StarTalk Radio - Planet of the Apes

Episode Date: August 10, 2014

We’re going ape this week when host Neil deGrasse Tyson talks to Andy Serkis from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and primate expert and paleoanthropologist Dr. Ian Tattersall.Read more and listen to the full show at:http://www.startalkradio.net/show/planet-of-the-apes Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm your personal astrophysicist. I serve as director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. My co-host today, the one, the only. Is there more than one of you?

Not that I know of. The one, the only, Eugene Merman. Hello. Today, we'll be talking about the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and my interview with guess who? I got, I got an interview with like the lead ape. The person who plays the ape. No, it was the lead. Just to be clear.

Andy Serkis. He played Caesar in the movie. You know, he's considered the king of performance capture technology. Yeah. Because it wasn't just some animation that he just then voiceovered. Right. That was him. He was moving around.

It's him. He was moving around. He's the best at that. I think so. Because it's not just, he wasn't just Caesar. Before he played Caesar, he was Gollum, the Lord of the Rings. Gollum. Yeah.

No, I remember him. He really wanted the ring. He thought it was very important. He spoke. He didn't have the best grammar, but he was very passionate. That's true. All these little creatures, they don't have, like Yoda didn't have good grammar either. Yeah, but very powerful.

I wouldn't fight him, but I'd be like, your sentence structure is very, very confusing. He was also King Kong in the latest King Kong there. Uh-huh. And he was Caesar in both of the Planet of the Apes. So it was the Planet of the Apes from a few years ago. Yes. And the rise of the Planet of the Apes and then most recently, dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and then most recently, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

And, you know, he created, he founded his own performance capture technology studio called Imaginarium Studio. So this is becoming a big thing now. Yeah. It's not just some side novelty. No, it's a huge thing. And there's only one person who does it. And now he controls the one studio. He's like a robber baron. So I caught up with him.

We were in the wrong place at the right time to each other. He's normally in Europe, and of course I'm a native of New York where my day job is. I happened to be vacationing in Paris while he was in New York. So that pissed me off, although I wasn't going to leave Paris to come to New York to interview him. Right. So I said, let's try a Skype interview,

and that's exactly what we did. And so over Skype, I asked him, what led him to this sort of techie path as opposed to following a traditional acting career? Because usually you slip on something or somebody pushes you in one way or something. There's always a story. So I wanted to hear what he had to say.

What is in your background, other than an actor, that may have led you to go down this tech path rather than pure acting path? Before I became an actor, I went to college to study visual arts and graphic design, and I wanted to be a painter.

In my first year, I had to actually do another... So you're a failed painter. I'm a failed painter, and I thought I'd better give something else a shot, which I happened to be a painter. In my first year, I had to actually do another... So you're a failed painter. I'm a failed painter. And I thought I better give something else a shot, which I happened to be acting and lucked out, basically. Your backup plan worked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the B plan. And so in the first year, you had to do another subject. And theater studies was the one that I thought, oh, that looks quite interesting. So I started to design sets and posters for theater productions and then got involved in acting.

And then by the end of the first year, I'd been in a play where i'd had this kind of epiphany moment where it was just like i have to act so but we get to your point performance capture technology and it seems in a way and filmmaking and directing and creating the imaginary all of those things have come out of a desire to tell stories and actually now having this technology which allows you to to step into any sort of character and you know and for any act no matter what size they are how tall how short what color or sex they are they can absolutely play philosophically they can play any character i think that's really really healthy as a notion you're free as an artist to be able to express yourself in any character so the guy's ready's ready to take this to a whole other level.

I mean, he's, like you said, he's got the monopoly. Yes. So I didn't know this until we did some homework for this show, that in Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, it was the first feature film to use real-time motion picture capture. So this streamed the actions of Andy circus into the computer generated skin of Gollum as it was being performed. So it's not just some separate clips.

It was happening live. It was happening live. And so this is a whole other frontier for moviemaking. Hopefully there won't be any people in movies in the future. That's one of the things so many movies are like, ah, actors. So I don't know. Does everyone know what performance capture?

