StarTalk Radio - Disclosure Day with Steven Spielberg & David Koepp

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Have aliens already secretly visited us? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp to discuss their new film Disclosure Day, alien contact, and why Spielberg believes there’s more out there than meets the eye. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/disclosure-day-with-steven-spielberg-david-koepp/ Thanks to our Patrons GrassCobra, Donnie Foos, Ms Fattahipour, Nick, Sean Van Dommelen, Wendy, Jennifer Cramer, Marce Marie, Wooderpy the Wise, Ryan Taggart, McKenna, Leroy McReA, joseph, Lauren Katz, Chance Brandt, Cierra Baker, John Haney, Gogov, Silent, Cory Ford, Gary Flugge, Dylan Jennings, Sarah Perfetto, Kenneth, Alia Over The Years, Paul Gale, Sean McCallum, Alana Heyser, William Rinear, Prashanth Vissapragada, Łukasz Nyczkowski, Thorsten Rock, Pete Checchia, Marike Kreeftmeijer, Marilyn Geer Rivera, Ryan Pickhardt, Chad Chadwell, jlparques, Jack Yantz, Peter Magnusson, victoria, Abel, Daniel C Schlack, LabratMatt, Vishal Shankaran, Chris M, Brian Trudeau, Amrita A, Alexandra Swanson, Halvy, Ethan Murray, Emily Zelaya, ArdyMcHardy, Daniel Almada, kartik goswami, Kurt Blumeyer, hunter nash, Ryan Greer, johntravolta88, Cody, wackerow, Akash Gaur, Anthony Dannucci, Chelbie Hinton, Ron Hooper, Neil Smallwood, Elderbobo, BigBodyBimmer, ghost with a thought, and Pablo Giles Sanz for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

People have a right to know the truth. It belongs to seven billion people. What is it? You won't believe me if I told you. So I'm going to show you. What are you going to do? Full disclosure to the whole world. All at once.

This is StarTalk. I'm Neil de Grass Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we've got some special brewing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're going to talk about Disclosure Day. Not just in the abstract, but I've got with me here, the one, the only, Stephen Spielberg. It's his story, and he directed it.

But we also have the writer, David Kep, who not only wrote Disclosure Day, but wrote many other science fiction films, not only in collaboration with Stephen, but also of his own. So we know this episode is going to say, serve your geek underbelly. And that's coming right up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Stephen, good to see you again. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on to the podcast. We did a little bit of homework, and I did not know that your first student film was called firelight about aliens. Yeah, it was called firelight.

I made it an 8 millimeter on 8 millimeter film. I was 17 years old. I was in high school. So you, aliens have just been a thing. Well, it was more about UFOs. It was, and it wasn't peace-loving aliens. The first one I did was much more of the formulaic, you know, monogram movie exploitation. But it was in an area of interest ever since I was a kid.

And I mean, why wouldn't it be? Because everybody's interested in aliens at some point. But you have the power to bring it to life on levels that no one could have imagined. Well, it's not really so much my interest in aliens. It's been my interest in the unknown. And the feeling I've had, you know, for a very long time, having been a consumer of everything involving the unknown. Not the unknown, you know, a million light years from here, but the unknown right here. And it's always been something that's really interested me.

And I've always wondered, you know, if the unknown is known by a very small group of people, the injustice of not everyone knowing what they know is kind of what drives me, especially to tell the story of Disclosure Day. It never occurred to me to think of people left out as being the consequence of an injustice. An inequity maybe is a better word for it. No, but still. No, I'm applauding the term because when it's an injustice, you want to correct that as a viewer.

You want to write the wrong, and you clearly establish that in Disclosure Day. I mean, that was the greatest feeling any of us had as we watch this. A question that I've always had, as a director, what is the value of the eyes of whatever it is you're looking into. Not only in Disclosure Day,

was there a lot of eye contact from animal to animal to human animals, but also human to human where you're kind of seeing into their soul imparting a bit of empathy, I guess, is for lack of a better word there. That is the word. That is the key word of the day.

But aliens tend, as we now think of them, they all have big eyes. and eyes seem to matter. Can you just speak a little bit as a director? And let me throw in the mix the eye contact with a velociraptor, right? I mean, at my museum, the velociraptor is not much bigger than a big dog, but they were sort of pumped up

in Jurassic Parks so that you're making eye contact with something that's going to eat you. So not only as a source of fear, but as a potential source of empathy. How does that feel to you? Well, with human beings, you know, eyes are the mirrors of the soul. And to animals, I guess, eyes are the mirrors or the appetite. But they both serve a similar purpose.

Parmills with teeth, yes. They both give a kind of satiation, you know. And I think everything is in the eyes. It's in the eyes. You know, it's from anything you've, any movie experience anybody's ever had. It's all about the eye. E.T.'s eyes in my film. was critically important.

