke those things. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't, but the hope with Deep Sky"
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"text": " was to use the images to evoke those kind of feelings that one realizes that this this vast sort of, you know, the vast universe that's out there is really there. It's not science fiction. It actually exists out there and we can see it if we bother to go find out. And that sort of gets at this deep piece of humanity, which you as a scientist immediately, of course, identify with, which is that we want to know."
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"text": " We're mystified and we don't want to just receive the knowledge and say, oh, here's how it is. We want to go find out for ourselves. So to me, documenting the telescope being built is very much about documenting this human desire to understand the universe and our place within it. Was documenting it in IMAX important?"
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"text": " Very, very, very much so, very much so. So explain to me this, because you used the word cinema earlier. And that to me is a word that people use when they valorize film. And I mean, film for people who are listening. There's film in the sense that you go to watch a movie, quote unquote, but there's film like the actual chemical film that is filmed on versus video. And people like Paul T. Anderson and Quentin Tarantino and Nolan, they lament the death of film. I want you to speak on the necessity for IMAX and then your broader thoughts on"
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"text": " The death of film. Well, I don't think there's any danger that there'll be a death of film. The death of the particular chemical medium, I don't think there will be the death of that either. And I'm absolutely with the marvelous filmmakers that you named. I think there is a quality to film, which is utterly unique. It's ineffable. There's something about it that has the aura"
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"text": " of um it has the aura of something that you can't quite put your finger on but it has a feel and and part of it is also even just the colors you know when you look at when you look at say an old super eight film um and that film uh much of it is you know reversible so-called reversal film right so there is no negative the film is is the final you know the final product is the film it's it it you film it and the colors are the colors"
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"text": " There is a vibrancy to them there's also a translation it's not exactly reality we have this kind of this kind of obsession now with everything being real with read the reality of everything. But but any kind of film whatever it is it's always some kind of there's some kind of artifice there is some creation there it's not."
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"text": " It's not reality it is an interpretation of reality a representation of reality the same way a painter represents reality so i think part of what we respond to in film is that there is. Where somewhere it's very very fundamentally aware that we're seeing a representation of reality and there's something that beautiful beautiful translation that happens in there where we're supplying details maybe that are missing or work we're somehow doing this calculus in our head when you see black and white film for instance."
},
{
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"start_time": 617.602,
"text": " Well, reality isn't black and white for us, it's color. Yet you see it and it has this kind of feeling that something is happening in your mind where you're translating what you're seeing in black and white into a reality. But it's like the reality of dreams. It's somehow heightened. At its best, film becomes art. So it has the same quality that other works of art have. So I think that the filmmakers you've mentioned"
},
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"text": " They're all artists. They see film as a medium, like paint is for a painter. Try taking a certain kind of blue away for a painter. They're going to be upset."
},
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"text": " So I think this is, you know, so when you talk about the depth of film, I think we'll always have film as one of the great, it is a great medium. And so many, there are other mediums. We filmed, for instance, the IMAX, my IMAX film was filmed digitally. It was not filmed in IMAX film. Christopher Nolan filmed, you know, magnificently, beautifully, Oppenheimer in IMAX film. I dream to be able to do that someday. I hope I'll be able to."
},
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"text": " But my film was done digitally and in terms of the resolution, the resolution is there in digital medium to be able to blow it up to IMAX size. I would argue that it does miss a little bit of that really wonderful sort of mysterious transformation that happens with film. So I'm a film stock aficionado as well. But the importance for making Deep Sky and IMAX"
},
{
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"start_time": 718.831,
"text": " is somewhat different from the actual sort of whether it's celluloid or whether it's digital. The part that is essential is the scale. So IMAX allows you to create sort of experiences that are very different from, certainly very fundamentally different from how most of us experience things today, which is the way you and I are doing it right now. I mean, I'm on a smartphone."
},
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"text": " And, you know, I feel that I'm there with you and we're together. But when you, you know, and it's fine for this kind of interaction, it's good. But when you talk about trying to represent or somehow experience the feeling of these vast cosmic spaces, to put that on a smartphone is, is you're, you're robbing audiences of, of this kind of awe inspiring wonderment."
},
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"text": " And also, I would argue, getting closer to the actual experience of what's really out there, it has to be big. So the IMAX format, it does something really interesting, which is it's big enough that you, the audience member, can choose where to look on the screen."
},
{
"end_time": 816.169,
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"start_time": 787.21,
"text": " So you're not just focused right dead ahead. You know, so much of filmmaking is, you know, we use shots, whether it's a wide shot or a close shot or medium shot or a panning shot or a push in, whatever it is to somehow focus the audience's attention at something very specific, someone's eyes and emotion, some, you know, some little squiver of the lips, which is, you know, that's the soul of cinema. Look at Ingmar Bergman's films. It's all about, I mean, a lot of it's about the human face. Um, but"
},
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"text": " For something like a vast nebula in the middle of space or a vast galaxy, it's actually better to have it be so big on the screen that you can choose where to look. Your eyes are actually not being focused on one thing. You're actually surrounded by it. So it envelops you."
},
{
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"start_time": 836.527,
"text": " And that doesn't work for a lot of things. It wouldn't work for intimate sort of cinema of sort of very tight emotional things between human beings, which is the soul of a lot of great cinema. But in this case, it made much more sense to create an immersive experience where you could look around and kind of feel it. It does something else too, which is that the images that have come back from the telescope,"
},
{
"end_time": 883.865,
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"start_time": 861.732,
"text": " are so extraordinary and the resolution of them is so, you know, is really incredible. You can blow them up really big and they don't pixelate. But there aren't that many of them. You want to honor them. They're like, you know, great cosmic tapestries. And we had, I mean, there will be more and more of them as time goes by. But when we made the film, there weren't that many of them."
},
{
"end_time": 892.022,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 884.155,
"text": " So we sort of created the story around these sort of iconic hero images if you will."
},
{
"end_time": 918.592,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 892.5,
"text": " And we were able to, because of IMAX, linger on them longer than you would in a film that was, say, made strictly for television, in which people expect faster cutting and they get bored, they can't look at something for a long time. We can't. We can't because you can't look around so much. It's like, OK, next, next. But with an IMAX thing, you can sit on an image and you see people in the theater exploring it."
},
{
"end_time": 939.582,
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"start_time": 918.763,
"text": " Right there's one image but it's so large it's as if there's several different focal points exactly that's it exactly and there is you don't want to say there's one focal point there are moments when we draw attention when somebody says look at this john madder says look at this little hook here in the in the cosmic cliffs image that's super interesting and i never thought about it like that before i watched dune recently"
},
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"end_time": 958.473,
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"start_time": 939.974,
"text": " I watched it in 70 millimeters. Yeah, sure. I had a not a great seat. Quite close up. That's another problem. Yeah, right. So for the first 10 minutes or so, it's a bit jarring. But afterward, it's like you're watching four different images, because you can only capture a quarter of the screen at any point. And so it had its advantages."
},
{
"end_time": 987.193,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 959.394,
"text": " No, that's wonderful. That's one of the few advantages of having a bad seat is sometimes it's a big format film. If it's a small format film, bad seats are just bad seats. But with a big format film, suddenly you're seeing different things. There's another huge, go ahead. Yeah, tell me about a film that you watched recently that many people wouldn't know about, but it struck a chord with you. Oh, my gosh. Let's see something I've watched recently."
},
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"start_time": 988.66,
"text": " Well, I re-watched... I mean, are old films okay with this? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Iqmar Bergman? Yeah, another Bergman film. Yeah, yeah, yes. Well, I watched Versona again recently. And I've seen the film many times. But I'm just astonished by how he's able to create this incredible sense of tension and foreboding."
