Part one of the interview.
I guess the power of
Google! In the Fall of last year I was just sitting here working on
the film as usual, and an email came in that said it was from Bryan
Adams. I'm embarassed to admit how close I came to deleting it,
thinking it was fake. It said ''Hi Stephen. This is Bryan Adams. I
came across your footage. It's beautiful, and I would like to use it
in a music video that I am directing. '' It was signed Bryan Adams,
Singer/ Songwriter. I thought ''There's no way that's real'' and my
finger hovered above the Delete button. But luckily I decided to
check the domain and the IP address, and also his website. I'd been a
huge fan of his as a kid in the 80s but I had no idea what he was
doing today. He is actually a great photographer and has an extremely
keen sense of visual composition. I replied to the email, thinking it
had probably come from his assistant. He replied promptly and we
began having an exchange. Both him and LeVar Burton were everything
you would want them to be - super nice and super professional. Bryan
Adams shared the trailer to film on his social media accounts and
that helped us to get a little bit of a kick-off. He didn't send us
the song beforehand so I was nervous, not knowing how it was going to
turn out. But I loved the song, and what he did with the images in
the video was really cool.
It sounds like it has
been a real journey making this movie.
It has been! I didn't
wake up one morning thinking ''I'm going to make an IMAX film. '' In
fact, making it an IMAX film wasn't even my idea. That was due to a
chance meeting with someone called James Hyder, who wrote for LF
Examiner, which is the trade publication for the large format film
industry. I was just going to make a ten-minute film that would play
on the film festival circuit, but I had a chance meeting with him in
Las Vegas, of all places, and he said to me ''Most people who want to
make a film for the giant screen, I tell them not to. But you have to
make this film for the giant screen. '' I told him he was crazy
because it was too high resolution and I couldn't do it. But after
the long journey, here we are.
 | |
| van Vuuren editing the film |
I think the thing I
have learned the most is that, as I read or heard somewhere, ''Do
what you love. '' If you do that, it will resonate with other people.
When I released the first clip from the film, of the one minute
fly-by of Saturn set to Adagio for Strings, it sat up on Vimeo for
nearly a year with only a hundred or so views, mostly from my family
and friends. People would say ''Adagio for Strings is not a good
choice. It's been used in other movies'' or ''You should use CGI.
It's sexier. '' I remember thinking ''Alright, I'm the only person
that thinks this is interesting. '' I seriously considered moving on
to something else. But then it went viral and everything changed.
After that I met a lot of volunteers who also thought it was fun to
create something beautiful that you could share with other people.
What kind of reaction
would you like to get from audiences as they leave the theater?
I hope people have a
variety of reactions. I would certainly hope that if people were
leaving the theater at night, the film would make them look up to the
sky. And that that would lead them where they may – perhaps to
realising how disconnected we have become from our universe. I tried
to provoke that response through not only the narration but also the
camera motion which went forward and upward. Part of the design was
to get people moving up and out, rather than down and in. That's why
I decided to do that time lapse of people with their phones, because
when you look at people when you're travelling you see so many people
looking down and hunched in with their phones or devices. The irony
of course is that without the Internet, this film would have been
impossible!
I was flying back from
the LeVar Burton recording sessions and there was a person next to me
watching DUNKIRK (2017) on her iPhone. I was glad she was watching a great
film, but as David Lynch would say, ''You think you've seen it, but
you haven't seen it!'' And this was the passion to make IN SATURN'S
RINGS. People have seen photographs of Saturn's Rings, but when you
are experiencing it on a giant screen, you will see them very
differently.
10 years from now,
where would you like the US to be in the field of space exploration?
Cassini was what is
known as a flagship mission to the other planets, and there are
currently no flagship missions that are funded and are going to
happen. But in ten years time I would like something to change so
that we have flagship missions to every planet. That would be my
dream. I think our chances of finding something to change human
history would be pretty good. JPL let me have the great privilege of
winessing Cassini's grand finale, and I had the opportunity to talk
to exobiologists and people who have seen and dealt with the deepest
research. I asked them straight out ''What do you think are the
chances that we will discover some kind of other life form?'' With
what they are seeing from the chemistry and composition and comparing
it to places where they have found life in harsh conditions here on
Earth, they all responded with ''We have a pretty good chance. '' It
would be my dream to have the question about the existence of other
life forms answered.
I would love for
everybody to find more purpose in space exploration. This is how
humanity rose and became civilised – through exploration and
discovery. We have stalled. The iPhone is an incredible invention but
if that same level of invention was applied to exploration and
discovery, I think we would be much farther than we are today. It
shouldn't be about ''What should we invent next?'' but ''Where are we
going to go next?'' Exploring and discovering is the core of our
nature. And also, we have billions of people on the planet and all
these diminishing resources and this is what should motivate us, like
it has done in the past, to move on to new places. It's the ultimate
answer to poverty and starvation. Enough people, like Elon Musk and
Jeff Besos, believe in exploration that perhaps in twenty years or so
they will finance their own space missions if the government can't or
won't.
How can people see the
movie?
Most of the large
format theaters are privately owned, and they show the same movie for
two or three months at a time, so IN SATURN'S RINGS will have a slow
rollout, theater by theater. The distributor has to approach each
theater and negotiate the run one at a time. It's a different and
strange industry compared to regular theaters. The Full Dome version
of the film, which is made for Dome theaters and has a screen that
goes 360 or 180 degrees over, will start rolling out later this year
or early next year. There is a two or three year window where the
film will slowly make the rounds theatrically, and about a year from
now there will be a Blu-ray and a 4K Blu-ray, and maybe even 8K
streaming. People can check venues and dates where it will be playing
at the website for the film.
The website for IN SATURN'S RINGS where details about the film and the screening dates and venues can be found.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2018. All rights reserved.
The website for IN SATURN'S RINGS where details about the film and the screening dates and venues can be found.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2018. All rights reserved.
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