The design of those eyes were critically important. It's a little bit harder with what people report, when they report non-human entities, there's no iris or pupil. I never thought about that. It's never drawn with anything inside the eye. No, but there are other things happening when people have close encounters of the third kind,

which is how that sort of defines itself, that there is something that is also a psychic part of looking into an eye of a non-human as has been reported and still feeling something without needing the pupil or the iris. So in Disclosure Day, because they actually had an alien, I always felt like what's the need to even disclose any video

if you've got the alien? What do you need the video for? You need the context. You've got to have 80 years of context. You've got to be able to, he's see. steals 80 years of the truth that has been hidden from the public and even from the government because, you know, it's very hard for elected officials to keep secrets. But in a way, contracted, you know, deep state contract companies, contracted companies, they're pretty good

of keeping secrets. There's not a lot of leaks from the big tech companies or even... Unless there's a mutiny as in disclosure day. And there have been whistleblowers that went to the, you know, House Intelligence Committee and gave their testimony. You know, Grush, Fravor, and Ryan... Sworn under oath, yeah. Sworn under oath. In 2020, yeah.

In front of Congress and the American public. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So that's quite the setup for this movie, but presumably the movie was percolating even before then, right? It takes time to make a movie. It does.

Were those testimonies the trigger for this whole idea? The trigger for the whole idea was the New York Times article. Right, that article that came out in the New York Times in 2017. Yes, yes. And that was the trigger for me, which was the first time we ever heard the term Tic Tac being used instead of UFO. Because first it was UFO and then it was Tic Tac and then we hear something called UAP. It's all confusing. You know, unidentified anomalous phenomenon.

Who are they fooling? They're talking about UFO. Can we go back to UFOs? Who are they fooling? Please. Please. Completely. Yeah.

I remembered speaking of a Tick-Tac at the time, and a few weeks later at my office, a whole creative Tick-Tac showed up. So it's free advertising for them. I just had questions about the story. You know, all the places are mentioned. We've heard tension occur in all of the, you know, Korea and Russia and Ukraine. And so that's kind of this buildup behind the disclosure.

because that's the backdrop. That's the landscape. Landscape. On which this is unfolding. Yeah. What was your goal there? Well, my goal was not to lay it on thick. My goal was to suggest that there was something approaching critical mass happening in the world.

Uh-huh. That at least was bringing back the word def-con. Yes. You know, and that, you know, people tend to take these things in their stride. I remember during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was in high school. And when it was hitting the tele... My parents went to a... dinner party and I was home with my three sisters worrying about the world ending my parents weren't

worried about that during the Cuban Missile crisis and and so there are people who aren't going to really be focused on the DefCon situation but there is a crisis happening in the world which has something to do with the timing of disclosure day yeah and it's coincidence surely that the government is releasing files right around when you've got your movie coming out that is complete coincidence unless you have access I know No, no. You can tell me. I won't tell anybody.

No. My movie is not a, it's not a holistic review of the entire UFO phenomenon as fed to me by, you know, by any actors inside or outside, you know, the government. No, I've had no government contact about this at all. We're going to have quality time with your writer, your longtime partner in this. But let me just ask, what would you say of this movie is your imprimatur? as director and storyteller?

Well, I wrote the story. So I wrote it from scratch based on my deep interest in this subject and so much was starting to come out in 2017. All right. And I was very satisfied with close encounters, very satisfied having made E.T.

And then even War of the Worlds, which was more analogous to 9-11 than to aliens. But this, when I saw that everybody that has a smartphone has been photographing and capturing some extraordinary things happening. We're crowdsourcing any possible alien invasion.

It's incredible how much is out there right now. And some of it, yes, can be faked, but a lot of it, I don't think is. And it just, my interest, I didn't think I would get interested again in this subject. And then when the 2017 New York Times article came out, I thought, well, something is about to happen. It may not be this year or next year,

but something is going to happen. and I really would like this movie to be my summation story in my entire, I guess, phomography of UFOs and extraterrestrials. So let's explore empathy some more. Yes. Because that really mattered in this film. Yes, it does.

You trust whom, how and why, trusting a stranger, complete stranger. So how did empathy land as a running theme? Well, because I've often, I've dwelt a lot about, not just empathy, but the lack of empathy. And the feeling that empathy is sort of in short supply. It used to be a lot more taken for granted, and now you have to kind of find it, reach for it.

The way our country is divided, and the way people go to their silos, and they stay with their groups. It's kind of like... Heels dug in? Heels dug in. It's sort of like sports, too, you know, in that sense. It's not a lot of empathy between crowds competing against each other and in any sporting event.

Empathy is toward your team, toward your home team, but not toward the opposition. And so more and more, we're having less and less common ground that we can find. And I do a lot of philanthropic work through our Harthland Foundation, trying to fund things that bring people of different ideologies and beliefs, beliefs together, not to change their minds. I'm not interested in changing anybody's mind, just finding common grounds so we can start joining together as opposed to separating further and further.

Disclosure Day has a lot to do with that, and empathy is the key. So how would you draw the line between national security and the public? The public's urge to know. I think the public's urge to know is more like a right to know. And I think when, you know, you can always look back and look at all of the conspiracy theories and all of the urban myths.

