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00:00I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
00:08The history of science fiction is the history of the imagination.
00:17I mean, wow!
00:19The true seed of any great science fiction story is the idea.
00:24What if? What if?
00:26This series explores the four corners of science fiction.
00:31The ultimate threat of alien invasion.
00:33They're coming to get us.
00:36Aliens should be mean. They should be out to kick our asses.
00:39Time travel. A world of infinite possibilities.
00:43Time travel is the coolest thing in the world.
00:45I wish it was real.
00:47What if I could go to another time?
00:49The fantasy of it is eternally appealing, I think.
00:53Space exploration journeys into the unknown.
00:56And what's out there. Cosmos and the mystery of space.
01:00Space. The final frontier.
01:02Other cultures, other places, other dimensions.
01:05When this dead hand moves.
01:07And the mysteries of artificial life, where technology and humanity collide.
01:13It's as close as we get to touching immortality, and that can sort of be a scary thing as well
01:18as an exciting thing.
01:19Will technology be how we live forever, or will it destroy us?
01:23The spine-tingling, blood-chilling story that stuns your emotions.
01:32Our guides are the men and women who fell to Earth.
01:35The people who created the real history of science fiction.
01:46My God.
01:48It's full of stars.
01:56Of all the themes of science fiction, one has captured our imagination for as long as we can remember.
02:02Space.
02:05None of us has ever looked up into the night sky.
02:10I've seen what you can see here on Earth, of the billions and trillions of stars, of galaxies, and not
02:20wondered what it's like up there.
02:24Not wondered, what are other worlds like?
02:29Science fiction has tried to provide us with answers.
02:31Taking us from our first attempts to leave the planet, to journeys into the stars, where alien beings, evil empires,
02:39and new worlds await.
02:42Ultimately, it would be events in galaxies far, far away that would come together to create the greatest phenomenon in
02:49the history of science fiction.
02:53But all of these journeys began with our need to explore.
03:08Science fiction's earliest attempt to leave the planet could be found in Jules Verne's novel, From the Earth to the
03:14Moon, written in 1865.
03:17He invented a huge gun to fire us into space.
03:21It was so popular, it inspired the film, Le Voyage dans la Lune, of 1902.
03:29One of the first films ever made, was a science fiction film.
03:36Over the following decades, writers and filmmakers followed in Verne's footsteps.
03:41But science fiction's most famous spaceship and crew, were to come from television.
03:48Space. A final frontier.
03:57These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.
04:01Its five-year mission.
04:03To explore strange new worlds.
04:05To seek out new life and new civilizations.
04:09To boldly go where no man has gone before.
04:15This show, and science fiction in general, appeals to a mythological need in people.
04:24James T. You got it.
04:26And I love that idea.
04:29This crew travel the galaxy, righting wrongs, solving conflict, and promoting peace.
04:36They had no mission log.
04:38It's like, here's what you gotta do on Tuesday.
04:39Here's a Wednesday.
04:40No, it's like, no, let's go, uh, that way.
04:43Space.
04:44The final frontier.
04:46It's amazing.
04:50Lieutenant.
04:53Healing frequencies.
04:55Tied in, sir.
05:01This is Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, representing the United Federation of Planets.
05:07We have contacted your buoy and understand its message.
05:10We hope that you will understand that our intent is to establish peaceful relations with you.
05:14The idea was, we are moving out into seeking out new life forms, seeking out new worlds, going where no
05:23man has gone before.
05:24Um, and, I think that was such a very, very 60s, very optimistic way to think.
05:35Star Trek was the brainchild of ex-pilot Gene Roddenberry.
05:40He characterized this series like a popular series at the time, which was called Wagon Train,
05:46which was a series of settlers heading out to the west of the United States at the time when it
05:52was unknown.
05:53And he'd called Star Trek, Wagon Train, to the stars.
05:58This future offered more than just adventure.
06:01The crew were ambassadors of humanity.
06:03Though the ship's captain and doctor, Kirk and McCoy, were white males,
06:07the first officer was half Vulcan, Spock.
06:11But it was the ship's communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura, who truly went where no one had gone before.
06:18There had been nothing like Star Trek on the television, ever.
06:25And I had, didn't even know I was the first black actress in a major role on television.