},
{
"end_time": 1041.988,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1015.145,
"text": " Um, and this feeling that something is going to happen with just two people on an island. Um, it's so fundamental, so simple, and there's a sequence in it which involves a broken piece of glass. Um, and, uh, uh, the, the, the sequence is, is, um, uh, BB Anderson is waiting for, uh, Liv Oman has decided she's not, she's made a decision not to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 1055.742,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1042.824,
"text": " I'm and bb anderson is her nurse and the nurse of course they have this kind of relationship that is constantly sort of shifting who's in charge who has the power and live on this silent actress."
},
{
"end_time": 1085.316,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1055.862,
"text": " It was famous, you know, and it's been taken care of by this nurse on a remote island. You feel she's in charge. She has power. And this becomes something that is very upsetting to BB Anderson. She feels manipulated and used. And at one point, Liv Ullman reads a letter that BB Anderson has written, and there's this kind of, or I think it's a diary, and there's this kind of confessional feeling. And then Liv Ullman is written about the nurse. And so the nurse feels very compromised, suddenly like she's being seen in a way and judged."
},
{
"end_time": 1111.118,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1085.64,
"text": " by this famous person. And there's a broken piece of glass, the glass breaks and there's a broken piece of glass on the patio. And B.B. Anderson just sits there. It's a sunny day. She has a hat on and she just watches as Liv Holman walks back and forth and almost hits the glass. And the tension you feel like when is she going to step on this glass? And she steps on the glass and she finally makes a sound."
},
{
"end_time": 1140.64,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1111.613,
"text": " She makes a sound and suddenly the power starts to shift in this, in this scene. So it, you know, you watch something like that and you realize, well, okay, that's cinema. That's cinema. Yeah, that's cinema. It's also difficult to write a scene with plenty of tension when there's not much going on. So it's easy when there's action or the threat of violence. Well, what I was about to say, it's a counterexample to what I was about to say is that in in glorious bastards, the opening 10 minutes or so,"
},
{
"end_time": 1170.213,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1141.305,
"text": " That's one of the most tense pieces of cinema or of film that I've ever seen, but there is the threat. Oh, absolutely. Well, Tarantino, of course, I mean, you know, part of what I love so much about his filmmaking is he makes films within films and they're very, very long sequences. You know, he's willing to commit to a long sequence like that. At least 10 minutes. Right. It's at least 10 minutes, maybe even more. But, you know, you have the farmer there and he's got his three daughters and you and you you"
},
{
"end_time": 1197.022,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1170.657,
"text": " You begin to realize that there are people in the basement hiding, Jews that are hiding underneath the floorboards. And Christoph Waltz is just, you know, the tension between the farmer and the hunter Christoph Waltz is so, you're absolutely right. The tension is so palpable and so, and so somehow in trend, you can't look away. You don't, you don't want the scene to keep going, but you can't look away."
},
{
"end_time": 1223.131,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1197.346,
"text": " And so that's, you know, in fact, they're related. What happens in that scene and what happens in the scene in persona are profoundly related. And that's something that, I mean, I think that, you know, great artists are able to create this, this kind of trance in the audience where you are, you are somehow you're stuck in this narrative, inexorable movement of time."
},
{
"end_time": 1249.121,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1223.49,
"text": " And that's something that I mean, to me, you know, the best cinema is cinema that gives you the experience of time, what time is actually sort of made up human time anyway. And in a great film, you know, you have the feeling you look at, you know, Seven Samurai or something like that, you know, it's a long film, three and a half hours nearly from nearly four hours. But when you finish watching it, you feel like you've lived. Hear that sound."
},
{
"end_time": 1275.623,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1249.497,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 1301.749,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1275.623,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 1327.5,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1301.749,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 1335.486,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1327.5,
"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories."
},
{
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"start_time": 1336.22,
"text": " This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state."
},
{
"end_time": 1396.442,
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"text": " Yeah, it's much easier to do that in television, but it's extremely difficult to do that in film. I agree with you in a way, but I think that one of the things that's happened in television that's kind of, it's both wonderful and also maybe sometimes a little deceptive"
},
{
"end_time": 1423.08,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1396.834,
"text": " is that it's true that long form television allows us to create, you know, much more sort of nuanced relationships and to slow things down and to kind of have more of the cliffhangers and all those things. And they're wonderful. But then I also feel a lot of times things are extended artificially and it's manipulative. It's manipulative in a way that actually is like, it almost becomes like real time."
},
{
"end_time": 1446.476,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1423.422,
"text": " So you're just kind of waiting for it to happen. Whereas I feel in a great film, it does something else, which is, and I think this is very important, which is that a cinema, the theater itself, and that's the thing that will never die. Mediums will change, but the cinema, the place we go to, which to me is is a temple."
},
{
"end_time": 1474.394,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1446.937,
"text": " You know, it is a sacred space when we go to a cinema, even the ones that are designed poorly. I mean, I'm an architect's son, so, you know, I like beautifully designed spaces, you know, or things that I consider to be beautifully designed. But, you know, you go to the cinema and you're sitting there with other human beings and we're collectively experiencing a dream. We're agreeing to collectively go through and experience together with people we don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 1498.2,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1475.094,
"text": " Maybe you go with somebody you know, but there are lots of people around you you don't know. And these collective experiences, that's like a fundamental, we're fundamentally touching our humaneness when we're sitting in the dark watching dreams play out on the screen. That is something absolutely, there's something very, very deep about that. And I do think that part of what"
},
{
"end_time": 1525.691,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1498.695,
"text": " Um, you know, part of what a great film does for you is that you feel you've gone through something together with these other people, not by yourself in the room, you know, but, but, but there's a, there's a collective experience, the collective gasp, you know, when you first see the shark and jaws or, or, you know, I mean, of course it happens in, in movies like that, but there's a collective gasp when live home and steps on the piece of glass. People gasp."
},
{
"end_time": 1551.8,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1526.118,
"text": " There's a collective gasp when you realize that Christoph Waltz knows that there are people under the floorboards, just suspects it enough to ask the right questions. Those experiences that happen together, you don't get by yourself sitting with your surround theater, and as much as we think that's just the height of luxury and the height of whatever it is, there's something, the humanness of it,"
},
{
"end_time": 1579.753,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1552.841,
"text": " It can often be lacking. And I think that's also in the longer form television things that are very extended. I, you know, I, for me, there's nothing like a movie in which you go in and you're going to be inexorably stuck. You can't turn it off. You can't stop the process. You can't stop the process of time. And in that sense, it's like the universe. We can't, we can't stop the earth from spinning. We can't stop the earth from orbiting. We'll never be able to do that."
},
{
"end_time": 1607.073,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1580.179,
"text": " So I'm a horrible person to watch TV or movies with at home. Cause I pause all the time. Why did that person say that way? Who's that person? Sure, sure, sure. And my wife, she cannot stand it, but I love pausing it. I love discussing it, but in the cinema, it's in the theater. It's a different experience. You have to stay focused. Yes. You, you, you, you must stay focused and you must also know you're absolutely right. And you must stay focused, but you must also accept that time goes on."
},
{
"end_time": 1635.06,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1607.466,
"text": " and that you can't stop it. And I think that that's one of the things about great films that, not manipulative ones, that just kind of play with you for two hours and then let you go. You just feel wrung out at the end, but you don't really get any sort of transformation. But a really great film when you watch it, you feel you've been through something, that you feel like you're changed when you come out. And part of that is that you can't stop it."
