The Supermassive Podcast - Black holes in the lab and meeting Ryan Gosling

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

It’s a massive bonus episode this month with both listener questions and an extended interview with the producer/directors of the new Ryan Gosling film: Project Hail Mary. Dr Becky and Dr Robert are joined by editor Richard to tackle questions on creating a black hole in the lab, how long a planet lasts and the size of the biggest black hole. Guest reporter, Sue Nelson, chats to Phil Lord and Chris Miller about Project Hail Mary and Becky reveals what she chatted about with Ryan Gosling.  Join The Supermassive Club for ad-free listening, forum access, and extra content from the team. And email your questions to [e-mail] or follow us on Instagram, @SupermassivePod. The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smeatherst, the Society's deputy director, Dr Robert Massey, and for one week only because he is years away, our editor, science journalist Richard Hollingham. Hello. Hello. I know, it's very exciting. This is a special bonus episode. Yes, we will be answering your questions, but there's something else. Now, you all know how much we loved Andy Weir's novel Project Hail Mary. I raved about it so many times on this podcast.

It has now been turned into a film. It's out now and we have an interview with the films, producers and directors. Yeah. And I also met Ryan Gosling. Yeah, well, we'll be talking about that later. Because I asked to meet Ryan Gosley and I was rejected. So you got it. I really want to hear about this.

Yeah, he was lovely. Well, I would hope so. Also, rather appropriately, we've had a message from a space-loving musician, and it reads, My name is Logan, part of the Denver band Moonshake, Love the Podcast. I mean, that's all you have to say. If you want to get on the podcast, just say, love the podcast. Thank you. I recently composed this piece, Solar Drone for an art show, and thought you'd be interested in hearing it.

It's a 30-minute, 11% scale, audio journey of a photon from the star. sun through our solar system where each planet is represented by a new note droning in the void. Yeah. So here's a section of it. This is actually the part. I actually took this from the part near Saturn for you, Becky. For thinking of me.

There's quite a lot of that. It's 30 minutes. Yeah, it's very eerie. It is. You have to kind of zone out listening to it, I think. I wonder if it'd be good work music. It's one of those things where it's that, you know, those like binoral beats things that YouTube, I don't know if anybody else gets pushed that by YouTube, but I do.

I thought it's like these like, you know, audio tones. It's almost kind of like that. But also, I feel like I made a really suspenseful moment in like a movie soundtrack as well. Something dramatic's about to happen. I think it's Uranus comes along next, so that's the dramatic thing. The track is free to listen to and download at Your Leisure. And he's even included, I won't read them out, he's included all the calculations he used to determine the time and frequency scale for each celestial body.

I mean, it's cool. That's so cool, love. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Logo. And he also signs off Celestially Logan. I like that.

I might steal that. It's very good. I'm thinking, yeah. I'm thinking you go in a planetarium, Richard, actually. You know, that's the kind of thing. You can imagine a show. That would be the sort of backdrop that would work there.

Or, like, you know, one of those, like, to scale walks that you do where, like, you know, it's like it's over, you know, five kilometers, and every so often there's a planet display. There's this one in York. You know, I think. Yeah, exactly. That would be really really.

fun. Okay. Questions, Becky. Now, what are the leading theories to how T-O-N-618 formed? Oh, I love T-O-N-6-1-8. Who asked this question? This is, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You ask the question. I'll try and work it out in the meantime who that came from. Oh, I love this question so much because I love T-O-N-6-1-8. It's one of my favorite

things to talk about. So, T-O-N-6-1-8. is the most massive supermassive black hole that we know of, right? With estimates ranging from somewhere between 40 to 60 billion times heavier than the sun, which I will get to why that is so insane in a second. But it was first spotted back in 1957 as a bright point of light that was known back then as a quasar. So that was a portmanteau of quasi-stellar object to get quasar. Essentially, it looked like a star, but we knew it wasn't a star, but we weren't really sure what it was at the time.

