The Hollywood Outsider – Film and Television Podcast | Reviews An award-winning film and television podcast for the fan in all of us
AP: When you are trying to make the show, and you are trying to appeal to a broader audience, to appeal to those that may not understand science in the way you do…how do you change your approach to that?
NT: I don’t have to. Because the universe is fundamentally interesting, and fundamentally entertaining, and fundamentally a source of wisdom and insight and perspective. So you will see from the episodes that we don’t, nothing is dumbed down because people know if you’re dumbing something down and once they figure it out they know that you think you’re above them that you have to dumb it down.
The universe, when told properly, needs no dumbing down at all and what helps us is the vocabulary, the visual vocabulary available to us through visual effects. There’s animations when we retell the historical stories. There’s the recreated cosmic phenomenon, there’s just me speaking to camera. All of these provide the diversity of our visual vocabulary. There’s me on the ship of the imagination, me on the cosmic calendar. So these all have flavor interests for the viewer where we’d like to think it keeps your attention the whole way. And again I don’t think of it as trying to compromise, we have access to stunning visual effects, so let’s use it!
Early versions of the script had me explaining everything. ‘Well this is the sun and it’s really hot…’ Now we don’t need to explain it because the visual effects gets you there emotionally, so that at the end of the day the show will actually influence you intellectually, emotionally, even a little bit spiritually when you are steeped in the wonder of the universe.
Executive Producer Mitchell Cannold
AP: When it comes to producing something like this, so much of reality television or television that deals with real information, they use celebrity hosts, that sort of thing. What is the advantage to using a real scientist like Neil?
Mitchell Cannold: Well, we would have never considered a non-scientist, first of all.
AP: And your viewers thank you.
MC: (Laughs) And while it’s fair to put us in the category of reality television in the sense that this is the ultimate reality, I suppose.
AP: Except this is actually real.
MC: (Laughs) Right. Most reality television is not ‘actually’ real. But it isn’t as if we looked at it that way. It was simply that Carl’s work, you know, I grew up with that series, and Carl pioneered a couple of other series’ at the time, before your time, for the history of man which were single host shows. Carl was really a pioneer of the single-host, long-form series where in essence he said to the audience ‘Come with me, take my hand, trust me. I’m going to give you objective truth and explain stuff that may feel scary or you may be intimidated by or stuff you don’t know.’ So the dye was cast, to say that the host for this series, if we were going to do one, that brought those attributes that Carl did. So that limited it to 3 or 4 scientists, physicists primarily but Ann’s #1 choice was Neil, so there was really never a question. Neil was the right guy.
And I think, more to the point of your question, even if the audience didn’t know him, and the large part of the audience does not know him yet, there’s a credibility, naturally, because they can recognize quickly that this guy knows what he’s talking about.
Writer / Executive Producer Ann Druyan
AP: You have been working on this for a long time.
Ann Druyan: 7 years, yes.
AP: Why were you so passionate about this project?
AD: Because I was honored to co-write the original Cosmos series with my late husband, Carl Sagan, and with astronomer Steven Soter, and ever since then I’ve been receiving the passionate communications from people in every country in the world, expressing what a liberation Cosmos has been for them and continues to be.
You know, in the time since, we lost Carl Sagan. Our most articulate exponent of the scientific respective, of reason versus magical thinking and science has undergone a bit of an assault. So about seven years ago, I began thinking that I wanted to do this again, and I would only do it if I had complete creative control and I had the means to produce it on the lavish scale that is necessary to attract the widest possible audience.
And with Mitchell Cannold, one of my producing partners, we presented to various networks…brought us to Fox and from then on it was clear sailing the last four years. It was a tremendous creative and logistical undertaking but once we were at Fox, our trajectory had been established. I feel extremely lucky that it turned out that way.
AP: It’s getting great reviews too.
AD: I’m thrilled.
AP: Now, I know this is personal to you, but a lot of people consider Neil to be the modern day Carl Sagan…
AD: YES! And I’m one of them!
AP: What about him makes you feel that way?
AD: Just look at the man. You know, he is vital, he has a passion to communicate. You can tell, he has an excitement about sharing knowledge. What people don’t realize is that every single word of the original series, except for a few words, were completely scripted and Carl was reading from cue cards. Neil, reads every single word in the series from teleprompters and yet both men’s delivery is so fluent that you think it’s coming out of their brain instead of the writer’s brains. Like, people can say ‘He’s so gifted at explaining difficult concepts’, which is true on his own obviously, he really is and so was Carl, but in fact, every line and every word in Cosmos is scripted.