},
{
"end_time": 1659.957,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1635.503,
"text": " That it is inexorably, even if you know what's going to happen, even if you know that the character is doomed, somehow going through it. I mean, it's the Greek idea of catharsis, right? That we need to experience these things together. The Greeks know perfectly well how the play Medea ends. It's not good. It's not good. We know how Titanic ends."
},
{
"end_time": 1682.739,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1660.657,
"text": " Exactly. We know how Titanic ends, the ship's going to go down, but going through that, there is a catharsis. Part of that experience is life, and that's why you want to watch the film again and again. You know what's going to happen, yet going through it is something that you crave repeatedly. That's interesting. It's remarkable that the theaters have survived COVID."
},
{
"end_time": 1703.2,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1683.046,
"text": " Now they've shrunk and like many have closed, but it's remarkable that there are any at all and they're suffering though. Barbenheimer was great for them. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I mean, but I think that just goes to show people crave that collective experience. We need that collective experience. We can't do without it."
},
{
"end_time": 1733.575,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1703.882,
"text": " Um, you know, we, we've, we've got to have it. Uh, and I think that, so that, that will never die. I mean, it goes back to Plato's myth of the cave. I don't know if you, if you've read that, but you know, right. So, I mean, it's, it's sort of this, this idea that, that, that people are together watching these shadows on the wall and it's entrancing. We, we can't, you know, we can't get enough of it. Um, you know, so I think that, and, and as in the myth of the cave, the relationship between those shadows on the wall and reality is very interesting. It, it reminds us that."
},
{
"end_time": 1758.456,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1733.865,
"text": " There's a difference between representation and reality and those two things, and those are things I wanted to play with in deep sky in the sense that here are these images that come back from the telescope that are of these vast cosmic places that we truly can't comprehend, but we're able to get a little feeling of them from these images and somehow"
},
{
"end_time": 1788.848,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1758.848,
"text": " When you when you when you get that feeling it's something that you know, it it tingles your spine a little bit and You know, you're just grasping a tiny piece of it but you feel like you're on to something and it makes you want to Go back again and and you know and and and see them again or or somehow go out under the night sky and realize The way it changes your consciousness that now we know that every single star in the sky Virtually every star has at least one planet around it"
},
{
"end_time": 1811.783,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1789.394,
"text": " That's not something we knew 20 years ago. So when I was growing up, you know, the, the idea that we knew that we knew the, at that point, nine planets in our solar system. Now they're only eight because they demoted Pluto, but you know, eight planets in our solar system. Those were the only planets that we knew existed in the entire universe. People postulated that there must be other planets around stars, but we didn't know."
},
{
"end_time": 1837.927,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1812.602,
"text": " Only through building telescopes like the Kepler Space Telescope and now JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes too, we've actually found that there are planets around virtually every star. So when you go out at night, think about that. When you look up at the stars, every one of those stars is another star system. You know, it really, it makes you sort of feel"
},
{
"end_time": 1864.121,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1838.456,
"text": " both our uniqueness but also that we're not so special right so our solar system is like many other solar systems so why would it be then that looking at the stars provide significance because it seems like in some ways it can provide significance but yeah in order for us to feel like there's something consequential about us being made of star dust we would have to first value the stars it's not clear to me why we would value the stars outside of"
},
{
"end_time": 1893.387,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1864.343,
"text": " It's just a holdover from our religious ancestors outside of some explanation like that, like rationally speaking, why should we value the stars? So that's one question. And then second, why would it be that rather than imbuing us with something that makes us larger than life, it makes us smaller because there's so many of them. Why doesn't it make us feel insignificant? Well, I, it's sort of a combination, isn't it? You know, because the, the idea that every star has other planets around it."
},
{
"end_time": 1914.292,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1893.712,
"text": " Could tend to make you feel insignificant. You're right. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that we now know that there are plants around virtually every star, we still only know of one place in the entire universe where there's life. So there is a great significance to that. It's hugely significant. It's everything that we know."
},
{
"end_time": 1932.5,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1914.889,
"text": " So it's this kind of duality of significance, insignificance that I think, you know, hopefully a film like Deep Sky begins to touch on that we are everything and we're nothing. And, you know, how can those two things coexist? Well, I don't know, but they do."
},
{
"end_time": 1960.776,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1933.029,
"text": " They do they do coexist and and it's okay as as John Mather the Nobel laureate who's who's in the film says and he was he was the director for much of the mission He was actually won the Nobel Prize for proving that the Big Bang really happened You know, it's a fascinating person, but when he says we are recycled, you know, and then he says it's okay It's okay There's something"
},
{
"end_time": 1968.285,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1961.084,
"text": " extraordinarily moving about that for a scientist to recognize that the fact that, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1993.814,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1969.07,
"text": " dust to dust that we are made of stardust and we return to stardust and you know the earth forms and then eventually the sun engulfs the earth and you know the earth is gone hopefully by that point we've gotten our act together enough that maybe we'll be able to go to the stars i don't know but you know but the idea somehow that we are from stardust and we return and we recycle and that it's okay and a scientist's understanding"
},
{
"end_time": 2017.159,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1994.258,
"text": " Not just the facts of it, but also the emotional component of it that he says it's okay. There's something to me that's very, very beautiful and very comforting about that. So we're both everything. We're both significant and insignificant in the universe. And I think that, you know, we live in a time when sort of contradictions like that or dualities"
},
{
"end_time": 2043.2,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2017.927,
"text": " You know, we tend not to like those things. We want everything to be good or bad or this way or that way. But, but so much of life is not like that at all. But most of life is it's this and it's that it's, it's two things at once. You know, um, I mean, you look at, you look at Shakespeare, arguably, you know, the, the greatest writer in the English language anyway, you know, um, all of his plays."
},
{
"end_time": 2072.773,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2043.865,
"text": " Could we say that it's okay, but then it's also it's not okay?"
},
{
"end_time": 2100.06,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2073.063,
"text": " Like in play with this duality. Sure. Yeah, I think it's okay. And it's not okay. I think I think I think that's I think that's true. But it's it's okay. It's not okay. But in the end, that's okay. Yeah, your base has to be that's okay. But that's in order for you to have some inner peace, which may be an article of faith that I think needs to be there in order for you to keep yourself sane. Yeah, no, but I think I think we have a lot of trouble with that right now in our in our sort of current discourse."
},
{
"end_time": 2125.538,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2100.452,
"text": " We have trouble with the idea of, of ambiguity with, with something being complex. And I'm not really sure why we have, that's an interesting thing. I'm not sure why we, why we have that, but you look at politics, it's all one way or all the other way, but, but to get things done in the world, one constantly has to negotiate. One has to have a conversation. We have to be able to talk about things and disagree."
},
{
"end_time": 2155.23,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2126.544,
"text": " and then find some way that we can all coexist. Because the alternative is disaster. I mean, one thing I love about science is scientists, to be any good, have to be willing to be wrong. They have to be willing to be wrong and they have to accept the idea that experiment and observation has shown them to be wrong and shown something else to be true."
},
{
"end_time": 2185.572,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2156.032,
"text": " Um, and that's essential for every scientist that you have to be able to say, look, I have ideas about things. I have notions about things. I think it might be this way, but I must design an experiment. Which I can do. Um, and I'll look at the data and see what the data says. And then other people have to be able to do the same experiment and get a similar result. Yeah. What would the filmmakers version of being wrong be? The filmmakers version of being wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 2215.333,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2186.254,
"text": " Oh, gosh, that's... I mean, in art, it's very hard. You know, rules are made to be broken in art. So I don't think that... I mean, I think that film isn't really... It doesn't feel to me that it's about right and wrong so much. But it is about inventiveness, innovation, freshness, newness. How about this?"