I mean, I do. It's you probably have balls all over you and you're in a green suit or something. I don't really know. Yeah. They glue stuff on you, little sensors on your body and they track how you move, know exactly where you are and how you're moving at all times,

and then they can layer some other form on top of you. But I always wondered, since we're human, you'll be moving the way a human moves. I mean, how could you be a grasshopper or something? If you're something that's not otherwise human i always motion capture is used mostly to uh to be things that aren't human but but i guess human-esque human-esque okay or or animated characters that are yeah but they're animated i suppose so so i i was so enchanted by his performance as gollum i had to to ask him just what's up with Gollum?

Yeah. And he even treated me to a little performance. Let's check it out. Andy, you were Gollum, for goodness sake. It's true. That's an amazing role. Yeah, it was. It's completely creepy, yet still bring sympathy from the viewer.

You know, he's much misunderstood Gollum, I think. You know, he was loved by his mother, of course, and it wasn't all his fault. Let me compare with other Gollums that I know. Well, right. I think the interesting thing about Gollum is that it is a little bit of, there but for the grace of God, go I. But, you know, equally, when he finds the ring or discovers the ring, or his cousin, the eagle, discovers the ring, it's a really interesting moment. And when we blocked out the fight for that, when there's this big tussle for the ring or discovers the ring or his cousin, Deagle, discovers the ring, it's a really interesting moment.

And when we blocked out the fight for that, when there's this big tussle for the ring, there's a moment where it could have gone either way and Deagle could have been the possessor of the ring. And there would have been a different story, I think, or maybe not. But, I mean, I suppose as Smeagol, he was susceptible. He was not strong enough to withstand the power of the ring, for sure. Now, can you bend your body in those positions? Not not anymore no but do you want me to do it now do you want me to get up on the chair do you want me to do it now look like this you know don't get a hernia or anything i don't want to be responsible oh nurse yep he climbed up on the chair, squatting like Gollum. I thought you meant he did the voice.

I didn't think you meant that he squatted through Skype, but I'm glad he did. Yeah, he Skype squatted. He's like the good thing that could happen to a failed painter. He's like the good version of that. Other options are you kill yourself, yes? Yeah, yeah. Cut off your ear and kill yourself. Yes, or become a dictator.

When we come back, we'll be talking about Andy's latest movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and explore some of the similarities between ape and human nature. We'll see you in a moment. We're back. StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson with Eugene Merman, my comedic co-host, Eugene. Hello. You tweet it, Eugene Merman, don't you? I do.

Yeah, yeah. I follow you. Great. You tweet it, Eugene Merman, don't you? I do. Yeah, yeah, I follow you. Great. Loving it. And we're also featuring my interview with Andy Serkis, who was Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And in this segment, and for the rest of this show, in studio with us is my friend and colleague,

Dr. Ian Tattersall. He's a paleoanthropologist. Way too many syllables for a word, I think. Paleoanthropologist, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. Ian, welcome. Your first time on StarTalk Radio.

Thank you. Yes, indeed it is. It will not be the last. Plus, when did you become emeritus? Are you that old? I am that old. I'm sorry. More years ago than I care to mention. You never told me you become emeritus? Are you that old? I am that old. I'm sorry. More years ago than I care to mention.

You never told me you became emeritus. We're going to talk about apes and humans and things, and you're like the right guy. You've written 20 books on anthropology, and your latest is Masters of the Planet. Only 18 on anthropology, two were romance novels. Is that right? I wish, I wish. Masters of the Planet, The for our human origins and so you're you're like the right guy to come here and talk about planet of the apes and so andy after he

played gollum went on to play king kong there's an ape for you if there ever was one and also as we already said caesar in planet of the apes and It's got to really be tough to play an ape because as you mentioned earlier, humans don't have the same body proportions as apes do. So to move around in a way that expresses being an ape without exact ape body proportions is quite a trick. Okay. So whatever that is, that's got to be easier than playing a ladybug or something. It's true. Yeah. Yeah, the number of ladies.