They weren't really appreciated for what they were, and it was only after a few sort of more decades of research that we now know that they are, quasars are powered by essentially matter, material, falling towards a supermassive black hole, what we call like accretion, basically the black hole is growing. So T-O-N-618 is around 11 billion light years away from us. So we're seeing it as it was when the universe was just under 3 billion years old.

And yet, despite having only... three billion years that means to grow that big it is the most massive supermassive black hole that we know of and i just want to get across how crazy that is because if we compare that to say the milky way's supermassive black hole that it's it at the center of our galaxy that's four million times heavier than the sun and that's had a full 13.8 billion years to grow that big t-0-618 is 10,000 times heavier than that that's four orders of magnitude right it's ridiculous like the top end of that range of estimates it's 60 billion times heavy than the sun would mean it would be heavier than all the stars in the Milky Way put together. It's just impossible to get your head around. Right, exactly.

And also the radius of its event horizon, right, the point of no return, the thing that we define as the Black Hole would be about 1,300 times the Earth to Sun distance, which is 40 times the sun to Neptune distance. So the solar system would just comfortably fit inside this thing. which I'm comfortably out imagined so what all of those things mean is that most people are like

is this even a super massive black hole I feel like we need an entire new category it's an ultra massive black hole right so how something like this formed is a big question because we think that the most massive supermassive black holes

got that way through many mergers of galaxies so collisions and mergers of galaxies that like take the beautiful discy spiral structure that we love and just sort of scramble it all up and make a big blob at the end. And yes, the two central supermassive black holes of the galaxies merge together, but also all that scrambling that happens in the merger means that the gas in the galaxy falls

towards the centre and can grow the black hole. And that's what seems to make the most massive, most luminous black holes. But getting to, you know, 40 billion times the mass the sun in three billion years is the big question of how it did that. Was there physically enough time for that many mergers, but not just that was the universe dense enough to have galaxies close enough together to give you that many mergers for that to actually happen. And so one of the big things that T-O-N-6-18 has been used for is evidence towards what's called direct collapse black holes. So the only way that we actually know of,

that we have observational evidence for forming a black hole, is like if you form a star and then it goes supernova because it runs out of fuel and then it dies and it collapses down into a black hole of like 10 times heavier than the sun, right? three billion years you just don't have enough time to build something from 10 times heavier than the sun up to 40 billion times heavier from the sun you just can't so one idea instead is you skip forming stars and supernova and you just take a big gas cloud in the early universe and you directly collapse it down into a black hole just skip all the star part and if you do that you can maybe end up with a black hole that's like 10,000 times heavier than the sun so you get a basically little bit of a head start on the growth but that's

still an unproven idea but it's one that the james space telescope is actively working on not the telescope itself, but the people using the telescope are actively working on it. You said it just collapses. How might that happen? Yeah, okay. So you have a big cloud of gas. And usually what happens as a gas cloud cools, so particles collide and they can radiate their energy away as infrared light, then they can cool enough so that gravity clumps them together. And that happens where it sort of fragments in the gas cloud. So it happens in lots of places at once. instead of everything all being drawn towards the centre,

which is why you end up with stars usually forming because that's why it happens in clumps, right? But if you can stop the gas from cooling so that gravity can take an effect, then you can sort of prevent the fragmentation and prevent the stars from collapsing down. So if you can sort of keep it hot until a point that there becomes so much gas in that area of space,

then the thought is you can get a direct collapse black hole. So if you have something nearby, like a big burst of star formation in another gas cloud that can just keep throwing UV light on its neighbouring gas cloud that stops it cooling, then maybe that's how it happens. That's incredible. I've never heard of a direct collapse black hole. DCBHs. Oh, that's a common acronym in my sphere of...