},
{
"end_time": 2245.111,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2215.862,
"text": " What would make Nathaniel feel like what you did was a success versus Nathaniel is in sorrow because of the failure? I'm always, I'm always seeing the way things fail. Always, always. I mean, I look at, I look at, no, I look at films I've done in the past and I see things I would have liked to have done differently. But, but, but that was then, you know, and I keep going. So, I mean, I'm always thinking about what the new thing, the failure would be not to keep going. The failure is not to start all over again."
},
{
"end_time": 2273.183,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2245.435,
"text": " The failure is to lose heart or to stop coming up with ideas. Actually failure, to be honest, it's to have an idea that you really want to do and find that you can't get enough money to do it. That's really upsetting. That's great. That's honest. I like that. I think most filmmakers out there would agree that"
},
{
"end_time": 2296.544,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2273.456,
"text": " that failure is not being able to move forward and filming film is as much as it's to do certain things you do need money. There are certainly films you can make without money and they're marvelous. Talk about that process. How does one as a filmmaker go about raising money or acquiring funding?"
},
{
"end_time": 2323.763,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2297.756,
"text": " Well, I mean, many people do it different ways. I mean, you can get grants, isn't it? I mean, there are people who work within a studio system. There are people who are able to continue to make movies because they have a certain level of reputation and people will bank on them. But even people at the top of their profession will tell you, finding the money is always a one-off. It's always, how am I going to find the money this time?"
},
{
"end_time": 2348.643,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2323.763,
"text": " So i think even charlie kaufman so charlie kaufman to me is one of the greatest writers and he. Still has some struggles in that regard oh absolutely major major struggles but artists always do he's i mean he's an original his art is completely original and he's not gonna repeat himself he wants to try something new so you know in the film that i made the price of everything which is about the art world."
},
{
"end_time": 2378.677,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2349.172,
"text": " One of the main people in it is an artist named Larry Poons, and Larry is still around, thank goodness, and still making art in his own way. But in the film, we learn the story that in the 60s, he was very successful along with a number of other artists whose names you know very much, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, and a number of very"
},
{
"end_time": 2402.227,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2378.985,
"text": " popular artists. And Larry was doing a particular kind of painting at the time, which was composed of a color field with dots on it. And the dots were very carefully orchestrated. Their organization wasn't random at all. They're very beautiful and they're mathematical. You would immediately appreciate their sort of order. There's an order to them, but you can't immediately see it. It's not like it's a simple pattern."
},
{
"end_time": 2432.517,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2402.705,
"text": " They're complex. In order for you to see them, you have to step back? Sort of both. You know, you sort of step back and you perceive the hole, but then you get closer and you see that there's some occasional patterns, but then they're not. They just have a kind of a, they vibrate. There's like this vibrating quality of spatial. Is something in front of it? Is it behind? They're quite, they're really entrancing and they were very popular. He made quite a number of them. They sold well, they went to auction, everything else. And then he started to change his style."
},
{
"end_time": 2462.005,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2433.114,
"text": " And to call it style isn't really fair. He started exploring different forms. He kind of moved away from the dots. First they were sort of ovals, then he moved away from them entirely, became something different. And he was told by his dealer, you know, what are you doing? You're the guy who makes the dots. And he's like, well, no, I'm not the guy who makes the dots. I'm a painter. I'm a person. I'm evolving. I'm making something new. And so he actually, you know, spent"
},
{
"end_time": 2492.466,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2462.875,
"text": " I mean, he's always been part of the dialogue, but people wanted the dot paintings. And he started doing something different. Now he's sort of back with, you know, many, many years later with a whole new set of paintings, which are, which are marvelous and beautiful. And we represent that in the film, but to see his story that this, he had to have enormous courage to say, I'm not doing those things I was doing before anymore. You may like them. That's great. I'm glad, but here's what I'm doing now. As an artist, you have to follow those things. And I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2521.203,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2492.858,
"text": " Filmmakers who are artists are constantly wanting to explore something new. And that's scary for the marketplace because the marketplace likes what worked last time. I mean, it's real simple. It's like marketing 101 versus art 101. Marketing 101 is if you find something that works, keep doing it. Art 101 is if you find something that works, do it for a while."
},
{
"end_time": 2548.166,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2521.51,
"text": " and then do something new. Yes. Because an artist has to evolve to survive. And that's an interesting thing. And I think it's something that perhaps is misunderstood, but that an artist, I mean, you look at the films of any, you know, you look at Scorsese's movies, he's constantly trying something entirely new, not just new stories, new techniques, whole new ways of making films."
},
{
"end_time": 2567.432,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2548.831,
"text": " You know, um, whole new, all new ways of telling stories, right? So whether it's mixing up time or it's using, you know, it's using, um, different kinds of effects or, or it's telling a story in a reverse order, or it's, you know, it's playing around with, with, with the actual techniques of story of filmic storytelling."
},
{
"end_time": 2592.568,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2568.49,
"text": " editorial techniques, cutting more quickly, cutting more. So those sorts of things. I used to be a huge fan of Wes Anderson. I've watched so many of his movies that I feel like he's become a character of himself. In my opinion, it's the same exact style, just doubled down on in each film. I'm a huge Wes Anderson. I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan. I love I love his movies. And to me,"
},
{
"end_time": 2617.381,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2593.063,
"text": " His stylistic, his, you know, his, his style, I think he's actually changing it all the time. We're quite a lot. Great. And, and, uh, yeah. So I, I, I, I, I think you should see the latest one is short that he just did. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah. I haven't seen this last two, so maybe my opinion would change if I were to watch them as a marvelous filmmaker."
},
{
"end_time": 2630.589,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2617.688,
"text": " World Tenenbaums is still one of my favorite films of all time. Yeah, I know. Bottle Rock is the earliest one. Sure. Fantastic. Now we're sounding like we're Larry Poonz with the dots. I love Bottle Rock too, but..."
},
{
"end_time": 2660.265,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2631.101,
"text": " This is a filmmaker who's trying many different techniques, always experimenting with new ways of storytelling. And you see the great actors who want to work with him. So, you know, you know, a director is really"
},
{
"end_time": 2686.92,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2660.674,
"text": " Special when great actors want to work with them. There's a phrase that good artists copy great artists steal. So let's speak about Nathaniel. What's a film like? Tell me about a film that you haven't stolen from, but you would like to because it's so great. There's something there that you want to take and incorporate into your next one. I wouldn't dare say the films that I aspire to because they're too great."
},
{
"end_time": 2717.261,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2687.415,
"text": " So all that I can tell you is the directors that I returned to again and again, you know, I returned to Kurosawa again and again. I returned to Bergman again and again, you know. Explain to me how they've influenced your documentary filmmaking, because those are narrative films. OK, I'll tell you. Let me be specific about Kurosawa. So. There's a sequence in Seven Samurai."
},
{
"end_time": 2747.756,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2717.841,
"text": " where Toshiro Mifune, I know you know the film, but Toshiro Mifune who is, you know, he's not really a samurai. He wants to be a samurai, but everybody loves this guy. And then he sort of poses himself as a samurai, but you don't really know his backstory. You really don't know who he is or where he came from. He's clearly not a great swordsman like some of them, but you couldn't live without him because he, he boosts the morale of everybody. He's, he's, I mean, and of course he's such a great actor."
},
{
"end_time": 2776.834,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2747.756,
"text": " But, you know, and Kurosawa uses him as the great actor that he is, you know, to great effect. But there's a sequence where they're defending the village, the village of farmers, from the bandits. And the bandits are coming through and trying to steal the food. And the samurai have now taught the village how to defend itself. And the village is defended and the bandits are coming and all of the farmers withdraw into the, you know, into the protected area of the village."