And you could look at all of the legends that haunt us constantly that television shows are made from. It's great, it's great material. It's great material for us, you know. But when you look at it, the one thing that hasn't changed, the one thing that could be considered mythology, which is UFology, could be considered by some mythology. But when you look at the consistency of the reporting, how it's so consistent for 80 years. You know, I am on much firmer ground now, certainly with all the circumstantial evidence that's out there, for me to believe that, you know, they're here. Now, empathy is something that the aliens in War of the Worlds did not have. No.

They just came and they just want to slaughter. with abandon. Yeah, that was a 19th century book written by the great HGWW. I'm not blaming you for that. No, no, I'm just saying that I made a choice to make it a very aggressive film. Indeed it was.

A very dark film. Oh my gosh. About invasion and annihilation. And genocide. Do you have any feelings? Oh, that's the wrong word. Do you have any thoughts on whether aliens would be sympathetic

empathetic, evil? What might be their motives or their attitudes towards us? Just given your sense of the world. Well, my sense of the world is obviously, you know, already on film with close encounters. Okay. A benign, you know, non-human civilization coming here.

And E.T. is as benign as you could possibly imagine any entity could be. And I believe that what's been going on is not something that we should fear. It's something that we should be very open to. In spite of how cinema has trained us to just completely believe in evil aliens. I mean, that trophy is with us. Yeah, if I hadn't made War of the Worlds, that was not in my filmography.

I would say, well, I've been trying to train us, too, between three movies, but War of the Worlds kind of makes me a hypocrite to say, totally undoes your line there. It undoes my good intentions, and yet I do have good intentions. is not, and I, and I, I am optimistic that whatever is interacting with us, whatever is here, out there, under the water, wherever it, and whoever knows the truth knows that this is not something, you know, that we need to flee and panic. There's going to be a lot of ontological shock if this ever gets announced, and the stuff that the government or the Pentagon has been

releasing in trips and drabs is kind of hard to see what it is, but what they're releasing is not causing, going to cause any, you know, social dislocation because it's not enough. And nobody's coming out and making that big public announcement. They're here. They've been here. They've always been here. That's short of that, there is no, you know, culture shock. But ontological shot happens when your fundamental beliefs of what you consider reality

are shattered by a new world reality. And that was, of course, comically addressing. in men in black. Your whole understanding of the world is changed. That's right. That's why they have to keep it quiet. Yeah, and they got that magic light thing. They have the neuralizer and of course.

Neuralizer, and of course it could only happen in New York City. A quick, another element about empathy. You expect everyone to want the government to disclose aliens. No, there are people who don't want the government to disclose any of this. because it's not going to shake up our core truth of our core realities. I just want to keep the rest of us in the dark. Yeah, there are people who don't really want this disclosed, not just government people.

There are people in the country that would rather, you know, get the price of eggs down, you know, and not have to worry about all this. But, you know, in America, our movies are our culture. They're our binding force among us. So with Disclosure Day, you've already disclosed the aliens. I don't need the Pentagon anymore because Steven Spielberg has done so. At least some people are surely going to feel that.

Well, I've told a story that is, I've told a story from my imagination based on credible things that I have seen and heard about and read for years. But it did go through a process to be able to find a great story. It's a chase film. This is an action picture. Yes, yes. You need to put on a seatbelt and a chest harness. when this film starts. And it shoots you kind of out of a canon.

And you got to really pay attention to keep up and don't go on your phones and text other people. You've got to go see this movie, wait until the movie's over before you talk to anybody, watch the screen. And that's very important to be able to comprehend it all. But at the same time, you know, this is not a documentary. This is a story.

But you asked great questions because that's what you've done your whole career. And you know, you're one of the greatest science people that I know. Oh, thank you. I'm just trying to keep it real. You do. Stephen, thank you for your time. All right.

Great to talk to you again. What would you do if a spacecraft appeared in the sky tonight and it wasn't ours? Would you panic or would you prepare? And how might you prepare? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader? I offer a guide to things you might say or do in a first encounter with an alien species. What we might look to them, what they might look to us, what habits you should just leave at home because they won't understand them,

what bits of science that you might be able to share, to see and explore if you have things in common, things you should and should not say, things you should and should not do in the presence of aliens in a first encounter. You can grab a copy today of Take Me to Your Leader,

not only the print version but the audio version that I narrated. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying. David, welcome to Start Talk. Thank you. Great to be here.

Yeah. It's not often we get to hang out with a screenwriter. Well, we keep to ourselves. Oh, I'm terrible. Who are in our room? Because the actors get all the shine and the red carpets. But they're just speaking your words. On a good day.

If you're nice to that, right? They'll do that. You've got quite the portfolio here, especially in the geek averse, if I may. Going back to Jurassic Park, we love it. Spider-Man, personally, that was my favorite of all the Spider-Man, is the first one. If I may say that. Ah, well, thanks. If I may say that.

It's okay with me. The advantage of novelty and getting to tell how something started is everything. Yeah. And we've got War the World, of course, in the remake from 2005. And is Steven Spielberg your primary guy that you collaborate with? Or you have other, or you freelance and he just plucks you when he needs you? Well, we've done, I think this is nine or ten together. So that's quite a bit.