We should do a whole episode on that. In answer to your question about where that question came from, the editorial process has failed, so I can't tell you. I'm pretty sure it came from Instagram. Thank you to whoever said in that question. Thank you very much. A question for you, Robert. Anna Binta asks,

how can we predict the lifespan of a planet? Yeah, thanks, Anna Binta. And that really is very intimately connected with the kind of star it's orbiting and how you define lifespan. So, or whether the planet's not orbiting a star as well if we think of rogue ones. So if we take the Earth,

then it formed within 20 million years of the Sun. So pretty early on, as we think did the other planets. and it will continue to exist until the sun enters the red giant phase and the most the reading around I've done around this suggests maybe seven and a half billion years times a long time Mars though a bit further out will probably avoid that so we'll carry in and certainly the gas giants will and the planets further out in the solar system but the thing the caveat on that I think and then thinking about planets elsewhere is that they all change as the sun evolves and its heat output rises so the earth is going to lose its oceans in a couple of million a billion years time I should say and then you're not really really going to see life sticking around. So it looked like a very, very different planet.

And there are also ideas that you might get in a thicker atmosphere at some point, a runaway greenhouse effect. You might even get something very extreme where the surface melts and so on. So that could be seen as kind of an end of some kind. But of course, the planet will still be there. You'll still have the rocky planet, even if it's got the modern surface. Now, I guess though, you know, we can say the final end for the Earth will be being absorbed by the sun. But if an Earth-like planet forms around a much cooler star, like a red dwarf, then it could be around for many, many times, that hundreds of billion years, because those cooler stars just have such long lives. You might see, though, that things like any

volcanic activity inside shuts down, you know, the core goes solid after a period of time, and the magnetic field might go, and then so might the atmosphere too. So again, it really depends on how you define lifespan. You know, if you want it as a planet that's got life on it or just something else, just the rock or gas giant that's sitting there. And then conversely, you can also see very hot stars, massive stars, where they have very short lifetimes and any planets that form, and they probably form quite quickly,

but they might, you know, they're going to die if their star becomes a supernovae of the stellar mass type that Becky was talking about, then that planet's not going to unlikely to survive, or it's going to get thrown out into the galaxy, which is another possibility. So the final thought on it is if you have, if you have sort of systems around long enough,

then very occasionally stars come reasonably close to each other, They're not dramatically close on the whole, but reasonably close. And then you might see some planets subjected from those systems, and then they would become rogue planets sticking around presumably for a very, very long time. And we did actually, thank you, Robert. We did actually do an episode on the end of the world, which was the January 2024 episode, Happy New Year. Go back.

Cheery stuff there again, Richard. Yeah, so you can go back and listen to that again. Becky, Carolina wants to know. I love this question. Even if not safe in inverted commas, could we make primordial black holes in a lab for testing? Oh, good question, Carolina. Okay.

First of all, primordial black holes. What's primordial black hole? It's a tiny black hole that forms in the early, aka primordial universe. They are hypothetical. We don't know if black holes that tiny actually form. I'm talking like, you know, less than the mass of Earth.

down to like grams, black holes. That's the kind of range we're talking about. They are predicted by theory in terms of the matter is dense enough than we think they should form, but we've no observational evidence for them. Like we've never found black holes that tiny. There's a couple of different things that we go, maybe that's what it could be, but it's not direct evidence that we've ever seen. So in answer to your question, Caroline, no, we do not have the technology to do that.

The Large Hadron Collider, you know, the big giant circular tunnel under Geneva and France in Switzerland. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. That gets up to incredibly high energies. They were nodding, by the way. Like Robert and Richard were both nodding at that point. I feel like I was talking to myself, but they were nodding. I was like, guys, this is a podcast, not video. Could you, yeah?

Could you give me something? It needs of affirmation. We know. We believe you. Yeah. So the Large Hadron Collider, like that. is probably the most high energy thing we have here on Earth, right? But that still doesn't have enough energy to compress matter to the densities that you would

need to make a black hole. You would need like billions of times more energy than you can actually get with the Large Chadron Collider at CERN. So we don't have the technology. But I think it is worth saying that if you could do this, it would be safe. So I think we should. I think there are people who are actually working on trying to do this as well. I'm trying to convince you why it is safe.