},
{
"end_time": 2804.872,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2777.688,
"text": " And Mifune is there and the other samurai are there and they're getting the farmers to hold, you know, hold the line. And the bandits set an outlying house on fire. And it's an outlying house of one of the farmers that they weren't able to protect because it was outside of the area that they could protect. And Toshiro Mifune and the bandits kind of ride away after setting this house on fire. Sort of it's a mill. And Mifune becomes extremely upset."
},
{
"end_time": 2830.367,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2805.862,
"text": " sort of almost irrationally, and he runs outside the protected area to this hut that's burning. And one of the great, the sort of head samurai follows him and is angry at him for leaving his post. And he, Mifune runs to this burning mill and they knew that there was an old man there and a mother and a father and a child."
},
{
"end_time": 2858.507,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2830.811,
"text": " and Mifune runs towards this burning mill and the mother comes out holding the baby. The mother hands the baby to Mifune and then she collapses into the arms of the other samurai who's followed Mifune angrily and they realize that she's been speared by the bandits. She's dead. And Mifune is holding this child in his arms and the head samurai says, come on, we got to go."
},
{
"end_time": 2886.732,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2858.899,
"text": " Let's get back to the village. We have to go. And Mifune falls in the water, falls in the stream holding this baby, clutched to himself. And he says, this was me. This is my story. I was this little baby. And you realize at that moment that he was a farmer's child. He's not a samurai. He wasn't born to this noble sort of tradition of the samurai. He's a farmer's child."
},
{
"end_time": 2917.227,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2887.329,
"text": " And he was orphaned because the bandits weren't killing his, his village in that moment. And that's all, all you get wiped to another scene. And, you know, but you realize in that moment who this person is, it's a revelation that happens in the midst of this enormous, you know, this, this enormous epic of, of, you know, feudal period, Japan."
},
{
"end_time": 2944.957,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2917.875,
"text": " And this great battle, it's as great as any Western. And of course, Kurosawa learned a lot from John Ford. And then it bounces back from John Ford to Kurosawa and Kurosawa goes back to George Lucas and Star Wars. But that's a moment that's so precise. Kurosawa doesn't make the whole film about Mifune's backstory. It's just that one moment."
},
{
"end_time": 2958.746,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2945.964,
"text": " Not to compare them they're not comparable but there's a moment in my architect there's a moment in my architect which resonates for me with with a moment like that not equating them."
},
{
"end_time": 2987.841,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2959.343,
"text": " But it resonates. And the resonance is there's a scene where I go to visit a guy on a boat. My father built one boat. It was a concert barge that pulls up the little towns and opens up and they play a concert. And the guy who commissioned my dad to build the boat and also the conductor of the orchestra, I go to see him in the film. And he's the only person in the whole film that I was able to go without telling him"
},
{
"end_time": 3015.657,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2988.78,
"text": " that I was the architect's son. So he didn't know who I was and we're filming it. So we're filming it and he's being kind of a jerk to me. I mean, I'm like trying to talk to him about the architect. He's like, yeah, yeah, you know, I got a concert kid, you know, you know, and he's really kind of blowing me off. Right. And he blows the horn and it was too loud. You know, there's a funny little sequence with me kind of running away from the horn. I didn't realize it was going to get blown right in my ears. And I mean, he's really treating me badly."
},
{
"end_time": 3045.23,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3016.561,
"text": " And so then, you know, he says, listen, I got to go to play this concert now. I can't talk to you anymore. And I say to him, well, do you know why I came today? And he's like, yeah, yeah, sure. You're making a movie about Louis Kahn, the architect, you know, and this is, he designed this boat and you know, go around, film it. That's nice. You know, and I said, well, no, I'm, I'm here because I'm his son. And suddenly the guy just collapses and he burst into tears."
},
{
"end_time": 3074.753,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3046.288,
"text": " And he gives me a hug, you know, and he realizes sort of, and then he says, I saw you at the funeral when you were a little boy. And if, for those of you who've seen the film, my parents weren't married and I was kind of a hidden child, you know, so I was at my father's funeral, but I was very much not part of the proceedings. My mother and I were not part of it, but this man saw me years ago when I was a little boy and he remembered always that. And suddenly in that moment, his humanity,"
},
{
"end_time": 3101.084,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3075.503,
"text": " His compassion for me, for the little boy that was me, all comes out. And then he says, I got to go play a concert and he walks away. You know, I mean, it's like this moment of clarity that then moves on and we don't dwell on it. It's not some big maudlin discussion and all this stuff. It's just this moment of emotion and of revelation. And to me, that's, that's the way life is."
},
{
"end_time": 3129.872,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3101.647,
"text": " You don't get to endlessly sort of take the thing apart and, you know, and somehow the movies that I admire most like this moment in Kurosawa know how to give you the deep humanity in this kind of momentary shock that just, you know, blasts right to your soul. So I look for those moments, for the moments when someone, whether it's an actor or it's a"
},
{
"end_time": 3155.964,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3130.435,
"text": " the person you're interviewing, where someone is talking about one thing and suddenly something else entirely bursts through, something that is deep within them comes out. So in the midst of all this action, which is life, suddenly the soul shines through. To me, those are the moments that just are"
},
{
"end_time": 3184.667,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3157.278,
"text": " You know, transcendent in filmmaking and different from other arts. You know, I don't see that in painting so much or sculpture or something like that, but film, and you see it in the theater, of course, very much as well. But the way it reveals itself in the theater is often more verbal. It can be gesture too, but in the cinema, in great films, many times it's gesture. It's a tiny shift"
},
{
"end_time": 3215.026,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3185.469,
"text": " In an eye or, you know, or somebody somehow pauses. And I can't explain it, but people in the audience cry, you know, or they laugh, you know? So those are, those are these things that, that, you know, you can't really. In scripted cinema, you try to create those things. I mean, you do absolutely, but they don't always work. And many times, you know, you improvise something and it's better when you improvise it. You know, it's better when you, when you sort of creep up on it."
},
{
"end_time": 3230.964,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3215.674,
"text": " Or it's amazing, amazing how you can film a scene and you think that, and this happens in documentary films all the time, you film the conversation with somebody and you get back and you feel like, you know, nothing happened."
},
{
"end_time": 3255.589,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3231.135,
"text": " This really was kind of boring, but they just weren't very interesting. You're referring to your impression after you just filmed. Sure. Like you're going now to look at the dailies. Yeah. Now sometimes you know, sometimes you know, you're in the moment, you're like, oh my God, this is like home run. Like I knew at the end of my architect, the conversation I had with the man in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I knew this is like, this is, you know, transcendent. It's magnificent. And he brought everything together."
},
{
"end_time": 3270.845,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3255.589,
"text": " In his emotion in his world everything everything was right there in the films right there i'm so happy you know but there are other times when you film something and you really think cheese i didn't get anything this. This was like not very revealing and then you look on the editing table."
},
{
"end_time": 3295.213,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3271.8,
"text": " And if you have a good camera person that you're working with, that's essential. And I'm blessed with being able to work with Bob Richmond, who's one of the very best and another cinematographer. I worked with Claudia Raschka, who's brilliant. And in working with Bob, I know that if something happened, he would have been attuned to it and picked it up."
},
{
"end_time": 3324.07,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3295.538,
"text": " Chances are, now sometimes that's surprising too, but then I also have a marvelous editor. I worked with an editor, Sabina Cranville, many times in my films. And, you know, when we're looking together, we'll look at shots and we have a similar, suddenly we both have a tear in our eye and was like, Oh yeah, that's a good moment. And, and oftentimes it's something you didn't think you got, you know, you, you did an interview and you didn't realize quite how much emotion was actually there."