Yeah, it's been a great collaboration. I've over 30-some years since Jurassic Park. I have worked repeatedly with a few others, you know, Stephen Soderberg, Brian De Palma. And there's different, because there's different aspects of yourself and your interests that people are suited to, but Stephen's one are interests most frequently line up. And could you correct something in my understanding,

or at least highlight for me, when you're a screenwriter, you're not just writing the words people speak, aren't you also conjuring the scene in which those words are communicated? Thanks for asking, Neil. Most certainly, yes, you are. The screenwriter's responsibility

is everything an audience sees or hears. And I don't think people think that. They think it's just what the script line, but you're putting the image in front of us. Yeah, and if you're writing a scene really well, you're not using so much dialogue. You're using images, visuals, movies or visual experiences.

Those are the powerful memories that we have from them. In fact, I've heard that you can always tell a first timer when they put everything in the script. They don't know how to use the visual medium for all that it's worth. Yeah, it's those things, the things in audio, the only things we can perceive in a movie are what we see in here.

Those are the two senses we bring to a movie. And so therefore, does the director come in? The director comes. It depends. The director can come in from the very beginning and ask you to start. The director then comes in, the good ones that can come in later after you've written the script. The good ones don't just record what you wrote. They interpret it. So they will say things that look at your material from a different point of view. I wrote this movie called Snake Eyes, Brian DePaulman directed. And he asked me after one or two drafts, can you make this first 15 pages

so I can do it in one shot. And I said, no. And he said, okay, give it a shot. So I went and gave it a shot and rewrote it. I never would have occurred to me. I never would have imagined it that way. I never would have interpreted it that way. And that's what the director is.

Okay. And that's a collaboration at its best. Very much. Tension at first, and then you resolve to something greater than either would have been. Yeah. So with Disclosure Day, as presumably existed with other films, there's some mixture of science and fiction.

Hence the word sci-fi, science fiction. How do you navigate that boundary? I always want to get it right if I can. I think anything that involves science, I start the idea by doing as much research as I can possibly do. Talking to people is always better than the Internet, and certainly it's better than AI sources. I mean a human-to-human conversation.

An actual conversation with a person. Well, how novel. Yeah. Because then you'll come up with unexpected things and little character things and stuff. But I stop at a certain point because I now realize, well, okay, now I have to write the story. And the foremost responsibility of this movie is that it be entertaining. So I cannot let reality and truth intrude too much on entertainment. But then once I've written it, now there's another round of research.

Let's make this as close to reality as we can. Okay. Interesting. So the entertainment, because someone has to pay to see the movie, and they want to do that willingly. Yeah. And it's not a documentary. And it's not a documentary.

And they understand that going in so I don't feel like I'm misleading society. They understand this is not a documentary. But anything I do that's real and grounded in truth and reality in actual research works. So you have a little black book with your science consultants in there? Is that how that works? Yeah, kind of. I'd written a novel once that I needed to talk to a microbiologist for. And I wrote the whole novel, and then I gave it to him and said,

now listen, I found one through friends and said, listen. F one does. It's not your microbiologist. Okay. Easy to do. I said, read this. I want you to have a good laugh. And then I want you to please, if you're interested, work with me.

Let's make it closer to reality. And he read it. And he called me and said, okay, well, it's not terrible. and I took that as huge praise. I was like, all right, then let's work on it. Okay, so that's good to know that can happen. One of my great frustrations is to hear a creative person say, I didn't want reality to constrain my creative plot lines.

And often, 80% of the time, 80% of the time, had they known scientific reality more deeply, the plot could have even been strengthened rather than constrained. Exactly. Because the universe is often stranger than you have imagined. It's a pretty wondrous place.

And life forms are pretty unusual and varied. And you can draw more from reality than it's better in reality. Nature has come up with something more interesting than whatever's in your head, I guarantee. So the science advice can come in, presumably at any phase of this. this, right? You want to get the story idea down, but then you touch it up as you go forward. Yeah. Well, in this case, there was a lot of research first because there's been, there's been a lot, there's a lot of material. And you have access, right? Then you have access.

And people do want to talk. It doesn't hurt if you can say it's a Steven Spielberg movie, then they really want to talk. They actually return your phone call. Henceforth, when we saved the David Kep movie that gets one kind of return phone call. But a better one is it's a Spielberg. So what is the process you go through as a screenwriter if you're starting with pre-existing material, a novel, War the World, a very famous novel. In fact, it's already been made into a movie in 1951. So what do you see as your role doing that a second time

in a well-established piece of sci-fi? Well, the first thing you wanted to do is reread it. I'd read it as a kid and I knew the book well, but I had not read it with the intention of making it into a movie. So I read it again. I didn't watch the George Powell movie yet because I didn't want to remake that. We were trying to reinterpret the book for modern times.

