The Hollywood Outsider – Film and Television Podcast | Reviews An award-winning film and television podcast for the fan in all of us
AP: What is the largest challenge you hope to overcome with this new series?
AD: When the original series was written, Carl and I and Steve, we were most worried about the 60,000 nuclear weapons that were on hair trigger all around the planet. Less worried about that now because the human species has taken real steps to cut those numbers down. So, the likelihood of the kind of full nuclear exchange that could bring on a nuclear winter has really diminished since Cosmos. I’ve been told by some people who were in, back in the day were in the central committee of the time in the Soviet Union that Cosmos had a little something to do with that. So I am very proud of that.
Today, I would say the longest challenge, if want to pick one single challenge that we face, is global warming. Most of all, getting people to understand how science works. So they can qualitatively accept or reject these ideas without imputing all kinds of political motives to scientists and their research.
Scientists don’t want to get it wrong, and they know that any lie that you tell about nature is doomed because sooner or later, another scientist will come along and prove you wrong. There’s nothing in it for them to work your research in a certain direction or falsify it because you’ll be disgraced or proven wrong. So, global warming. It’s showing, in the first episode as you’ve seen, how all that carbon became the basis for the fossil fuels that we burn today and what the alternatives would be.
I think the coolest thing about Cosmos is that it has a vision of our future that’s very hopeful. We’re in one of those marvelous, lovely, epochs called an interglacial, where if we were to play our cards right, and just get our house in order about these fossil fuels and all the carbon we’re dumping into the environment, the weather’s going to be really good for the next 50,000 years. We can take advantage of that and just really realize the dreams for the future that we were handed.
When was the last time you saw a vision of the future that wasn’t dystopic and ruined and utterly chokingly horrible?
AP: Disney cartoons, that’s about it.
AD: Yea, well I haven’t seen any of those showing the future in a long time. I mean, even that Disney cartoon…
AP: Wall-E?
AD: Yea! That was pretty depressing?
AP: That’s true.
AD: That was about a human future in which we’ve blown it, completely.
AP: How do you want to use this show to reach those that aren’t into science?
AD: Oh, those are the people we want to reach most. We want to do that with all of the imagination, the visual beauty, with marquee named actors like Kirsten Dunst, Patrick Steward, Alfred Molina, we want to use our state-of-the-art effects so that if you are surfing around and you suddenly see, you know, the formation of the solar system, you might stop, keep watching, and want to know more! In each and every episode we try to create at least one experience like that. In most cases, many, where we try in any way, to take your breath away and really do justice to great beauty of the Cosmos.
Thank you to Neil, Ann and Mitchell for taking the time to talk to us. And be sure to watch Cosmos, every week on Fox and the National Geographic channel!