06:37I've had so many people, I was waiting for a character like,
06:42I was waiting for a black woman to come on and be that person.
06:48In 2009, Uhura's role was taken by Zoe Saldana.
06:54Uhura is intuitive.
06:56And that gives her the ability to look at her first officer and her captain eye to eye and level
07:04with them.
07:05And if she feels that, that they're making a decision where, in her mind and in her gut,
07:11they haven't covered every corner, she will speak up.
07:17Star Trek continued to push boundaries with a kiss like no other.
07:22But I'm not afraid.
07:25I am not afraid.
07:28And it was the first interracial kiss on, on TV.
07:40Star Trek is the one idea of the future where it all works out.
07:45Where it's all actually pretty good.
07:47Where we saw, you know, the Earth is one world.
07:49We've solved poverty and disease and war and racism and everything else.
07:53And we're going out in the galaxy and we're making friends with other people with bumps on their heads.
07:57And it's all working out for them, too.
07:59We are still go with Apollo 11.
08:0130 seconds.
08:02And I think that since the 60s, that notion of that pretty image of the future,
08:08I think has kind of become what we think, expect, and want the future to be.
08:17People who fall in love with it do seem to fall in love with the possibilities that it promotes or
08:27offers
08:30of maybe a world that does get better or at least gets bigger in the sense that you can travel
08:35to other places.
08:37Half the people who went to work for NASA grew up watching Star Trek.
08:44As we began to push the boundaries of real exploration,
08:47the diverse origins of Star Trek's fictional crew proved inspirational to NASA.
08:58And they wanted to know if I would consider working for them.
09:09And, well, I'm not a scientist.
09:11What is he talking about?
09:13I'm waiting.
09:13And would I recruit the first women and minority astronauts for the space shuttle program?
09:21I said, and how important is this that you're bringing on the first African-American and the first female?
09:31And they said, it is top.
09:35It has to happen.
09:36It must happen now, not later, because that's who we are.
09:42We're going like you where no man or woman has gone before.
09:47And that means all of America.
09:56Where no man or woman has gone before is not just a story.
10:07We're going to do it.
10:09You want to go?
10:16The face hugger, the chest burster, the warrior.
10:22I mean, these are all the stuff of nightmares.
10:35In the history of science fiction, the exploration of space inevitably led to the question of what we might find
10:40out there in the stars.
10:45In the early days, the answer was often laughable, an unconvincing man in a rubber suit.
10:56But that changed when the American director Stanley Kubrick and British author Arthur C. Clarke joined forces and took the
11:03idea very seriously indeed.
11:07Kubrick and Clark decided consciously that they wanted to make a science fiction movie that was articulate, thoughtful, intelligent, talking
11:16about the possibility of contact with an alien civilization, and do it in a way that would be an A
11:21movie.
11:24This is the screenplay of the movie 2001, the space odyssey, which Stanley Kubrick and I have been working on
11:33for the last two years.
11:36We are concerned with nothing less than man's place in the universe and his possible position in the pecking order
11:45of cosmic intelligence.
11:512001 was a short story of Clark's called The Sentinel, and it was one of these idea stories that science
11:57fiction is so good at, and it sort of is putting the human species in the universe as opposed to
12:03just on Earth.
12:05Clark was saying, well, maybe there are even more intelligent species out there, older species that know more than we
12:11do.
12:14In a story spanning millennia, a benign alien intelligence appears in the shape of a black monolith.
12:21It guides humanity on a journey from the apes to the moon, and ultimately, to the stars.
12:36I mean, wow!
12:43To sell such big ideas, an immense effort went into ensuring everything on screen was as realistic as possible.
12:51Stanley went to great pains to be absolutely as authentic and not just up to date, but up to the
13:00date of 2001 as he could possibly guess.
13:03The design was based upon real spacecraft design, helped by people who worked in the space program, and so there
13:10was a reality to it.
13:11It said, well, this is the way you would have to have vector thrusters to maneuver a pod in space
13:16or whatever.
13:16He had about 40 corporations that were cooperating with him, and each of those corporations were presenting him with their
13:24best guess as to what they would be able to achieve that many years in the future.
13:31And I think the fact that there's nothing that catches your eye that looks fake makes it all look more
13:36real.