You reread the novel and start to think what applies, what doesn't. But you have to have an idea for how do I make this different from a book where everything is explicit and everything is said and you know what people think and you know what they feel and science can go on for pages. How do I make this a movie experience?

And the big thing in that was limiting the point of view. you have to have an idea. Our idea there was, okay, let's go from one person's point of view, and if they don't see it, we don't see it. That's brilliant, because now I'm in suspense the whole time. Right. And, you know, Stephen's done very well

by suggesting more than he shows. Right. So if... That's a trademark. It's a trademark. It's born out of necessity, which is what's brilliant about it. The famous stories about Jaws and the shark not working.

Right. And it also didn't hurt that our main character, we had Tom Cruise, who was going to be an interesting person you want to watch anyway. Right. So if you're going to restrict a point of view, that's the rule. Do it with someone interesting. Right, right. So let's go to Jurassic Park for a moment.

Okay. I work at the Museum of Natural History. You're a neighbor. Yeah. And surely you've seen our velociraptor. Yes. We have a fossil velociraptor on display. It's not much bigger than a large dog.

In Jurassic Park, okay, it was sort of pumped up to be human-sized so that eye contact is a thing. could you describe to me the role of eye contact in storytelling? Oh, that's not where I thought you were going. Oh, that's good. Well, no, I mean, because it can be love or you could be the person's next meal. Yeah. Eyes are everything here. Particularly, I mean, one of the ideas behind Jurassic Park, there's a, you know,

there's the central, brilliant Crichton, once in a lifetime idea of, you know, the preservation of the DNA in Amber, which is fantastic. The other I. Michael Crichton. Michael Craigman, yes. The other idea is rearranging our place in the food chain. That has worked in a couple of jaws, notably, and certainly Jurassic Park. We love to think about that.

I think because it hits us in a very elemental place. We used to hide in caves and worry about the cries of the tigers at night. And you're bringing that back to life. Please. Yeah. Exactly. Let's tap into something. That's why you get the big bucks.

Yeah. Well, that's how we know we've got your. attention. It's like, you know how Disney movies always kill a parent early on? Okay. They grab those kids' attention and hold on to it. And I think I kind of... And the superheroes, they're all orphans, right? So... Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But you're, you're quite right. Eye contact is a vital part of that. And I think the sequence, one of the sequences people really remember is when the Great Hunter is stalked and defeated by the, by the velociraptor that comes are on the side of him, and the thing we see that reveals the raptor is the eye.

Eyes really are portals to everything. Okay, so you're affirming what I suspected is that this is an important part of your, of the intensity of a scene. Yeah. Yeah. I'm intrigued as you describe your access to our primal fears and how you exploit that in the storytelling. But there are also perhaps other primal emotions that perhaps are,

of your storytelling needs. In Disclosure Day, empathy was an important piece of that. Oh, it's everything. It was Stephen's notion, which is embodied in a beautiful monologue, Coleman Domingo delivers. Oh, don't con dissent to me. I'm listening to you, Noah. Something I've learned quite a bit about.

From your friends? Yes. They regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage, as the foremost evolutionary advantage. In fact, the core of animate existence. Our rejection of this understanding is leading us to our extinction. Empathy can be seen as the foremost necessary evolutionary quality. It's another way I think of saying cooperation.

Any great human accomplishment is only done through cooperation. You can go back to the agrarian revolution and say, the idea that we all must plant and harvest this stuff and then help each other store it, is what led to the massive explosion in population. It's what led to the success of the human rights. What we call civilization. Civilization, building a bridge.

No one can do it unless we do it together. And I think that that sometimes gets overlooked as a necessary next evolutionary step, which is increased empathy, understanding others and working with others is the only thing that will let us succeed and prevent our own destruction. I don't want to speak for,

you and your craft, but the greatest of the villains are the ones that you have some feeling for in some way. Otherwise, they're just, you know, kill them off. That's what Mr. Spielberg is so good at, is insisting that every character is a character, even a villain. Why are they a villain? What is it that's pushing them? They don't, please let no one twirl their mustache. There's a, there's a scene in the movie that follows a massive train chase. You see it in the trailer, so I'm not giving anything away. It's thrilling. It's great action filmmaking.

The traditional end of that scene is the release of They Escapeed. Oh, thank goodness. But there's another scene that follows it, which is an incredibly emotional scene in the box car. And that's Stephen, the early drafts of the script didn't have that scene. And he said, but this is the most frightening thing that's ever. happened to them in their entire lives, there would be emotional fallout. Can we see that? And that's just being attuned to character. I deeply remember that scene because it was wholly

unexpected. They drop into a box car. It could have been anything. And it's a quiet, tender scene. Yeah, emotionally violent inside, but there are people working together to try to resolve those feelings. Yeah, because at different times, we're asking ourselves, does the Colin Firth character, have it right. Is he protecting civilization? Whose side should we be on? And I can tell you that, you know, yes, I want disclosure, of course, but you can see where he's coming from.