So like if you could make a black hole in a lab, let's say, Half a kilogram, 500 grams, right? It would have an event horizon, one trillion times smaller than a proton. So that is, it's like sphere of influence, the point of no return, right? Nothing is in danger from a black call you've got to remember unless it gets too close. That would have a tiny gravitational pull. It would have the same gravitational pull as, you know, half a bag of sugar. So you don't have a pull towards it.

So nothing's going to get pulled towards it. It's so tiny that, you know, the cross section of anything that's going to interact with it is also sort of negligible as well. So that's one thing, but then also it would evaporate away very, very quickly due to what's called Hawking radiation, which is the whole other thing that's predicted but not proven theory. So, but we think it would evaporate away. Essentially that says thanks to quantum effects, a black hole can actually radiate away its mass

as energy. So, you know, the whole E equals MC squared, energy and mass the same thing. Somehow Hawking was like, black holes can do this, trust me. I need a little lecture course to fully explain hawking radiation, if you will. I do try in my book. That's a nice little plug there. But this happens, like hawking radiation happens so solely for massive black holes that it's a completely negligible effect, right?

Supermassive black holes aren't going anywhere. But for a tiny black hole that's not that massive, let's take our 500 gram black hole again. It would take just 10 million billionths of a second for it to evaporate again after it had formed. So you could definitely try and make a black coil in a lab, but you better be doing your experiments on it quick because it's sort of sticking around.

Do you remember, Becky? I don't know if you remember it. In 2008, there was a lawsuit by a Hawaiian who suggested that when the LHC was switched on, it was going to make a black hole that was going to swallow the earth. And it was dismissed. I think the judges were arguing, well, unfortunately, it was a European project

so they didn't, the Americans didn't have jurisdiction over it. They didn't actually contest the science, but they did get lots of people talking about it. I love how that's how US law got around that, and they were like, whin, they're not out of thing. Can't do anything. There's, I mean, there's so much science fiction with this idea in it, but some crazy scientist is going to create in a lab a black hole.

And I can see the visuals now. I can see your lab being sucked into this, you know, bag of sugar-sized experiments. So you can reassure us that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. we don't have the tech to do it. There are people who are like, it would be great if we could make a black hole in the lab

because then we can test like quantum effects and things to do with relativity, blah, blah, blah, blah. They are sadly disappointed at every turn, I think, because it's proving obviously very difficult in terms of energies. And like I said, how would you even observe something like that when it's that small, you know? And it's, yeah, I don't think it's really that feasible.

Just to remind people that, you know, if you took the earth and could squash it down into a black collar, it would make a black collar the size of a tennis ball. So you need to be. a lot of, you need a lot of material to get anything that, you know, you could actually see and observe. Becky, thank you very much. We'll be back with our Project Hail Mary interview in just a moment. Okay, so Project Hail Mary, it's the latest story from Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. We were obsessed with the book and the audiobook. So you can imagine our

excitement when it was announced that Project Hail Mary was being turned into a film. And I've got the blurb here. And I don't think, Ben, Becky, this gives too much why. Because it did, it annoyed me in the trailer. Trailer annoyed me. The trailer annoyed me. Having read the book. I was like, no.

I went into the book knowing absolutely nothing. I hadn't even read the blurb of the book. And it was the best thing. But how do you advertise a film without telling people what it's about, right? So I get it. I get it. But still. Let me read.

So if you're not familiar with it, and I would imagine most supermassive podcast listeners are familiar. But let me read the blurb. Science teacher, Ryland Grace, Ryan Gosling, wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission, solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth for extinction.

But an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone. That's not bad, actually. That's not bad, actually. That doesn't sort of be entirely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's okay, that's okay, yeah. The film is out now, and a science journalist and co-host of the Space Boffins podcast, Sue Nelson, went along to see it for the Supermassive podcast, and afterwards met the producers and directors of the film. My name is Phil Lord.