13:37You just buy into it.
13:40As the film draws to a close, astronaut Dave Bowman finds himself transported to a strange bedroom for the last
13:47appearance of the monolith.
13:49Like the film, this image still fuels debate decades later.
13:56This may be something I kind of have come up with, whether it was Stanley telling me this or whether
14:01it was my own conclusion when I saw the film.
14:03But that room represents perhaps the aliens being millions and years in advance of human beings, had the technology just
14:15to go inside a brain and look for what that creature considered habitat.
14:21And maybe one day the character that I was playing visited the Louvre Museum and saw that, and the aliens
14:28figured that's his habitat.
14:31And so there's an intrigue on the part of this film that a few other science fiction films have.
14:41Kubrick and Clark's creation stood like the monolith of their story, casting its shadow over all of science fiction.
14:47But even they had chosen to avoid actually showing the aliens.
14:51It would be another decade before science fiction unleashed the alien it deserved.
14:57It arrived in 1979, and this one was anything but benign.
15:10Director Ridley Scott wanted the creature that menaces the crew of the space freighter Nostromo
15:15to look like nothing the audience had seen before.
15:19He turned to a Swiss artist, H.R. Giger, notorious for his nightmarish paintings.
15:26Well, Ridley Scott really lucked out when he found Giger.
15:30Giger's inclusion into Alien was pivotal because, you know, Scott found this guy who had this whole vision, kind of
15:40necronomicon, otherworld thing, like totally worked out in his head.
15:55The great thing about Giger and his designs is that they're not like anything you've seen before.
16:03They're beautiful, but at the same time incredibly disturbing.
16:12They created machines and organic beings, melded together, and you really couldn't tell where one stopped and the other started.
16:25But what made the alien terrifying wasn't just its appearance.
16:28Its biology and the way it reproduced were utterly inhuman.
16:33What the film franchise has been able to do is to create a life cycle for that creature.
16:41The face hugger, the chest burster, the warrior.
16:47I mean, these are all the stuff of nightmares.
16:50What is more horrible than having a thing with a going down your throat that looks like a spider and
17:01a crab and a tumour and like a...
17:06A life cycle that preyed in our darkest fears made for science fiction's most memorable birth.
17:13I was told I'd get a little blood on my face.
17:16They had four cameras, so everybody was being shot.
17:24I think they got it on the first take, you know, a lot of this stuff, because the actors didn't
17:28know what was going to happen.
17:29Well, I leaned directly into a blood jet that hit me square in the face.
17:39And all this blood comes out and this penis thing comes out and like...
17:44Our reactions to it were the audience reactions.
17:48It's like these people going like, what is happening?
17:52Oh, God!
17:57Nothing had been done like that before.
18:01Alien is still the film by which all on-screen creatures are judged.
18:04It explored a grittier, a more realistic side of science fiction.
18:09A part of the genre that you could call dirty space.
18:14I do not like the men on the spaceship.
18:17They are uncouth and fail to appreciate my better qualities.
18:20There are no glowing orbs of anything.
18:25It's just metal versus dirt.
18:34Stories of space exploration extend the boundaries of our imagination.
18:39But sometimes the hardest thing to believe is just how spotless the spaceships are.
18:44And how professional the crews.
18:47In 1974, director John Carpenter offered a less sanitized vision of life in space in the film Dark Star.
18:57The idea of space travel as being clean and sleek lines and all easy is ridiculous.
19:06And you just imagine being stuck inside this capsule for months, years.
19:152001, the space odyssey had come out in 68.
19:19But Dark Star was a response to the stoicism of the astronauts.
19:23They're kind of boring.
19:26They had nothing going on.
19:27They weren't angry at each other for being...
19:29They were out there a long time.
19:31So I thought, eh, we can do better than that.
19:36The crew of the spaceship Dark Star are crammed together for years
19:39as they roam the universe, destroying unstable worlds.
19:44Life and death situation and things become absurd.
19:47The more serious that movie got, the more absurd it became.
19:50So it became completely funny.
20:00I do not like the men on this spaceship.
20:03They are uncouth and fail to appreciate my better qualities.
20:07I have something of value to contribute to this mission if they would only recognize it.
20:11And after a while, the things that...
20:16The pleasantries between people, the hygiene begins to drop off.