He makes a fair point. We have not traditionally done well with sudden, dramatic, cultural change. And we're not doing well right now. So speak to me, again, the importance of being able to sympathize or empathize even with people branded as evil in a story? Well, you have to do your honest best

to understand their point of view and to actually believe it. We did an interesting process on this script where there were five main characters and at one point we did a draft solely from the point of view of that character. I'm not saying we rewrote the entire script so it's only them,

but thinking about every scene and every moment only from their point of view. And that really helps you strengthen their arguments. I think Colin's character is quite right about most of what he says. He goes too far. But I think he's right about what he says. And I don't think if the action of the movie continued after the last moment of the movie, I don't think it's all peaches and cream.

I think there's a lot of tumult that's coming. So given the points of view that we were treated to, really, because then at the end we'd make our own resolution, right? And that's allowed. I kept asking myself, would my level of empathy for the aliens, because that's really what it came down to, I just wonder, suppose that footage wasn't there.

And you just had sort of UFO sightings and maybe an alien from a crash saucer lifted onto a stretcher, would we still feel as much as we did? Were it not for that just one squealing alien? No, I don't think we would have. And I think it's telling that that's Josh's character says, that's the footage Hugo showed me to get me to agree to do this. To join the mutiny.

And that means everything because it's a great turn on every single thing we've always thought about aliens. They're omnipotent, right? Because they can handle interstellar travel. They're gods. They can do everything. everything we can't and they're invulnerable. But no, they're not.

And their ships can crash and they can be injured and we can do terrible things because we have kind of a history of doing terrible things. Because we're dicks. Sometimes. Okay. Sometimes.

Okay. So, okay, because that's, I thought that, I don't want to call it a turning point, but that was a key shift in the depth of my empathy that I would have for the aliens. And of course, in ET, you know, they grab them and they, towards the end, they want to operate them on them and cut them open or whatever they were going to do, the medical doctors, out of curiosity, I suppose.

But it's still, once you've built a relationship with the character up until then, that's just evil at that level. However, in Disclosure Day, we don't yet have a relationship with the alien. No. We didn't look it in the eyes yet. So why did that work so well? I hadn't thought of it that way until you said it. It's a really strong structural underpinning of the script because it subverted our expectations,

and it demanded that we question things we had just taken for granted. But you see this kind of, you know, this kind of deep empathy is in Spielberg's work all the way through. Just as you were talking, was thinking about jaws. And while the shark is not... No one has sympathy for the jaws. No, but it's no sympathy for sure. But it's presented as just doing what it does.

It's an animal. It needs to eat. It needs to eat, sleep, and make baby sharks. And that's what it's doing. You can't judge it for that. Right, right. I just got to deal with it. Yeah.

It's just being a... Maybe you stay out of its lane, you know? It's just being a shark. Yeah. You can't blame a shark for being a shark. And maybe it's because we know the alien has intelligence. Yeah. And that's a threshold that above which we care about,

who we resonate with, you'd agree with that? I think so. Yeah, I mean, I think with some animals we kind of are kidding ourselves that they don't have an intelligence where they might understand what's happening to them. And the more we study animals, the more intelligent we find out that they are. Yeah, my daughter, who's a vegetarian,

would say we are all kidding ourselves and we're horribly cruel. So you'll never be as woke as your daughter. No, maybe not. Have you considered the possibility that the evil alien trope, which was not kept, that was not what Disclosure Day was about, but we, when we've encountered other humans of lower technological prowess, is never boated well for the, you know, in the whole era of colonization,

people were enslaved, killed, you know. And so we imagine these evil aliens. Would you agree that that might just be a mirror to ourselves? Yeah, I think we're imputing our history onto them. I think we assume, well, the Spaniards wiped out the Aztecs, therefore this is what's going to happen to us. Right on down, and that's just one of many examples that could be given. So for Stephen, in multiple movies, War the World Accepted,

to have an alien that is not, does not want to harm you. This is a little weird, given the tropes we are fed. Yeah, it's another way of thinking about it, which is, but that's, and it's fairly consistent across his four movies

where he's touched on the subject. In three of the cases, maybe they are, I don't know if they're benevolent or not, but they're certainly not malevolent. And then in War of the Worlds, it's, you know, anything goes. Yeah.

But that's just for diversity of viewpoint. What do you think of people who are capable of great harm, but inside they think they're doing the right thing? As a screenwriter, what do you do about that? Well, you have to have the second part of what you said. You have to have the inside they think they're doing the right thing. And you have to think of it from their point of view and find real reasons to justify why that might be the right thing.

Why might they be correct? because any good actor is going to come in well first of all your story is better that way but any good actor is going to come in it gets two-dimensional right I mean yeah and you're not really you stop paying attention you don't take the movie as seriously you're not as engaged

but any good actor is going to come in and act like their character's lawyer and they're going to say now you're not fairly representing my client's interests here you better be right seriously? Absolutely oh my gosh single-minded point of view I never thought about that okay

Because this is, that's their craft. Yeah, and they have to do it. They have to stand at Colin, had to stand up there and say these things. Right. And find them believable and justifiable, genuinely for himself. So you have to write better material. This is Ken, the nerdneck Zabera from Michigan, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Now, I can't have been the only one to have immediately thought of the day the Earth stood still. Oh, yeah. When Disclosure Day comes and everyone has stopped and is looking at their smartphone. The world stopped. All I can think of was the day the Earth stood still. Yeah. And were you thinking that as well? I mean...