If Andy plays a ladybug, then I'll be impressed. Let's find out what, we'll bring in the ladybug expert to comment. Let's find out what he says about his transition from Gollum to apes, and then we'll pick you up again. Let's check it out. So it's one thing for an actor to do that. It's another one for someone to pioneer the whole movement you know most actors just become actors and you have a whole other pathway yeah i mean i happened to step into an arena that was an expanding universe which was that of performance capture technology but i still considered myself just an actor at that point so i

was you know going on set and shooting all my scenes with Elijah Wood and Sean Astin and then I was coming back and sometimes you know a few months later on I'd go to a motion capture stage and put on the suit and for the first time I saw Gollum moving it was a real epiphany it was like this is incredible if I move my right hand I can see Gollum moving his right hand on a screen that was an amazing moment the following film and I've been talking about this recently because it's quite an interesting moment where I just thought Gollum was going to be an anomaly role.

When the third film was finished, I just thought, well, it's been an amazing role, an amazing experience. I'm now going to go back to my normal acting career, working the stage, work on British films or other films. And then Peter Jackson asked me to play King Kong. And that was like, all right. And that was a big moment because it was, okay, so this wasn't just a one-off event.

And you discover you might have some gorilla in you. Exactly. Then it was like, okay, so I'm going to go from playing a three and a half foot ring junkie to a 25 foot gorilla. And how does that work? And actually, what was amazing about that was, you know, Peter asking me to do that was like saying, well, typecasting is dead. And this performance capture technology is the portal to that. This is the way through. And that's why I've enjoyed and embraced the technology because of what it offers philosophically as an actor is the potential to play anything.

So, Ian, let me ask you, how many apes are there? Ape species. How many ape species? It depends, but there's four genera that we speak about. The orangutan and the gorilla and the chimpanzee, which are the great apes. And then there's the gibbons, which are the lesser apes. And then there's a number of species of each. Do the gibbons know that they're the lesser apes?

Yeah, what do you mean by lesser? They're the lesser. Fortunately, they didn't have any part in calling themselves lesser. They're better off that way. Creatures rarely do, but what makes them lesser? They're smaller for a start. That's okay. So size is everything in your field.

Size. Okay, so we are lesser gorillas to King Kong. Well, in a sense, we're lesser gorillas. We're certainly smaller than gorillas, but we're part of the same group that gorillas belong to. And we're part of the same group that orangs and chimpanzees belong to as well, and they have a lot in common with us. Well, okay, so it's not, we have a lot in common with each other, right? We do. Right.

It's not that they have in common with us. We're like having – Yeah. It's like – Well, we're the ones sitting around the table talking about them. But if they were sitting around the table and talking about us, I think they might be talking in the same terms, if perhaps a little less complementarily. So how much DNA do we have in common? We have

more than 99% of our structural DNA in common with the apes, but it turns out that the difference between us and the apes is more a matter of how active the different DNA that we have is.

So we can go into a human, flick some dip switches, turn some, activate some genes, deactivate others, and we can come out as functional gorillas at the end of the experiment. Would we be unable to talk but very strong? Like what kind of DNA? How can I make super soldiers? How can you make super soldiers? Yeah, well, obviously listen to what I say. Well, if we can figure that out, we can all make a lot of money here. But the fact is that we are extraordinarily similar to the soldiers. Yeah, well, obviously, listen to what I say. Well, if we can figure that out, we can all make a lot of money here.

But the fact is that we are extraordinarily similar to DNAs, and if we could deactivate a bit of our DNA and superactivate some of it, we could come out looking pretty much like an ape. Could we superactivate ape DNA to make them able to learn just French or something? Not even... I wonder if you could superactivate my DNA to learn some French. That would be very handy. That would be a first. We could at least learn to say house.

Oh, we could. Let's find out how Andy Serkis, how he studied to learn to play the role of apes. So you studied apes for the first planet of the apes movie correct did you just visit the zoo and hang out and you know reach into your diaper and throw your poop this is all we think of when we think no absolutely absolutely chimpanzees yeah thing is there's a difference between say the way that i approached kong which was that i wanted to make him a very very full-on silverback gorilla and went and studied them very thoroughly, both at zoos for months on end. And then I went to Rwanda and studied mountain gorillas. But when it came to

playing Caesar, this was a very special type of ape. Yes, he's a chimpanzee. If you look at Caesar, he is a chimpanzee whose mother was experimented on and given an Alzheimer's drug, which enhanced Caesar's intelligence. So apart from playing the chimpanzee, working on behavior and physicality of a chimpanzee, I'm now playing a character that is an eight plus. So he's totally into it. And then he can't only play the one character. In the storyline, the chimps are evolving in front of your eyes.