20:21People don't care as much.
20:22I don't want to do that.
20:26So the idea of, well, we'll let it, we'll fix it when it goes bad.
20:29Just leave it alone.
20:31Don't bother me.
20:32It starts to take over.
20:33That's just kind of human nature.
20:37The world of Joss Whedon's TV series Firefly took Dirty Space a step further
20:42by creating a frontier setting that echoed the Wild West.
20:47It may have drawn on the same inspiration as Star Trek,
20:50but this story of a cargo ship for hire is a very different proposition.
20:56There's no grand purpose or prime directive behind what these people are doing.
21:01These people are simply making their way.
21:06It's the crew of Firefly's ship that set it apart.
21:10These are poor people.
21:12It's about, we're going to run out of gas, we're going to run out of food,
21:15we're going to run out of air.
21:16These are things that were priorities for these people.
21:20To stay alive, they are endlessly bartering and trading with dark and nefarious characters.
21:25Malcolm Reynolds?
21:26All patience.
21:27I have to say, I didn't look to be hearing from you any time soon.
21:31Well, we may not have parted on the best of terms,
21:35realized certain words were exchanged, also certain bullets.
21:39There are spaces that are clean and beautiful in the Firefly universe.
21:44They're just dominated by the rich.
21:46They exist, they can see them at a distance, but they can't get into them, they're not allowed.
21:51And when they do, they're also deeply corrupt.
21:53Whereas Star Trek, the safest thing that would happen to you is you could beam back up to the Enterprise,
21:57where it was like, you could feel the rumbling of the impulse drive, perhaps.
22:01But other than that, it was really, really pleasant.
22:02The setting is something that we can relate to, that we're familiar enough with it,
22:09that it's not an entirely alien experience.
22:14I hope we got paid today.
22:15We did?
22:17Sir, I'd like you to take the helm, please.
22:20I need this man to tear all my clothes off.
22:24Mark, Mark.
22:26There's no glowing orbs of anything.
22:30There's no force fields.
22:31It's just metal versus dirt, bullets versus flesh.
22:40It kept it for me very, very real.
22:44It's this sense of reality that makes stories like Firefly so appealing.
22:48They're set in a future we can picture ourselves in.
22:54But what if science fiction wanted to start from scratch,
22:57to create a whole new planet that's as complex as our own?
23:01A place with its own unique plants, atmosphere, and creatures,
23:06somewhere that seems real in every respect.
23:09This is the challenge of world-building.
23:13Jim did just a fantastic job of thinking about what's the flora,
23:18what's the fauna, what's the atmosphere.
23:20Thanks to advances in computer graphics and groundbreaking 3D technology,
23:26Cameron was able to build a world so real you could almost touch it.
23:37For much of the early history of science fiction,
23:39the environments of the planets we encountered were given little thought.
23:43They were simply there to provide a setting for the drama.
23:45We have been expecting you.
23:47You will come with us now.
23:49But there are those who have taken a more ambitious approach
23:51to the challenge of world-building.
23:53Using science to guide their imagination,
23:55they conjured up every detail of their planet.
23:58Some authors have been drawn to real places, like Mars.
24:03When I first saw the satellite photos from the Viking orbiter
24:06looking down at Mars,
24:08I was struck by how much they resembled the American West,
24:12and especially the high Sierra of California,
24:14where I was doing a lot of backpacking at that time.
24:16So I looked at these photos of Mars,
24:18and I thought, wow, this would be a great planet to go backpacking on.
24:21But, of course, that wasn't quite right,
24:23because it has no atmosphere, and the water's all frozen.
24:25You would need to terraform Mars.
24:27You would need to make it Earth-like
24:28in order to live on it as human beings live on this planet.
24:33So I had the idea it would be a great story to tell,
24:36to tell the story of the terraforming of Mars,
24:38as the human inhabitation of Mars.
24:46The Mars trilogy tackles every step needed
24:49to turn Mars from a desolate desert to a habitable planet.
24:54Robinson was inspired to write by an earlier book,
24:57the first to create a complex imaginary planet,
25:00Frank Herbert's Dune.
25:03Frank Herbert's Dune was a really big science fiction achievement.
25:07This was a planet that had an ecological system that made sense.