Sure. But that is how it happens. I mean, that's what we all remember, take the pivotal events in history and remember where you were when. We all do. And there are some things that happen that are so consequential, you stop. everybody stops. Some reference, that movie's a landmark, and I adore it. And so some reference, not necessarily that you're consciously referring to those things,

but you're not running away from it either. You're not saying, well, we can't do that because Day of the Earth should still do it. Well, yes, because that's what would happen. Because it would happen. Yeah. You're both representing a reality. You're not copying each other. Right.

There's a separate reality that you're both trying to capture. Yes. Yeah. And it was clearly manifest where on the front lines, where people might have been ready to fight, which is, of course, a persistent theme in the background of the entire film. These are hotbed spots in the current news, Russia and Ukraine and Korea and, you know, South Korea, North Korea.

It's there. And when Earth stood still, there were these soldiers looking at, their smartphone. There's a moment that everything stops, and no matter who you are. No matter who. And it reminded- That was conveyed brilliantly.

Good. Silently and brilliantly. Yeah. Well, a lot of the best things in movies are done without dialogue. Yeah. And it reminded me of who was the astronaut who, most of them actually, when they are in space

and they look back at the Earth, there is an inevitable feeling of, oh my goodness, we're very small and we're all in this together. Right, the two layers of that, there's the overview effect that the astronauts have gone into orbit have experienced. Then there's what I would, I'd pump that up a bit and call a cosmic perspective when you're on the moon and the entire Earth is there, just adrift in darkness.

That would be a full-up cosmic perspective. Yeah, but you don't get that perspective unless you step out. Yes. And so our challenge is, how do we get that to happen? But obviously, we stay here on Earth. So the whole movie, you're treating us to chaos of the world. with familiar places we've seen in the news where there's conflict.

You didn't have to do that, but it was there. So you're kind of setting us up to believe that disclosure might remedy that, I guess. Was this an explicit thought that you had? That's an excellent speculation, and I hope so. What we wanted the end of this movie to be was like somebody clapping their hands together in front of your face to say, hey. Wake the fuck up. And then in that moment, what's next? I would love to see what's next.

I have my own ideas about what's next. I smell sequel. Because you can't answer every single question all at once. We wanted the whole notion of getting this, what we've been fighting the entire movie to do, is to get this information out, get the truth out to people. Now, what effect will that truth have?

It's a part of what you said earlier. You don't have to have the empathy for these extra-true. You don't have to have Earth in such terrible chaos, but that's what that's the purpose of the story and that's what makes us involve ourselves more So I have just some more sharpened technical questions What's funny to me is no one has ever actually seen an alien or brought forth an alien that we are aware of But we all know what aliens look like I just find that you can draw an alien with big eyes, you know bald head, just once, give me an alien with hair.

An alien is humanoid that could be mammalian and all mammals have hair. Give it like a nice hairdo. I'll tell you what really fascinates me. We do have a sort of universal perception of what we think aliens look like. Right. And it's embedded. It's embedded. It's based on movies. It's based on lore.

It's based on what we think, an interpretation of our physical self. Here's what's interesting to me. We can perceive, what do we see? see between about 4,000 and 7,000 angstroms, right? Well, that's what we can see. Yeah, that's what we can see. What we can hear, I don't know how many decibels,

but I know our dogs can hear more than we can. So we're 20 to 20,000 Hertz. Thank you. It's a nice, it's very easy to remember. And dogs can hear higher pitches than 20,000 hertz. But not lower than 20. No, not lower than 20, right. But I feel it because it becomes a pulse.

Right, right. So I asked the right guy. So. But those are fairly crude senses. So we invented some devices that could help us see other things. You know, the telescope, all the things we've invented. That is modern science. The last hundred years, it's really gone far.

Is modern science. But who's to say we certainly aren't still perceiving everything that exists around us? We're perceiving a lot more with the help of our gizmos. But who is to say these alien life forms don't exist in a form that we can't yet perceive? I find that as the agnostic's most reasonable explanation for why things exist that I don't understand. They sit outside of your sensory. They may well, and not just our sensory, but all the technical equipment that we have to perceive things. So let me pick up on language for a moment.

So the lead character, Emily Blount's character, speaks in a couple of different scenes. One fluent Russian, another one fluent, Korean. And she's not self-aware of that. She just thinks she's speaking. Is this alien powers imbued within her that they gave her?

Can you give us some place to anchor what was going on there? I think we see with Emily's character when the bird appears, something happens. They make eye contact. They make eye contact, which is what it's all about. And then she starts speaking in Russia.

in a way that she doesn't understand. Hey, Maggie, okay? You okay? Are you right? Yeah, I'm in the practice. I just got to be able to. I'm not in New York. I don't know, maybe we'd have stood there, or Chicago?