So let's see what he says about playing not only a chimp, but an evolving chimp, and we'll come back and analyze it. The journey of playing Caesar, both in Rise, from an infant through to a teenager, through to a young revolutionary character, and then, of course, in Dawn, sort of jumping forward 10 years, where he's now an elder statesman and carrying the weight of responsibility.

Throughout all of that journey, there's a conflicted human mind in an ape's skin almost i mean he's brought up with humans and and so the physicality the emotional intelligence the responses that he has the the language the growth of language through being taught sign american sign language which then becomes the end of rise he begins to utter his first human words all the way through dawn of the planet the apes where he starts to his first human words all the way through Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, where he starts to use human language more to the point where by the end of the movie, he's conversing much more fluently than he does at the beginning. It isn't just portraying a chimpanzee.

This is an evolving chimpanzee that becomes more human-like throughout the course of the movie. So that was a very specific journey. So, Ian. Well, this is really where you're getting into the course of fiction here because actually uh apes learn and develop much more quickly than human beings do for the first couple of years of their lives as do as do most mammals right as do well uh the the comparison isn't so close but there was a american museum of natural history curator before the war who brought up a baby chimpanzee with his kids of the same age. And I remember his daughter was totally traumatized.

I knew you guys were weird, but now you're just confirming this. These are my colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History. Okay, so he raised a chimp in his family. He raised a chimp at home and it developed much more quickly and had much better coordination at a young age and then after a couple of years the uh the kids continued to develop and learn and the chimpanzee didn't the chimp didn't get into vassar no matter how many times it got into trouble but uh not into vassar the chimp topped out it matured earlier but then didn't rise as high exactly okay so clearly planet of the Apes is fiction,

and so they've got something going on there where there's a drug that they give them that affects the brain and the motor coordination and everything else. And so is that so outlandish that you could give someone some kind of chemical cocktail that will evolve their DNA? It worked in the movie Limitless. Let's hold that until we come back to the next segment.

You're listening to StarTalk. We're back at you. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Eugene Merman across the table from me. How you doing, Eugene? Pretty good. Always good to have you here. We're featuring my interview with Andy Serkis,

who played Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And that's not the first time he played a creature. He played Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. He played King Kong. He played Gollum. He's playing all these motion capture creatures. For someone who doesn't want to be typecast, he is very ape heavy.

And we brought in, because I don't know, what do i know about apes we brought in ian tattersall he is a a curator emeritus paleoanthropologist at the american museum of natural history right here in new york so and we left off we're asking in the movie the heat they're being influenced by a chemical cocktail that is evolving them. And is that biogenetically possible? This is sci-fi at the moment. Who knows what's coming down the line? Because nobody would have imagined that we would know this much today

about how our genomes work, only just a few years ago. So anything is possible, but beware anybody that comes at you with a syringe today, as of now. I would do that no matter what. So don't let someone inject you with what they claim will evolve you. Yeah, exactly.

Just a note to people. No evolution potions. Yeah, yeah. So, so Caesar was a chimpanzee. Is it fair to say that chimpanzees are close, we are closer to chimpanzees than we are to any of the other apes. Is that correct? It's generally reckoned that chimpanzees and bonobos, which are two species of the same genus of ape, are our closest relatives.

Yes. They're our closest. So that means we have the most DNA in common with them, and you're up around 99% or so. That is true. Yeah, 99.7% by some counts. But that little bit of difference really has made an enormous difference. Well, so we say,

but if we were jellyfish looking at Bonobo chimps and humans, we would think that we were indistinguishable from one another. If you're a jellyfish. That's possible. Yeah, but jellyfish are idiots. Even a cat wouldn't think that

well this is true Bonobo would think very much the same thing he'd think so near but yet so far no you're saying it's so far because we're so close to it and you don't want to be thought of as that close to it so isn't that human hubris

that's saying this is human hubris to say that we're close to it. So isn't that human hubris that's saying this? It's human hubris to say that we're close to apes? No, it's human hubris to say that the... No, the human hubris is to say that little bit of difference is a big difference. Well, we're ones that are studying them and imitating them and not them that's studying us. Yeah. We can make bicycles and they can come nowhere near that.