},
{
"end_time": 3330.265,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3324.804,
"text": " And then of course the job in a documentary film is to try to create a whole scene around that."
},
{
"end_time": 3359.667,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3330.708,
"text": " So, you know, when we're talking about something like, you know, and glorious bastards with that scene, it's highly orchestrated. I mean, each shot is clearly very worked out in those first 10 minutes. I would assume I never, I never talked to Mr. Tarantino about it, but I'm assuming he had pretty clearly what shots he wanted. But, you know, so I think he knew how exactly what he wanted to build. But in documentary filmmaking, so many times you'll find a moment where the, which is the emotional pivot of the scene. And then you cut everything."
},
{
"end_time": 3379.872,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3360.145,
"text": " somehow around that to, you know, to highlight that and to make it land. So you might have to build a, you know, a significant ramp to get into it. And then you might have to get out of it in a certain way to make it work. Um, and it's not, it's, it's really, it's like, um, well, it's, it's panning for gold, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3408.729,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3380.435,
"text": " You know, you find a nugget and then you're like, Ooh, this is good, you know, and, and, uh, what's the ratio between the footage that you filmed and then what actually gets released for some of the changes? Yeah. No different films. I mean, with my architect, it was a hundred to one. Wow. Holy moly. Yeah. It was those people who are listening, who don't know what we just said. Yeah. 100 hours need to be filmed in order for there to be one hour of footage on screen. Yeah. Yeah. But that had even said, I do want to be sort of clear that"
},
{
"end_time": 3431.732,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3409.087,
"text": " There were things that I filmed that I was, you know, that I kind of knew as I was doing it that this won't work. But you never know. I mean, like it most likely wouldn't work. Who knows what Sabrina or the editor would think. And yeah, so you have to still capture it anyhow. Exactly. And part of that, you see, yeah, because that was a journey film."
},
{
"end_time": 3461.63,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3432.039,
"text": " And I wanted to sort of really cast a very wide net. I wanted to film a lot more than than I would use because I wanted to really kind of to film, you know, a lot just a lot of things because part of it was my journey. I wanted to hear what people had to say, you know. So that was about 100 to one. But also we gathered a lot of material that had already been shot, you know, archival material and things like that. So I'm counting that as well as part of that. It wasn't just the filming ratio."
},
{
"end_time": 3491.766,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3461.937,
"text": " With something like The Price of Everything, that's probably more like maybe 25 to 1, something like that. That sounds reasonable. With Deep Sky, much less, much less, much less, much less. Why do you think that is? Well, the planning was better or the writing was different? And also, please explain, what does it mean to write a documentary? People will see you have a writing credit. How can that work? Sure. Well, you know, with a film like My Architect,"
},
{
"end_time": 3516.254,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3492.295,
"text": " Um, it's a lot of this material and then one is working for, you know, over a year, year and a half. I think we worked in the editing room, crafting that, creating it, um, you know, making it. So there is narration that's written that is, you know, that, that is over it, but I don't consider that film to be a written film. That's very much a film that is, that is sort of discovered through, through the process of making it."
},
{
"end_time": 3545.879,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3517.398,
"text": " Which is really what's so wonderful because because so much of filmmaking is editing. I mean, editing is like, you know, it's I don't want to say anything was the soul of filmmaking, but on a certain level, it's the soul of filmmaking because editing is like the great innovation in a way that you can understand that the car pulls up to the house and the next scene is in the house. We understand that the person got out of the car, went to the door, knocked on the door, came in and sat down. We don't have to show all that. We can just cut it out."
},
{
"end_time": 3567.142,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3546.323,
"text": " And so editing allows you to create these disjunctions in time that that are extraordinary or disjunctions in point of view, you know, that we can we can go from a close up to something wide or, you know, that we those those things are, you know, that's phenomenal. And so much of actual documentary filmmaking in the verite style."
},
{
"end_time": 3587.483,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3567.551,
"text": " which is you know this so-called cinema verite this you know it's direct cinema the dream was you're capturing life and i don't believe that because it's it's always there's always an artifice associated with there's always a created reality it's not like it is reality it's a created reality um but it's uh it's filmed without"
},
{
"end_time": 3608.387,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3587.978,
"text": " A script you're not going saying I want this person to say this or this sort of thing and then you create you and you find the story to some degree something like deep sky was different because First of all, it's 40 minutes. So it needed to be a compressed experience So it needed to find ways to compress itself to tell a lot in a short period of time and"
},
{
"end_time": 3635.128,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3608.712,
"text": " Second of all, because of the, the IMAX world of it and realizing we wanted to present those images, that the images had to be the kind of the centerpiece of it. We wanted to create, it needed to tell a story with those images and really in order to do that. And I also wanted it to be a pretty broad story, to be as much of the story of kind of the universe, if you will, that we could put into 40 minutes."
},
{
"end_time": 3662.346,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3635.52,
"text": " You know, while still having a little bit about building this telescope. So building a telescope to set the stakes and then using the images, you know, part one, the stakes, the mission, how hard it was to build this thing. Then there's the launch at about 11 minutes into the film. And then the back part of the film is the telescope unfolds and these images come back. And I wanted to use as many of those images as I could to kind of tell our universe story."
},
{
"end_time": 3692.705,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3663.524,
"text": " To do that, I certainly interviewed great scientists and they have, you know, beautiful things to say about those images, but it needed an overarching sort of, you know, story, an overarching sort of sense of the grandeur of this endeavor and the humanity of it. So I knew I needed a great actor to narrate it. So, and that's where, that's where, so I did write the story and then"
},
{
"end_time": 3723.37,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3693.49,
"text": " God asked the great Michelle Williams to narrate it and her narration is magnificent and tells the story in this incredibly somehow emotional, accessible, human way. She's not presenting it as, you know, a set of facts or so many times in, you know, especially in science films, one kind of gets this voice of God thing where the narrator is telling you the facts and this is the way it is. You know, we didn't want that."
},
{
"end_time": 3752.449,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3723.763,
"text": " So, you know, Michelle and I talked about how we wanted to have it be that the person who was narrating it was also experiencing it along with the audience, not informing the audience. That's super interesting. Explain to the audience what would be the difference between directing it for the I'm telling you version versus the emotional, the voiceover artist is coming along with the journey, discovering it with you. Like, explain to me the difference in direction and then maybe you can articulate one."
},
{
"end_time": 3778.592,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3753.029,
"text": " Well, maybe, I mean, it's a little, okay, let me try to do that. I mean, I think that the major, it's different in the way that it's written. So it isn't written as a sort of authoritative, it's not written in the authoritative voice. It's written in a voice of discovery. It's written in a voice of sort of finding it as it goes along, right? It's going, the voice is going along on the journey just as much as we are."
},
{
"end_time": 3806.63,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3779.121,
"text": " The voice doesn't, the, the, the person behind this voice doesn't know everything already. They're finding it too. They're experiencing the emotions of what is, um, you know, what is being discovered. So an example would be, and I love Michelle's reading of this line where she talks about that, that, you know, back to Stardust where she says that the, the, you know, the,"
},
{
"end_time": 3829.838,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3806.937,
"text": " That the stars are made of this material, the planets are made of this material of stardust. And then she says, and us too, are made of this stardust. The way she says us too, it has this quality of reaching through the screen. Interesting. And saying you, you, us, collectively."
},
{
"end_time": 3853.933,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3830.589,
"text": " Me reading this, me telling you the story and you out there, all of us, all of us. So that was a difference in her intonation and not a difference in script? I think it's combination. It's a combination, but very much it's about acting. It's about knowing how, I mean, when we say acting, it's about emotional connectedness to the material."
