I thought it would be an enormous amount of fun to make a movie that heads out into space, which is something that we had never done before.
To a certain degree, with a TV show, people are looking for a certain amount of familiarity. You don’t want to pull the rug out, but you also want to keep things fresh and keep changing it up.
The thing about working on a TV show is that it becomes, very quickly, all consuming.
Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.
For me, the attraction of TV is that you continue to get to tell those stories and refine those characters. The other thing is that TV, in the last years, got really, really, really good.
I always love it best when you have a project where there is this commingling of the subject matter and the way in which you’re recording that subject matter.
I was struck by – Einstein’s a fascinating figure who didn’t have any instruments that he used, he didn’t use telescopes, he used his mind to try to understand the universe.
Each week the machine is spitting out a number for a new person or a new world within New York that you get to know. And the idea from the beginning was that some of the characters would stick around and become part of the lives of the show, and the world of the show itself will continue to grow.
I’ve always been interested in themes of memory, paranoia, and revenge.
Even if you’re not a parent, you have parents and you’ve been in those situations where there’s a certain kind of goodbye – nothing this extreme exists, but I think that’s what everyone holds onto, that common denominator that runs through this that everyone can understand.
Mankind’s expectations have to be greater than ourselves and that the further out there we go, the more we find out that it’s about you and me.
I remember when I was a kid my first real confrontation with space travel was when the Challenger exploded and I remember how traumatic that was for me, because I remember watching that on the news and all the children in our class were watching.
I think that we, as human beings, always need to conquer our fears and reach beyond our grasp and I think it’s very important that we don’t become complacent or stagnant.
I don’t like to talk about messages so much with films simply because it’s a little more didactic. The reason I’m a filmmaker is to tell stories and so you hope that they will have resonance for people and for the kind of things you’re talking about.
It can be easy for an actor to go “Well I really have to do a lot” and then just saying “I don’t need to do anything, I’m not bound to do anything”.
I don’t think you can guess what people will really like. You have to come at it from a more natural place and then kind of hope that your taste is shared by enough people to keep going.
We are the only instrument for understanding the universe. We have to ground it in human beings.
You’re different. You’re more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you’re the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.
Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.
I can’t be your ghost right now. I need to exist.
Time is theft, isn’t that what they say? And time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance. Time steals your nerve.