There you go. High tech, high tech. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so now about tech, high tech. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now about motion capturing to become an ape. They have different body proportions, right? I mean, what's the most different thing physiologically about them?

In general, apes have longer arms and shorter legs than we do. And that's very hard for a modern actor, a human actor to imitate. Is that why they don't play soccer? It's why they don't play soccer very well. Yes. Right. I spoke too soon. Well, in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, there was sort of some messaging going on,

some of it a little heavy-handed, others a little more subtle. Let's get Andy Serkis' take on that. Let's find out. Now, in the very original Planet of the Apes, which I took the occasion to see again, it actually held up very well. A lot of movies from the 60s, they fail in some fundamental ways, being transported many decades later. But that one held up in some important ways, socially, culturally, intellectually. And of course, there was a lot of secondary level messaging that went on. When I first saw it, I was a kid.

I wasn't thinking the messaging. I was just thinking, that's a bad future. So could you comment on the messaging on Rise? I'm sorry, the current one. Dawn. Dawn, thank you. I mean, it's no mystery, really, that this franchise has endured. Because Pierre Boulot's book and then the films still live on in my memory and many people's memories, and people are huge fans of these movies because of that.

They are entertainment, yes, but they are so much more than that, and you can appreciate them on so many different levels. In Dawn, I really do believe that Matt Reeves has created a film for our times. It's very zeitgeist. The core of it is messaging is about empathy. It's about prejudice. It's about the necessity to take the harder, longer route of trying to find a peaceful solution to conflict and the ability to see the other side's point of view and not to have knee-jerk reactions which lead be more pertinent today. And because we can still see ourselves through the portal of these, you know, the apes, we can examine ourselves and have some clarity about ourselves.

I think it holds up as a great metaphor. Yeah, at the risk of stating the obvious, some of the best science fiction, again, in my lifetime, which goes back to the Star Trek series, the original for television, every episode had a certain morality to it. It wasn't just, you know, war in space. There was messaging, and sometimes it's easier or more potable to tell a story through that inverted lens than just to come right at you. And clearly that's the success that you're seeing right now. Exactly, and it belongs to a tradition. I mean, obviously it goes back to Grimm's fairy tales or Aesop's fables. So, Ian, do apes, do they wage war?

Do they kill each other? What do they do? Do they behave badly? Apes do a lot of stuff that humans do, including behaving badly. We're a kind of super apes. So if we dig down below the surface, we're going to find a lot of chimpanzee in us. And chimpanzees do organize aggression. We will get back to organized ape aggression when we return to StarTalk Radio, we're back.

We're on the web at startalkradio.net and startalktweets at startalkradio. Check us out there. You can also, of course, like us on Facebook. Where else? Where else can you like you other than on Fit in Real Life? No, no. Let's talk right here.

We're featuring my interview with Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films, the two recent films. I've got in studio an ape expert, Ian Tattersall. He's a colleague of mine, a paleontologist. Paleoanthropologist, I think is the full title. Ian, is that right? All the syllables, yeah. All the syllables. Paleoanthropologist. There you go.

All right. We're talking about apes behaving badly. And is there something that we do that apes don't do other than use our technology to kill one another? Well, you can make a long list. You know, apes don't hang glide. They don't wear lipstick. Yeah.

You know, there's a lot of stuff. But they would. They don't wear lipstick. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of stuff. But they would. If they wear lipstick, they just do it in moderation. So they don't look trashy. They could recognize, they can recognize themselves in mirrors. Do they steal? Oh, really? Mm-hmm.

Do they steal? Do they have other crimes? I mean, I know they murder and punch each other, but do they have other types of crimes? Wait, wait, they murder? Do they steal? Yeah, I mean, they will definitely mug each other in a sense. Really? So if that's what's sitting inside, they don't have a lot of personal possessions for each other to steal.