You sure about that? And my title, I was trying to think of my title. Yeah. We don't do those in the United States. I mean, or a director of the movie. And I am Chris Miller, and I also am titleless other than. Yeah, director-producer, movie. Excellent, right.

You're a little quieter. I'm a little quieter. I'm very loud. I come from... You like me, then. The islands. Okay, okay, okay. We know Andy Wears, The Martian, was a huge success.

Yes, of course. Did that have an influence on this novel, or was it something that you had to read first before you thought, yeah, I love it? Gosh, we've known Andy for a really long time. Our producing partner, Adithia, sued, actually discovered Andy when he was a self-published novelist and helped turn the Martian into a film. So, and we have a lot of projects with Andy. So when he had a new manuscript to read and Ryan sent it to us, we were like, oh, yes, we were familiar with Andy's work.

We were very excited to read it and said yes right away. And you two have both got a bit of a geeky past, really, haven't you? because I saw something to do comic books and stuff. Oh, yeah, we're... I don't know what you're talking about. Super popular. I was just throwing touchdowns and scoring goals. Yeah, very popular in high school,

and please do not research. Yeah, don't ask anyone. I collected comics. I rode my bike to the comic book shop every single Thursday, I think, to pick up new books. Which ones, Marvel? I was mostly Marvel, but I was really into the, DC reboot of the shadow.

And I liked like really niche DC books. Amazing. And I was a real math and science nerd and I was a crossroads in my life where I was going to decide, am I going to be the like artsy creative science person or I'm going to be the nerdiest creative

person? And I decided option two. That was what I was going to do. Now you've worked together on quite a number of films. How does that work in terms of do you have shorthand? Because you both went to the same college together. That's right. Yeah, we met freshman week when we were 18 years old. And we, you know, we try to, we try to support one another's whims as much as we can. You know,

we agree 95% of the time on most things because our brains have fused. It evolves together in a symbiotic relationship. Exactly. So is this sort of, you know, a Ben Affleck, Matt Damon kind of thing? I mean... You'd have to ask them. But I'd say that, you know, we have a lot of the same interests, but we try to also embrace our complementary interests so that we're not just like the middle sliver of a Venn diagram, but rather try to encompass both circles.

Yeah. Now, you've worked on films that obviously involve, I'll say, real people. And I'm sure there's another more technical phrase. Live action. I knew there was a phrase I was grappling. for that. Live action and animated. Yeah, and animated with the Lego movie,

which, you know, so many people will be huge fans of that. This film's quite interesting because it's mostly live action, although a lot of the action is very personal and one person on screen on the time. But there is a sort of, would you call it animation? Yeah, of course. It's half animated. Ah, right. So Rocky, the Alien in the movie, was a practical creature that was puppeteered by a team of five people.

people on set so that Ryan Gosling had a scene partner to interact with. And then in the end, it ended up being a marriage of animation and puppetry, about 50-50 in the movie. And you can't tell which parts are real and which parts have been animated. But there's a massive contribution by the animation team. And a lot of Rocky's personality and your favorite moments were generated by that team. And, you know, we knew going in that the puppetry was going to only be the first. step.

All right. And was that sort of very different process to say the Lego movie then when you're compiling the two? Well, yes and no. Because, you know, the Lego movie has, although the entire film is animated in CGI, there was an aesthetic, which was we wanted it to feel like a stop motion film made in the basement of the richest child on planet Earth with the most Lego bricks and infinite time.

So the restrictions of, you can't see, because on the radio I'm making, I'm indicating a very small mini-fig in my fingers here. The restrictions of the Lego were something we wanted to embrace. And we basically made a rule for the animators and in fact brought on many stop motion animators onto that CGI team in order to recreate that, that the physical limitations. You can't bend the plastic. That becomes something that inspires the movie. So on set, we had a practical puppet.