},
{
"end_time": 3872.619,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3854.428,
"text": " that the actor is completely in sync with what they're saying. They're not saying words. They're not using language to convey simply facts. They're using language, intonation, words, pauses to convey story and feelings."
},
{
"end_time": 3898.387,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3873.609,
"text": " So it's, it's what actors do, you know, it's what it's, it's what a great actor does. Um, they, they take you along on the journey, but they also know how to slow down so that it has, so that it, so things land. So they're not just, you know, because we can all take in facts pretty fast, but emotions take time. Yeah. You have to allow something to land, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3925.026,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3898.831,
"text": " Um, and now we're into, we're basically into music. We're into rhythm. We're into the idea that you have to allow something to sit. And now we're sort of back to IMAX. One of the great things about working at IMAX was we could linger on images, linger on an idea. Um, we didn't have to immediately shift to something new because the format sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 3952.466,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3925.572,
"text": " I mean, it not only allows it, it kind of demands it because your eyes simply, you can't take it in if it's shifting too quickly. You know, you need to slow down. So all of those things had to be in sync. The rhythm of the narration, the rhythm of the cutting, all of those things had to sort of work together to make it a, you know, a story that worked and to have the narration"
},
{
"end_time": 3983.251,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3953.268,
"text": " Be part of the picture, not overlaid on top of it. It's in the picture. Yeah. In the story. Tell me about another insight of yours that changed the way that you create film. So I'll give you an example from the physics side. There's a science writer named Amanda Gefter. She would say that, look, I have a philosophy background and I went to study physics afterward. And there's so many disconnected facts, but something that crystallized it all for me early on that made the rest easier to learn."
},
{
"end_time": 4004.121,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3983.524,
"text": " Was that something is only real if it's invariant in every reference frame. Okay, just carrying that in her pocket helped her contextualize other facts. Now, obviously in art is not the same as let me remember facts and recall them and restate them. But tell me about an insight that you have or that you had that shaped the way that you create film."
},
{
"end_time": 4034.923,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4005.316,
"text": " An insight to tell me a little bit more about the insight that you were talking about to give me an example, another example from like from from science or something like that. I'll explain for me for filmmaking. I found that the dialogue was much more easier to be natural. So in the fiction film that I made the feature fiction film when it was just bullet pointed out rather than scripted out and the specific words or specific phrases could be scripted out, but rather we're improvising a bit off of an outline and it created much more natural dialogue."
},
{
"end_time": 4060.145,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4035.265,
"text": " Sure. So that's a small example, but you're a much more seasoned filmmaker. So I'm sure you have a more emotional or meaningful insight. No, no, I don't. I think your insight, I think, I think your insight is brilliant. I think you're absolutely right. Did some of the best, um, some of the very best films. I mean, you look at the films of, of, um, you know, the Italian near realist films. So here's another one."
},
{
"end_time": 4091.101,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4061.323,
"text": " When you first, at least for me, when I first start filmmaking, you shoot everything, you shoot someone walking for no reason. Like you mentioned earlier, they enter the door. That's like the standard student filmmaker mistake. Sure. Just the insight that every single shot needs to be there for a reason. Oh, especially the opening shot, especially the opening shot, but every single shot and even shot movement. Like I want to plan the movement. This applies in the narrative case. In the documentary case, it's so much more fluid and the editor is much more involved. That stuck with me and"
},
{
"end_time": 4114.787,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4091.527,
"text": " Planned out, what's going to be in frame, what's going to recede from the distance, from what side. The visuals of the film were there before I started filming. Each frame in I'm OK, my feature film was deliberate. If someone's on the left versus the right, it matters. If a shot was a certain duration, it matters to the symbolism, character names, etc. And so that stuck with me."
},
{
"end_time": 4141.954,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4115.179,
"text": " Okay, so what about for you? What's something that you learned fairly early on? You're happy that you learned it because it helped you out so much. And it's not something that's obvious to everyone else. It's a great question. And I won't pull something from narrative filmmaking, I'll pull something from documentary filmmaking. And it's something that Bob Richmond taught me, the cinematographer, like the very first day. And he said, learn to shut up. And"
},
{
"end_time": 4168.387,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4143.183,
"text": " I think it's the single most important in documentary filmmaking. People go in with their list of questions. I was supposed to ask you this and I'll ask you this and what about this? And you see it in interviewing all the time. You see it in, you know, in news shows, you know, these, these, these, you know, hard hitting whatever interviews of some picture of public figure and they have a list of questions."
},
{
"end_time": 4195.964,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4170.282,
"text": " And so many times I say, just be quiet. The person isn't done. They have more to say. If you just be comfortable with silence, they'll say what's really on their mind. Not, you know, answering questions. Documentary filmmaking is not about question and answer. It's about truly observing."
},
{
"end_time": 4217.193,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4197.415,
"text": " The world observing what's going on in that sense it's very much like narrative filmmaking in that you're there with another human being honor that human being. I actually listening to them and looking at them and and allowing them their space. So the difference in the material that i got back."
},
{
"end_time": 4246.954,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4217.824,
"text": " As a filmmaker, when I learned to sort of get a conversation going, and then, you know, when you have a conversation, you do have certain questions you start to ask, but then you allow the other person to take charge, to take control, to... So you're following them, you're not leading them. Well, you lead them... I mean, it's like playing jazz, right? Sometimes they lead, sometimes you lead. But the idea that somebody sort of says something, and then you leave the silence,"
},
{
"end_time": 4276.51,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4247.585,
"text": " In general, I mean, look, we've been talking here this time. I've been talking so much. The idea that just sitting with another person after they've said something and let the silence fall, let the discomfort in a way with sort of personal intimacy that happens when there's nothing to say, let that be in the room. And then many times the person says something far deeper."
},
{
"end_time": 4298.968,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4277.312,
"text": " then what your question elicits. They let you know something about themselves. They make a gesture. They look away. They say something else. They asked you something. So to me, sort of the greatest lesson was to allow silence."
},
{
"end_time": 4326.254,
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"text": " Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been in Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit BigDealEvent.com for more details."
},
{
"end_time": 4363.456,
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"start_time": 4333.968,
"text": " I was practicing some of that right now. It's much more effective in person because sometimes when even right now, we're also not sure. Are you lagging? Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Are we out of sync? You know, yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah. That's something I'll take with me. I appreciate that, man. Thank you. It's a big one. And the other one, which is sort of in a way it's related, it's be willing to go back another time. So, you know, people can't always bring their best."
},
{
"end_time": 4392.261,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4364.377,
"text": " In one goal, you know, and so many of my films, I mean, there's an example in my architect as well. Um, there's one in the price of everything too, but in my architect, you know, I interviewed my mother who, who recently passed away. Um, and at 94, she lived quite a life and managed to write a book when she was 91 years old. You know, she lived quite a remarkable life and was a single mother and, and, you know, did a lot for me. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 4413.763,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4392.739,
"text": " And, you know, she's in the film, My Architect, and I went and interviewed her and I thought I got a really good interview with her. And I thought she really revealed an awful lot about the struggle she had, you know, as a professional woman in a period that was not easy for women and certainly not easy for women in her position, unmarried, you know."
},
{
"end_time": 4442.978,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4414.343,
"text": " Uh, and working for my father as well. Um, very, very complicated circumstance. And I thought she was pretty terrific, you know, and, um, I watched this interview with the editor Sabina and she looks at me and she has this way of, she adjusts her glasses when she's not happy about something. And she looks at me and she adjusted her glasses like this. And she says, um, yeah, it was good, but you didn't go far enough."