25:11It was dry, therefore water mattered,
25:13therefore the plant life and the animal life were all desert.
25:17It was really excellent on planetary ecology
25:20in a way that had never been true before.
25:23Dune changed the landscape of science fiction.
25:26Herbert created an incredibly detailed galaxy
25:28in which to set his epic tale
25:30of the struggle for control of the desert planet Arrakis,
25:33the source of a mysterious substance,
25:35spice, the ultimate currency.
25:39It kind of made a big wave
25:42because he had spent so much time
25:47thinking out his world and seeing it and feeling it
25:50and, you know, making it real and doing the details.
25:55The horizons of science fiction continued to grow
25:58with the arrival of a book
25:59set on an imaginary ice planet called Winter.
26:05The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
26:07is not only a masterpiece of world-building,
26:09but it's a philosophical masterpiece.
26:12The ways in which things work in that world
26:15are so alien to us
26:16and yet feel so completely convincing and immersive
26:19that it feels like you actually are visiting an alien planet
26:23when you read that novel.
26:27When I invent a world,
26:32I have to know a lot about the whole culture
26:38or I can't imagine who the people are.
26:42This seminal work has at its heart
26:45an idea that was unthinkable for the time.
26:49The people on that planet
26:51do not have male and female as we understand them.
26:54Rather, once in a cycle,
26:57they go into Kemmer
26:58in which they basically are in heat
27:02and they, at that point,
27:03they differentiate into male and female
27:05for the purposes of mating.
27:06But the rest of the time,
27:07they do not have any gender as we understand it.
27:09I read that book when I was 11 or 12
27:13and it undid the inside of my head.
27:16It had not occurred to me up until that point
27:18that things could be another way
27:22than the way that I saw that they were.
27:25Men were men.
27:26Women were women.
27:27Wasn't that obvious?
27:28Wasn't that unchangeable?
27:32One reason why I wrote the book
27:33was to find out what they were like
27:35when they were neither.
27:36Would they be human
27:38without having any sexual drive or characteristic?
27:45And it seemed to me they came out quite human.
27:52Novelists had imagined incredibly detailed worlds,
27:55but cinema would provide its own unforgettable example
27:58of world-building.
28:00Avatar director James Cameron
28:02created the planet Pandora from the ground up.
28:06As in June,
28:07this is a world that's fully realized
28:09with its own flora, fauna, and indigenous people.
28:16Well, we went to extraordinary lengths
28:18to study the natural environment of forests.
28:23A lot of times you can see nature
28:25and it's like nature's in a zoo
28:27because we are the dominant force,
28:29but in Pandora we are still just a small footprint
28:33in that whole overall planet.
28:35Jim did just a fantastic job
28:38of thinking about what's the flora,
28:40what's the fauna,
28:41what's the atmosphere,
28:43what's the gravity,
28:44how does this whole place work?
28:45He named all the plants,
28:47he named all the creatures,
28:47he created this whole world.
28:50Thanks to advances in computer graphics
28:53and ground-breaking 3D technology,
28:56Cameron was able to build a world so real
28:58you could almost touch it.
29:02One of the things I read a lot about
29:03was that people kept going back
29:05over and over and over to see that movie
29:07because it was like a vacation on another planet,
29:10it was like some big experiential thing.
29:14It may seem very alien to us,
29:16but the creatures of Pandora
29:18drew on James Cameron's own experiences
29:20when deep-sea diving on Earth.
29:25Jim Cameron has gone to the bottom of the ocean
29:28and seen forms of life
29:31that very few of us have ever really seen.
29:33He's seen it from a point of view,
29:34it's like through a portal,
29:36that his mind could go out
29:39into that world underwater,
29:41that he couldn't breathe,
29:42but he could make himself a part of that,
29:45feel its power and its presence.
29:47And then I think that's what he tried to convey
29:49for audiences through his movie
29:51and a 3D experience,
29:52was to make it immersive,
29:55that it wasn't coming out at you
29:57as much as you could come into it.
29:59It was extremely visionary,
30:02extremely risky,
30:03and extremely effective,
30:05and profitable.
30:06Most profitable movie of all time
30:08is probably the geekiest movie of all time.
30:10I would say, yes!
30:13The inhabitants of Pandora are the Na'vi.