It was a rod puppet, and he has his limitations. His arms can't crash into his body, and his joints only move so far, and that created a lot of character. And so the digital animators used that as a springboard. Right. And in terms of character, Ryan Gosling-Claze is sort of every man, really, the person who you'd least expect to be in spray. Like a heroic astronaut, like, you know, so he's a character who starts out full of fears and vulnerabilities.

He wakes up on the spaceship. He doesn't know why he's there. He's not an expert. He's bad at space. Once we get to microgravity, he is clumsy and he balks into things. And we had, you know, we had a lot of consultants from NASA and other scientists. I mean, Andy, we are on set all the time. But especially the NASA people are like, oh, yeah, your first time you're in microgravity, it's you just bonk into every.

You can't understand how it works in your body just can't get used to it for the first few days. And a lot of astronauts get space sick. Oh, very, yeah. They don't advertise this. They don't want to admit it, do they? But they all, they're like, oh, you're vomiting for days. And then it's not pretty. That's not the video that NASA releases.

The vomit is floating in space right in front of your face. That's not going to get you more funding. It's true. But, and so we wanted to be true to that. Like we had, like, one of the first times we shot Ryan in microgravity, he was, like, smashing into everything. We set up this thing for him to like balk over here, hit over there, spin around. So did you use a vomit comet for some of those? We did not. No. We had a specialty.

But it was incredibly impractical. You only get like five seconds at a time. So we did some good old-fashioned wires. But we used a spin ring thing that allowed him to like twist his body in whatever way he wanted to and sort of air parkour. And when we did the first take, we went over to Chelle Lingren, who was on set with us. And we were like, huh? And he goes like, that's exactly. exactly what it's like.

So we're like, oh, we did it. Now, you've obviously used advisors from NASA to make the spacecraft as realistic as possible, and it does look like a sort of souped-up space station. AIS, sort of. But a bit more home comforts. Exactly. Yeah, so Charlie Wood is our production designer on the film,

and he put his entire self into making that ship very credible and inspired by real things. One of the things we insisted on is space is messy. The guts of the ship are on the outside in case you have to fix them. We didn't want this film to ever feel slick. We always said it wasn't a Mac. It's a PC. Right?

And that space is messy. There's wires everywhere. And on top of that, Ryan's character is messy. And there's no one around. So we can just kind of throw his garbage over his shoulder. and not worry about it. It was just like my teenage bedroom, basically. Yeah, and my adult bedroom.

I wasn't going to confess to that. And in terms of the alien spacecraft, that was a very beautiful visual representation. How much of that was direct from the book and how much did you sort of bring to it? What was taken from the book was the concept that there was this very strong metal, xenonite that was, you know, that's normally a gas, but Ken was in metallic form that

could withstand a lot of pressure, which meant that it could be corners, which are generally not something you want to have a lot of on spacecraft, which is why all our earth metal spacecraft are big tubes. But we thought, oh, the opportunity of that material is that our spaceship can have corners, and in fact, it can not be driven by aerodynamics. Right. And so one of the... Then we started asking, well, what would a creature from another planet's aesthetic be?

Right. And so to answer that, we asked, well, what are the aesthetics of, like, animals on Earth? And one of my favorite most creative animals are birds because they make nests and they grab stuff out of the garbage and decorate them. And so we thought, well, maybe it's a giant bird's nest. Right. And because there's so much density in the atmosphere of Rocky's home planet, the idea was that they essentially. assembled this spaceship up in the upper atmosphere with the space elevator. And so it didn't have to like blast off to get there.

And so it was able to have all these like metal sticks that we thought might be used for navigation because they're blind also. So we like there's a lot of thought behind it, but it ended up being something that was really beautiful and unlike anything you'd ever see. Yeah. No, I was rather impressed by that. As a big sci-fi fan, I was rather impressed by the team. It's hard to make a spaceship.