Give me your wallet. I don't have a wallet. They don't have a suitcase they tie up to bike racks or anything like that. The motivation for mugging is considerable. Do they have morality? Oh, good question. Do they have, you know, they have a sense of fairness. They do.

And primates in general seem to have a sense of fairness. They don't like it when somebody else is getting more than they are in a way that they consider unfair. So, yeah, there is this. Yeah, but they're not full-blown commies. They're very social, but they're not pinkos. No, no. Good. They're like, if you can get a nice car, that's fine.

Okay, so how about the expression of emotions? Love, hate, indifference, empathy. The big problem when we're using words like this is we're using what we ourselves experience as humans, and we overload these emotions, these basic emotions with all kinds of meanings. I'm sorry, I don't have any vocabulary to invoke here. Do they have 99.7% what we call love? They have attachment. They definitely have attachment.

They definitely have feelings of dislike. They have positive, negative feelings. Yeah, there's a lot of what we are in them. Does it manifest in their facial expressions to some extent yeah but humans are unique have uniquely mobile faces it may be that if we try to put human faces in motion capture we are over dramatizing what an ape might be let's find out what andy circus did with regard to facial muscle capture so So I just remember seeing some behind-the-scenes, the making of for earlier motion capture films.

How many points are on your body that are then captured and portrayed? Because it seems to me the more points on every little muscle tinge, the more accurate is the rendering. Well, the technology has evolved so much so in fact in king kong days i had 132 tiny little spherical three-dimensional markers stuck to to all over my face including my eyelids 132 on your face yeah on the face okay so no botox before then otherwise it's no no actors who have botox are not very good in performance capture it's it's a well-known fact you know because they're like that and they talk and nothing moves and they just do that.

So no, probably not the best career move if you've had a lot of Botox. Not saying it's impossible, would be very restrained performances. I mean this is 2014. Why don't they just do this with a continuous laser scan so that every millimeter of your face is known you know it is evolving constantly before facial performance capture is is totally evolving and the use of head mounted cameras for real high definition you know video reference with markers all over your face i mean that that's where it's at at the moment but i think there will be a you know a sort of a version without that where it's purely optical and we would have done away with all of that in the near future interesting okay so so ian i didn't know this you're saying humans are unique among in the animal kingdom for our facial expressions we have amazingly complex uh uh muscular arrangements in

our face allow us to chimp has the same muscles in the face. It doesn't have exactly the same muscles. It has the same basic muscle pattern, but it doesn't use those muscles in exactly the same way. And again, so you're going to get on a chimp in motion capture, that animates the chimp's expressions and emotions far more than an actual chimp would ever express. Certainly a lot more than we would ever recognize in the face of a chimpanzee. Do chimps recognize each other's facial expressions? Do they have the same range of sort of emotions and expressions, we just don't read them as well? Yeah, maybe they're more subtle. That may well be part of it.

But in fact, the range of emotions I think that we express with our faces is a lot more diverse than you find in chimpanzees. When we come back, more StarTalk Radio. We're back. So, Ian, we've got a follow-up question. We're talking about the emotions of chimps and other apes.

Do they wage organized war they certainly wage organized aggression whether war in all the implications that we place on it i don't know but it's certainly documented that sometimes bands of of males organize themselves go into the territories of other males with apparently the the the the ultimate aim of taking over those territories and do they ever then regroup and and attack again usually what happens is one uh one group is bigger than another group and that that group uh wins they have conflicts and and displaces the others is the conflict who who yells the loudest or do they draw blood they draw blood they uh they murder each other they there is some very grisly footage out there.

Do they use stones or sticks or they're just – No, they don't. They're not good at throwing things. But they can whack each other with sticks. Like that. They would be awesome pitchers in the major league. I can't wait to teach them how to use javelins. Let's get back to my interview with Andy Serkis who played Caesar in The Dawn and The Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

And I wanted to find out just more about him as an actor and what makes him tick. Let's find out. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm blowing smoke, but consider that your talent at this has its own force on the creativity of others who say, wow, look what is possible. I will now write a story that involves more of that. Because if you failed at this, if you were not an interesting character, people, it wouldn't draw the next generation of creative people to write or tell stories in that mode. So, I mean, you're really doing quite a service here for the industry.