30:16Like the characters in the left hand of darkness,
30:18they have their own language and customs.
30:23Which is, I see you.
30:27Me understanding how she was physically
30:29and mentally and spiritually
30:30helped me with the language,
30:32and the language helped me understand her more,
30:34so it was a combo that needed itself.
30:36Like, one cannot exist without the other,
30:39in order for the Na'vi to really become
30:41what they are, you know?
30:43Which, they're alive, they're real.
30:45Pandora had to be real.
30:47Why else would the audience care
30:48when it came under threat
30:50from an Earth-based mining company?
30:53Themes in the movie were so relatable
30:55since the beginning of time.
30:59It's the taking advantage of a society
31:01that once you come in
31:02as a self-considered civilized,
31:06much more civilized and evolved
31:09species or creature or person,
31:11you immediately take advantage
31:13of the purity and the simplicity
31:18that people live in.
31:21Avatar's immense appeal
31:22was built on the creation of a world
31:24unlike anything ever seen before.
31:26But the greatest phenomenon
31:27in the history of science fiction
31:28created a whole array of worlds
31:30for its saga,
31:31which played out a long time ago
31:33in a galaxy far, far away.
31:39In creating Star Wars,
31:41Lucas faced a choice
31:42between two radically different ways
31:44of telling stories of empire.
31:45In the end, he went for the one
31:47that had entertained his generation
31:49and appealed to the child in all of us.
31:52In science fiction,
31:54the most powerful spectacle
31:55often comes from stories of empire,
31:58epic struggles of good versus evil.
32:04Of these, one work stands above all others,
32:07George Lucas's Star Wars.
32:12I remember one night
32:13sitting in a restaurant
32:14and George was glum.
32:19George is always rather glum,
32:21but this was a particularly glum night.
32:24And I leaned over and said,
32:26what's the matter?
32:27And he said,
32:31I made a kid's film.
32:34And he had wanted to make an adult film.
32:37And we commiserated
32:39with the billionaire-to-be.
32:46In creating Star Wars,
32:47Lucas faced a choice
32:48between two radically different ways
32:50of telling stories of empire.
32:54The simple version
32:56was personified by Flash Gordon.
32:57He's shooting us down.
32:59He's spreading out.
33:00You want action, right?
33:01You want action beats.
33:02First, we've got to go over there
33:03and we've got to rescue that princess
33:05so that we can go get
33:06that magical gemstone,
33:08so that we can plug it
33:09into our broken spaceship,
33:10so that we can defeat
33:10the evil emperor
33:11who has all of the soldiers.
33:13Just like Star Wars,
33:14Flash Gordon has a reluctant hero,
33:16battles with spaceships,
33:17and its own evil lord,
33:19Ming the Merciless.
33:21I'll perish all those
33:22who dared to balk me
33:24in my determination
33:26to conquer the universe.
33:28It was a combination
33:29that thrilled a generation.
33:33On Saturday mornings,
33:34I used to watch television
33:36and there was Flash Gordon
33:38and I was hooked.
33:40I mean, ray guns,
33:41aliens from out of space,
33:43rocket ships and starships.
33:45What's not to love?
33:47Kill them!
33:48Kill them!
33:52Flash Gordon was storytelling
33:54at its simplest level.
33:57A more adult approach
33:59to empire was to come
34:00when Isaac Asimov
34:01began the stories
34:02that became known
34:02as his Foundation series.
34:07Asimov's Foundation series
34:09came in the 1940s
34:11and it really was
34:12that moment
34:12when Asimov's editor,
34:14John W. Campbell,
34:16of Astounding Magazines,
34:17was trying to make
34:18science fiction
34:19more serious intellectually
34:20so that it was no longer
34:22just essentially
34:24westerns in space,
34:25which was the space opera
34:26of the 1930s.
34:30Isaac Asimov
34:32decided to try and take
34:34the rise and fall
34:35of the Roman Empire
34:36and translate it
34:39into science fiction terms,
34:41not one-to-one,
34:42but to take that feeling
34:44of scope,
34:45the feeling of what happens
34:47with an empire
34:49as it rises,
34:51as it falls.
34:54Asimov's narrative
34:55spans galaxies
34:56and features its own empire.
34:58But this is not a simple tale
35:00of good versus evil.