Yeah. That feels new. So this sort of touches all the basis in terms of your interest, doesn't it? In terms of it's got that mix of science and practicality that Andy Weir brings to it as a former engineer himself, along with the imagination. So which of the parts of the film for you, without giving away any spoilers of people who have yet to see it and maybe haven't read the book, were the bits that you enjoyed working on the most or that you think has come out like, yeah, I love that bit. Well, what I love about Andy's work and the interpretation of it by Drew Goddard, who wrote the screenplay, is just the way that the laws of physics are so inspire the imagination. And so we tried to make sure that the film never shortchanged those rules and didn't bend them.

rather use them as a launching point for what is spectacular. So, you know, in addition to all the fun we had making a centrifuge to create gravity on the ship and the fun we had on set creating a light rig to spin around the set as if the sun was moving around it, right? All of those visual opportunities, I'd say one of my favorite things is the astrophage sequence in which Ryan's character imagines the infrared light that is actually, you know, igniting all around him. And the way that you make a regular film camera into an infrared camera is you remove a filter that filters out the infrared light. We remove the filter and then created a lot of infrared lighting rigs around Ryan with good old-fashioned chicken wire.

and to the naked eye, it didn't look like anything, but on the monitor, because we removed the thing that was blocking the infrared light, suddenly you could make the invisible visible, and there's all these sparkling, beautiful pink lights all around him and reflecting in his eyes, and it was just so gorgeous that it felt like using science to make your imagination bigger.

And you? I mean, and with all the awe and wonder and spectacle of the movie, for me, some of my favorite moments are these little intimate scenes, you know, scenes between Ryan Gosling and Sandra Huller, scenes between Ryan and Rocky, these

are like emotional scenes when, you know, I don't want to give away some of these plot points, but there's these very sweet emotional beats that are just two people in a room talking, and there's some of the most powerful scenes of the movie. And I think that this speaks to, like, the thing we set out to do

with the movie and that drew set out to do in the screenplay which is it is a story about saving the galaxy by making a friend so that you're doing all these epic things you have all these epic visuals and the plot comes down to

can an adult man make a new friend if the universe depends upon it and do you believe that there's life out there it stands to reason it's pretty vast out there.

You would imagine it's got to be somewhere. Would it be like Rocky or do you prefer something? What I like about Rocky is that it's not like, you know, just like a person with blue makeup with the dots on their forehead. It's a totally different. It's a totally different type of species and it doesn't breathe the same air as us and it doesn't have eyes or a mouth. And so we're having those limitations where you're like, oh, it's not just convenient

that they can breathe our air. Like we have to. It's not humanoid. Right. Exactly. I think you'd be more likely to find like, Coral. And on that note, thank you both very much indeed. Thank you.

That's Phil Lord and Chris Miller talking to Sue Nelson, who very kindly stepped in as supermassive reporter. I should say, Sue Nelson is also my wife, so I have to be very good. She was a fantastic interview. I love it. They were great. And they said it was so fun at the end of it as well. I also interviewed them and they were such. lovely guys who you could tell, just loved the science aspects of it, loved the challenge of how you translate this to the screen and how you do it visually. Like I said to them, like, you know, my job is a science communicator and they became science communicators with this film, right? And that's the thing about the Andy Weir books, isn't it? And, you know, they're so rooted in

science. What did you think of the film then? I loved it. I loved it. I mean, I loved the book. And the reason I love the book is because there's so much just like back of the end. science calculations in it, you know, that you sort of get talked through by the character. And it's just so much fun in that respect. If you love science, obviously that doesn't, it doesn't translate to film. It was the same with The Martian, right? There was a little bit of that in there, but a lot of it gets cut because, or a lot of it gets just shown visually. You don't fear the inner monologue of the character, right?