Well, I mean, I can't possibly think in those kind of grand terms really um you know it is my passion and it is you know the imaginarium is an extension of that look here's the thing when i started acting i started in a theater that had quite a committed sort of social approach to what theater was and was lucky enough to work with the director who's who was quite a political in many ways in in that he saw the job of the actor as service and that you go out and you research and you build your characters and you come back and you perform in a play to affect an audience and to engage them and make them think and emotionally connect that you are lucky enough to be in a privileged position where you you know if you're taking the stage you better have something to say and you better have some have something important to

convey and i've always carried that with me. And it doesn't always work. And sometimes you're in terrible projects and sometimes you lose faith completely. But I think the ability to work in these kinds of movies, which are broad, huge, epic fantasies or such a big canvas, to be able to have that play through and actually connect with such a wide audience.

We are in very privileged positions, which is why I find it very annoying when, you know, big buster movies don't do anything more than just splurge and become eye candy. I think it's insulting. And I think one of the things that, like, for instance, Matt Reeves has done with this movie,

it's gone so far beyond. In saying to an audience, you can be entertained, but you can think and you can feel at the same time. That's, I suppose, going back to your point, I mean, that's the background for me. That's what was in my makeup that actually has led me down this path.

What is storytelling going to be? How will children in 10 years, 15, 20 years' time receive stories? I mean, is it interactive? Is it an emotionally engaging, interactive story? These are questions that are really interesting to me. And then I asked him, have any Academy Awards ever been given

for motion capture actors? I think the answer to that is no. And I wanted to know what his reaction to that fact would be. Let's find out. Will the day come where someone whose face you never see on the screen win an Academy Award for Best Actor? I don't know. That's a very, very hard question. Is the Academy ready for that? What's important about it is that the education of what this process is, performance capture technology, I think that needs to be understood and I think that is the perception has shifted and people are beginning to understand that it is an actor authoring the role on set with other actors and a director creating the scenes.

You don't push a button and a character comes out, it's entirely acted and the visual effects team and the processes that take on that and interpolate are equally as impressive and magnificent. And the artistry that goes into that is not to be underestimated, but they have visual effects. where you have a court or a team of animators, the actor is the guardian, the emotional guardian of the life and the soul of the character that they're playing. So that needs to be understood. And whether the final manifestation on screen is, you know, the actor is recognizable because... I don't think it should be, for instance, I don't think one should be discriminated against

because your face isn't on screen, because you're still giving as entire a performance. If you're going to portray other animals, obviously apes come really close to us, but there was the movie Bugs Life. And part of what made the insects charming was that they had human body gestures and things. Maybe that's what you need, right? If you were a perfect grasshopper, it wouldn't be an interesting character to portray.

So Ian, you studied chimps and apes and monkeys. Don't you have, isn't there like a monkey species named after you? No, there's a lemur species named for me, but not a monkey species. Oh, lemurs are not. Don't give up, Ian. There's an even more remote species. I'm working on it. I'm still working on it.

Lemurs aren't monkeys? Lemurs are not monkeys. Oh, sorry. Excuse me. Are monkeys apes? Apes are not monkeys. Oh, sorry. Excuse me. Are monkeys apes? Apes are not monkeys, and neither are lemurs. Ugh. No, I thought I understood.

And how about baboons? What are they? Baboons are monkeys, and we're all primates. But baboons don't have tails, though, right? Baboons have tails, and apes don't. Oh. Okay, so. And we don't have tails.

So we're apes? We don't have tails, and we're apes. Some humans are born with tails, vestigial tails, and they quickly snip it off. They're baboon humans. They prune them off quickly. Baboon humans. Right. We got to run.

That's this edition of Star Talk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Eugene, thanks for being on. Ian Tattersall, I want to have more of you in the future. Promise you'll come back? Absolutely. We have been brought to you in part by a grant from the Sloan Foundation. As always, this is Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking up.