35:01This is a work
35:02that challenges
35:03the basic principles
35:04of science.
35:07The Foundation series
35:09takes place
35:0950,000 years
35:11into the future
35:12when we have
35:13a galactic civilization.
35:15And it forced me
35:16to confront the fact
35:17that the physics I know,
35:19the physics that makes me think,
35:21ha, all that's impossible,
35:23it's only a few hundred years old.
35:25What could be the physics
35:26of 50,000 years from now?
35:28And then I realized
35:29that I had to expand.
35:30I had to expand
35:32my conception
35:33of the laws of physics.
35:37The Foundation's hero
35:39is a scientist
35:39who can predict the future
35:41using something
35:42called psychohistory,
35:43and trade
35:44is the source
35:45of all power.
35:48They weren't action heroes,
35:51those traitors,
35:51in the sense of
35:52some of the earlier
35:53Flash Gordon types
35:54might have been.
35:55They weren't out there
35:56with a sword in one hand
35:57and a pew-pew laser pistol
35:59in the other hand
35:59saving Martian princesses.
36:01They were like
36:02building civilizations
36:03based on capitalism,
36:05but with spaceships
36:06and hyperdrive
36:07and miniaturization
36:08and personal shields.
36:10Taking those bigger themes,
36:13those ideas,
36:13made the stories
36:14more mature.
36:15In creating Star Wars,
36:17Lucas faced a choice.
36:19Would he draw on
36:19the complexity
36:20of grown-up works
36:21like Foundation
36:23or the cliffhanger
36:24action sequences
36:25that had made
36:25Flash Gordon so successful?
36:33In the end,
36:34he went for the one
36:34that had entertained
36:35his generation
36:36and appealed
36:37to the child
36:38in all of us.
36:45I first saw
36:46Star Wars
36:47at a cruise screening
36:48in London
36:49and, like everybody else,
36:51went like this
36:52when the big spaceship
36:53went over my head.
36:54With that shot,
36:55with the ship
36:56coming over
36:56and the sound,
36:57he really changed
36:58the cinema experience.
37:00I remember
37:00leaning over
37:02to my dad
37:03in the theater.
37:04He took me
37:05and, without taking
37:07my eyes
37:07off the screen,
37:08I said,
37:08I want to see
37:09this again tomorrow.
37:15But the birth
37:16of Star Wars
37:17was a struggle
37:17from start to finish.
37:19No one anticipated
37:20the phenomenon
37:21it would become.
37:26And probably,
37:27we all thought,
37:28I won't ever see
37:29this film
37:29because this is
37:30not a good film.
37:32What kept you?
37:33We ran into some old friends.
37:35Is the ship all right?
37:36Seems okay.
37:36If we can get to it,
37:37I just hope the old man
37:38got the tractor beam
37:39out of commission.
37:43With Star Wars,
37:45George Lucas chose
37:46to celebrate
37:46a childlike approach
37:48to Tales of Empire.
37:50I've seen so much
37:51reaction from little kids,
37:53two-year-olds.
37:57He assembled a motley crew
37:58to take on the might
37:59of an evil realm
38:00and set his saga
38:01a long time ago
38:03in a galaxy far, far away.
38:06But such stories
38:07are not easy to pull off.
38:08To create his saga,
38:10George Lucas
38:10had to overcome
38:11innumerable obstacles.
38:14And he kept changing
38:16his mind.
38:16At one point,
38:17he was going to do
38:17it with Redford in mind
38:21and an actor like Lee Marvin
38:23to play Obi-Wan Kenobi.
38:26And, of course,
38:27that became Harrison Ford
38:28and Alec Guinness.
38:31By the time filming commenced,
38:32his problems were escalating.
38:35The budget originally
38:36was very, very small.
38:38Five million, maybe.
38:40It happened to be there
38:41day after day after day.
38:42And never used me.
38:44The costume didn't really
38:45fit me.
38:46Slightly more important,
38:48maybe it didn't even
38:48fit itself.
38:49So it was like a
38:50malformed Rubik cube,
38:52really, I don't know.
38:53Remote-controlled robots
38:56sometimes don't malfunction.
38:58Anyway, within seconds,
38:59the costume had broken
39:00and I was in agony.