Where did you learn? Well, I'm going to, today's today to talk on this issue. In fact, we don't, we don't know. Okay, Maggie. Okay, stop, stop. What I'll tell. What we do, Jackson? Stop.

Stop, stop it, stop! I think that notion that something is activated in her somehow or given to her somehow that causes her to have these powers, she doesn't even know she is implementing that she's using. And certainly we've seen in all the trailers, she is communicating in some sort of language that we understand that isn't based in the sounds that we know from Earth. So I think it's a fair assumption that maybe this is coming from somewhere else.

This isn't coming from her elementary school. This is coming from somewhere. Some long-forgotten Russian class she took. Right. This is from deep within or far without. Ooh, I like that. I liked that, too, as it came out. You must be a writer.

I was really happy with that one. So I just like that because communication, we take for granted that we understand each other when we're speaking. But half the world can't understand the other half of the world because we all speak different languages, though we are the same species. Yeah. So that's just a...

Well, it gets to the heart of empathy and understanding. How can you understand someone if you don't even know the words they make? Right. So she not only speaks Korean and Russian, she speaks alien with these clicking noises. And I loved it. After I saw a screening,

I went home and just started speaking that way to my family. And I'm just looking... and they're looking at me. Sure. So is that like Klingon? Is that a real language that we can buy a book on and speak to each other at Comic-Con? Or was it just some noises that you just threw in at the...

God, I hope somebody writes that book and wants to learn out to do that language. We wanted to make a language that was based on sounds we don't normally hear in spoken communication. But they still had to come from a human throat somehow or out of the human mouth. So the idea was to create that language. Then more interestingly, with Josh's character,

we see that he hears or interprets those same sounds, but in terms of math. Right, because he's math fluent. He is math fluent, and that is, you know, math is the language in which the universe was written. And so we wanted to create that language that was based on quasi-human sounds and math, which seemed to us like the best way we would,

the best and perhaps only, way we could communicate with another species. So how much thought was put into the actual sounds or were they just sort of random clicks? Because if you put some thought into it, then some geek somewhere is going to write a whole dictionary. Yeah. You know

that's what's going to happen. I do. You'd have to ask Stephen and Gary Rides from the sound designer who came up with it together. I'm afraid of it. Okay. All right. Clearly the movie had to address our modern understanding of what is true.

Mm-hmm. Is this person speaking the truth? Is this video real? Is it a deep fake? Why should I believe this and not that? The media vessel through which this was released was local news. Is there some implicit or explicit statement being made there that we kind of trust our local news people more than we might trust the anchor on a network news? Is there any, was there any subtle thinking about that?

I think so. You know, you don't, you're not always conscious of what you're doing and how you're doing it. But building the story, I think we certainly trust what is near to us and perhaps smaller and manageable. And with someone we know. Because that's the person reporting on news around the block from me. Right. Somebody's talking about what's happened in Chelsea. Right.

I believe it because I can see they're standing in Chelsea and they know Chelsea. And so that's my neighborhood. So I get that. So he's not a person that's a neighborhood in New York City that he just referred to. Right. The further it goes, the bigger it gets, the bigger the institution, the less we trust it. And what I think is really interesting about this movie, as a bookend to Close Encounters, the close encounters, late 70s, great deal of paranoia is the government.

I think the government might be lying to us, we said in the 1970s. In 2006, we say... Yeah, Watergate set that up for us nicely, yeah. And that very much grew out of that. That was the suspicion they might be lying to us. Now it's 2006. Oh, we know they're lying to us. We know all of y'all are lying to us.

We want to know what is true. We've gone further and said, you've been lying, you've been lying, you're busted. We all know we don't believe a thing, but we're going to find out what's true. And I think this movie's, from the first frame of the movie, there's this desperate urge to find out what's true,

to get the information out. But you accurately and justifiably represent the skepticism that people might have on their feed when they're looking at their smartphone. Is this true or is it not? Is it a deep fake? You hear the questions being asked, the skepticism is all legit is what any of us would ask. Yeah. And then you see it in all the news outlets. And then people come, they have the moment where they say, oh, my gosh.

Well, and the trick is we know, of course there's skepticism. is to have such an overwhelming amount of information that it can no longer be denied. Right. So thanks for shedding some light from your literary artistic skills. My pleasure. Delightful to talk to you. And storytelling.

I mean, it's a, you know, I write books and I like to think I tell stories, but I'm not these kind of stories. I mean, you're immersing a person in a world and have them believe it and feel it and think it. and possibly change them in a way for the better. I mean, that's, you have the world in your palm of your hand, dude. Anyone ever tell you that?

Movies do have a responsibility because we touch people, we reach them in an emotional, not just an intellectual way. And emotions can be very powerful and very positive, and they can be very negative. Also be negative. All right. Well, thanks for being on StarTalk. My pleasure.

I just heard you're a neighbor of the American Museum of Natural History. This is true, four blocks away. I'm going to find you at a coffee shop and we'll drag you in for another interview. So this has been yet another episode of StarTalk. Disclosure Day edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.