},
{
"end_time": 4475.299,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4445.879,
"text": " And I knew she was right that I hadn't gone far enough. So I went back a second time to my mother almost six months later and just me, I filmed it myself. I didn't bring a camera person. I just filmed it myself and I was able to get to the level of her being that transcended the sort of the first time she presented her story and she told it very well, but she was still presenting it."
},
{
"end_time": 4503.2,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4475.828,
"text": " The second time she was living it. So both interviews are in the film. They're separated by about, you know, I don't know, half an hour, 35 minutes or so. But, you know, the return visit, certainly in documentary filmmaking, the return visit is essential. But if you find somebody that you really like and that you think there's more there, don't just kind of move on and, oh, let me get somebody else, you know, some other talking head."
},
{
"end_time": 4533.831,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4503.985,
"text": " Return to the people who, where you feel that there's more. So that's, that's in a way that's related to this idea of listening and silence. Okay. You're on a roll. What's one more? What one more film? No, one more insight. Oh, one more insight. One more insight. What I'm wondering is in the last example, was it the case that it's sure it is also the second time you visited, but was it also the intimacy of you being there yourself only?"
},
{
"end_time": 4558.848,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4535.043,
"text": " Absolutely. I mean, you've given me the next one right there, which is that have the courage to use whatever technology is at hand to capture the moment. These days, a smartphone is so good that we worry ourselves so much about the technology and the perfection of the... I mean, here's one right here."
},
{
"end_time": 4577.415,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4559.36,
"text": " worry less about"
},
{
"end_time": 4605.725,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4578.336,
"text": " That came with the territory. You watch taxi driver, you know, you watch watch, you know, watch anything filmed in film where there's lower light and there's a good fall off because the depth of field isn't so great. You know, these days with video, everything's in focus and it's kind of a problem, you know, but, but with film things were often out of focus, but people were not, I mean, yes, of course, great cinematographers were always worried about how the background was falling in focus and out of focus, but they weren't turning, they weren't fetishizing it."
},
{
"end_time": 4634.923,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4605.725,
"text": " I'm turning it into some like thing where, you know, we have to use only prime lenses and we want to have this background view. It's about the emotion. It's about what's happening on the screen that really matters, not the background. So I guess that's the piece that goes along with it. If a moment is happening, don't worry desperately about if you have your new fancy handy-dandy thing that's the latest of the latest to film it. Use the technology at hand so you don't lose the moment."
},
{
"end_time": 4665.265,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4635.435,
"text": " Don't waste it. That's another one. When you first go to talk to someone, be rolling from the beginning. Don't do a pre-interview. Don't have a whole conversation on the phone. If there's one thing I've learned, you only get one chance of first meeting someone. One of the great thrills of documentary filmmaking is you get to meet these amazing people."
},
{
"end_time": 4691.664,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4666.032,
"text": " But you only get to meet them the first time once and that's the first time. So you want that first time to have meaning not to be something where you sit down and you talk for three hours and they're talked out and then you say, okay, let's do that again. People don't work that way. They don't repeat themselves, you know, the same with the same cadences and the same emotions a second time. They just don't, you know, even actors. So tell you many times the first take is the one, you know, because it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4718.353,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4692.312,
"text": " It's raw. It's new. You know, now sometimes it's the it's the 20th take. Sure. But, but there's a freshness that happens sometimes right off the bat that is very, very real. And, and with, with, you know, with people, the characters in a, in a, in a, I mean, we call them characters, but people in your film, um, you know, you only get to sort of be them, be there with them the first time."
},
{
"end_time": 4745.828,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4718.677,
"text": " The first time. So I think it's essential. I'm always, you know, I like to be rolling from the very start. Um, and many times, of course, you cut out the greeting, Hey, how are you? And that stuff. I mean, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the first, the first, and sometimes you use that. Sure. Once in a while, once in a great while, maybe once in a movie, you use that, but it's those first reactions. Somebody says something maybe about you, you know, Oh, what's that thing on your shirt? You know, there's some, there's some human, there's some human response."
},
{
"end_time": 4758.507,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4746.374,
"text": " Or, you know, like the first time that I saw Larry Poonz in the same film, The Price of Everything, we drove up. I talked to him on the phone a little bit, just, but I said, I look, I don't want to."
},
{
"end_time": 4780.384,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4758.933,
"text": " I don't want"
},
{
"end_time": 4808.814,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4780.947,
"text": " Um, the cameraman, Bob Richmond and the sound man, Eddie O'Connor and I, you know, we've done this before. I just said, well, let's, let's, let's be rolling right away. So we were, and that first interview where he starts talking about the relationship between art and money was 30 seconds after we met. Literally. I mean, we met and it's like, you know, he starts saying, wow, what are you making this movie, you know, a movie about? And I was like, well, you know, art and money. And he just,"
},
{
"end_time": 4838.643,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4809.155,
"text": " Launched right into it. And there's no way he would have done that a second time. Because there was like this, you see in his face, his skepticism, like, well, how could they, how could art and money be related? He looks at me with this kind of like, what's wrong with you? Of course they're not related. It's not like baseball where your batting average is your batting average. You know, you either you hit the ball or you don't. Art isn't like that. You know, it's, it's got to do with all these other things. Taste and the most expensive art isn't the best art. Of course it's not."
},
{
"end_time": 4868.063,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4839.07,
"text": " Doesn't make any sense. So immediately, he like encapsulated the theme of my entire movie within 30 seconds of meeting this person. If I hadn't been rolling, I wouldn't have had it, would have been gone. So it's the, I guess what we're coming back to is the preciousness of the moment when you're making a film. There's a precious moment, which is, it could be silence,"
},
{
"end_time": 4897.824,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4869.206,
"text": " It could be the first meeting. It could be, you know, the second time you go back, but these are moments of time that won't repeat themselves. It's not information. It's emotion. It's life, humanity, time, all, you know, sort of all at once. Um, and anyway, that's what I respond to in films is where you feel like life is like this."
},
{
"end_time": 4926.34,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4898.37,
"text": " This is the way things happen. This is the way it happens. You know, life is composed of these things. Moments like this, you know, like that moment in Kurosawa when, when he collapses, he's holding the baby and he says, this was me. This, this, this could have been me. It's just a moment, but it's like he managed to capture something that, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4955.367,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4927.108,
"text": " It felt at that moment like a documentary. Like, it's not an actor anymore. It's a human being revealing their innermost thing, you know. It might as well be Mifune himself, not even the actor. So it has this sort of, you know, this weird sort of thing of like he's an actor, but he's also a person. And it was so, so sort of real in that moment that you almost felt like, oh my God, I'm watching a documentary here. This is really real. Nathaniel Kahn's"
},
{
"end_time": 4983.37,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4955.845,
"text": " Deep Sky, which chronicles the James Webb Telescope, releases nationwide April 19th in IMAX. Nathaniel, thank you for spending so much time with me. Thank you. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, kurtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like."
},
{
"end_time": 5009.821,
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"start_time": 4983.609,
"text": " That's just part of the terms of service. Now, a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 5028.353,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5009.821,
"text": " Plus, it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn"
},
{
"end_time": 5056.561,
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"start_time": 5028.524,
"text": " Greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts."
},
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"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
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"start_time": 5076.476,
"text": " and donating with whatever you like there's also paypal there's also crypto there's also just joining on youtube again keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time you also get early access to ad free episodes whether it's audio or video it's audio in the case of patreon video in the case of youtube for instance this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier"
},
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"text": " Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much. Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store"
},
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"text": " . . . . . ."
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}No transcript available.