39:01And I went up to
39:02nine and a half million dollars.
39:04More importantly,
39:05the actors were struggling
39:07to see the appeal.
39:08Their characters had
39:09odd names.
39:11Obi-Wan Kenobi,
39:12who thought of that one.
39:14What a hell of a name,
39:15you know.
39:16The planet Dagobar.
39:17I think in India,
39:18a Dagobar is some kind
39:19of temple-like structure.
39:21Darth Vader.
39:23I don't know where
39:24George got his names from.
39:26And they just couldn't
39:27get to grips with the script.
39:29I remember driving
39:31across the desert
39:32one morning with Mark Hamill.
39:33We, out of courtesy,
39:35were going through
39:35each other's lines,
39:36you know.
39:36And I said to him,
39:39how can you say rubbish
39:40like that with a straight face?
39:41And he said,
39:42well, you know,
39:43well, you have to say.
39:44And I said, yeah,
39:45but I'm behind a mask.
39:46None of my friends
39:47know I'm in this movie,
39:48so it's fine.
39:49And probably,
39:50we all thought,
39:51I won't ever see this film
39:53because this is
39:54not a good film.
39:55And the first screening
39:56we had of it
39:57that the horror directors
39:58saw it,
39:59they hated it.
40:00But the studio head
40:01backed Lucas to the hilt.
40:04I believed in George
40:06because I thought
40:07he was the smartest person
40:08I had met
40:09at that point in time.
40:11And I still think
40:12he might be one
40:13of the smartest men
40:14I've ever met.
40:16And when Lucas
40:17finally managed
40:17to finish the film,
40:18everyone understood
40:20what he'd been
40:20trying to achieve.
40:25They invented
40:26new methods
40:27of adding
40:29an epic quality
40:30to a science fiction film.
40:32And there is
40:32a spectacular
40:36aspect to it.
40:37And then you underscore
40:38the whole thing
40:38with music.
40:39There hadn't been
40:40a movie like that
40:41for this generation.
40:42There hadn't been
40:43a movie like that
40:43for a long time.
40:44And he was able
40:45to achieve it
40:46in a way
40:47that he'd never
40:47been seen before.
40:50I had the first line
40:51in the very first film.
40:53Did you hear that?
40:54They shut down
40:55the main reactor.
40:56It will be destroyed
40:57for sure.
40:58This is magic.
40:59There'll be no escape
41:00for the princess
41:01this time.
41:02Well, sorry.
41:06I had no idea
41:07what this was about.
41:08What do you mean
41:08there'll be no escape
41:09for the princess?
41:09What was clever
41:10about that,
41:11it jumped you
41:11straight into
41:12the storyline.
41:14There'll be no escape
41:15for the princess,
41:15so there's a princess.
41:17This time,
41:17oh, this has happened
41:18before.
41:19It's a very clever
41:19piece of writing.
41:23Star Wars is very smart.
41:25Lucas drew from all
41:27the ideas we'd enjoyed
41:28in science fiction.
41:31It is the urge
41:32to explore
41:32that drives Luke Skywalker.
41:38Lucas built myriad worlds
41:39in which to set his story.
41:45Star Wars universe
41:46is populated
41:47with an incredible array
41:48of aliens.
41:51Like dirty space,
41:52this is a world
41:53that is used
41:54and broken.
41:55What a piece of junk!
41:57Underpinning it all
41:58is a classic empire story,
42:00a struggle against evil,
42:02personified in the form
42:03of Darth Vader.
42:06It was an unprecedented
42:07distillation
42:08of our fascination
42:10with space.
42:11There was a time
42:12that George Lucas
42:13was worried
42:14that Battlestar Galactica
42:15had pinched his ideas
42:17after the fact.
42:18They counterclaimed
42:19that George had pinched
42:20everybody's idea
42:21from ever,
42:22and they won the case,
42:24because it's true.
42:25The thing that George did
42:26was to mix them together
42:27in a really, really
42:29different and neat way,
42:30bash them up a bit,
42:31make them look old,
42:32use,
42:33give you a world
42:34as a member of the audience
42:35that was lived in.
42:37When Star Wars was unleashed,
42:39it caught the imagination
42:40of a generation
42:41and changed the entire history
42:43of science fiction.
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