Because you're not reading a book. No, it would have been quite tedious, wouldn't it? Well, yeah, exactly. So, like, after I got over that bit that I was sad about because I'm like, I like this. science and then I realized, oh, okay, they can't do that. I just sat back and was just like, wow. Like the visuals, the cinematography, obviously the heart of the story with the character and everything, I won't say anymore, but like all of that is if you love the order book for that, like, oh, the book when you read it, like that is all there. And I think that is what is the key

heart of the story. What's really interesting, I think is I'm very into like all of the cinema nerd content online and I'm like, yeah, tell me what's going on. And a lot of people have been saying, you know, is the art of movie making dying because everything is filmed in front of a green screen. So all of the lighting decisions like don't get made until post and it's just done in the edit to decide where a light goes and how someone is lit.

But in front of the green screen, everybody's perfectly lit, you know? And so it makes films look really oddly flat and people don't understand why. But with this film, what I loved was, you know, it's a spoiler to say, you know, he's on a spacecraft, he waits on a spacecraft,

and it has, you know, a centrifuge mode so he has gravity, which is great for the character in the film but also for the filmmakers. So what it means is that it's spinning. And so the starlight that's coming in is, you know, appearing to be constantly moving around the spacecraft. And they actually built like a massive lighting rig to do that. So that, you know, as you're watching it,

he's constantly going in light and shadow and it makes it so real. And I think that's what I loved about it was just how immersive it was for that. And I just, I came out of the cinema with a massive. a smile on my face. I thought it was the most joyful film. I've seen ages. So many sci-fi films are so serious. You know, like, interstellar it was so serious. I'm just like, where is the joy? You know, this film had so much joy. It's just the joy of size. I mean, gravity is the funniest one for the seriousness. Oh, yeah. You know, and even when she lands, I mean, I think everyone's seen it by now, she lands on Earth at the end of it. There's like a frog. Expect the fork to like leap up and eat her or

something because everything's gone wrong all the way through the film. And they destroyed the Hubble Space Telescope in the first five minutes of the fantasy. I'm not happy with that book. Not forgiven them for that. Now, Izzy wrote the original running order for this recording, and she says at this point, scream chit-chat about meeting Ryan Gosling. Robert, would you like to scream about the fact that Becky met Ryan Gosling?

I can't say a word. I can't do the fan girl thing. I didn't meet the guy. Although I do know someone who apparently had Ryan, well, a friend, the friend who Ryan Gosling apparently gave a helping hand to when she fell over the street. York. Oh, that's what you'd hope?

So what was Ryan Goslin like then? He was so lovely. I sent a picture of me and him to friends and family and they were all like, did you go to a Madam Two Swords? What? He looks like a waxwork. And I was like, no, he's just that perfect looking in real life. I can't.

He's real. It was a live photo. Watch. He moves his eyebrows. Like, and he was just so, so lovely. And you could tell like he was, he was, you know, a big space and like science fan. He says like he just doesn't have the bro. to retain any of the information, but it's why he keeps making, like, science and sci-fi films.

Like, you remember he played Neil Armstrong in the, the, I can't remember what the film was called. Yeah, I can't remember either, but he was very good. Yeah, he played in the alarm story. So, again, it's just, he's like, it's why I keep making these films because I absolutely love it. So it was fun to sort of talk to someone, like, you know, that massive, who, who still has this appreciation for, you know, all the things that we love as well. And you can see it come out in the film, right? I think everyone who worked on the film seemed to have an amazing time doing it.

it. So yeah, it was really fun. And I got to ask him to explain time dilation to me. And he was like, no. Does he ooze charisma? As you imagine, he does. Of course he does. And I was like sat there going, like, my inner monologue was just, ah! To next time. So yeah, the scream, chit-chat thing from Izzy was good. Okay. Sorry we can't oblige. Please do send your questions to podcasts. at rass.ac.ac.uk. We could do with a few more, actually. We love reading them. And if you do say, as Logan did, what do they say? He said,

Celestially. Logan said, love the podcast and Celestially. So anything along those lines would be absolutely fantastic. Yeah, we do love reading them. You can find us on Instagram or at Supermassive pod or you can post on the Supermassive Club's forum. Tell us that you love the podcast. We love hearing it. We'll be back in a few weeks time. Until next time, everybody, happy stargazing.