Until this interview, which occurred the morning of May 20, Neil deGrasse Tyson didn't know the title of his Monday-night appearance at the Winspear Opera House: "The Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies." The man who has become The Country's Most Beloved Science Teacher offers the venue in which he is scheduled to appear a list of eight to 12 topics in which he has expertise - "just the universe," he says, not at all facetiously. Then, they pick one.
In this case, the AT&T Performing Arts Center went with the popular choice. The event sold out faster than the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel Run.
"It's a very personal tour," says Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, host of FOX's Cosmos and the man who got Jon Stewart's audience to put down the bong and pick up a book. "It's about what movies look like to me -- the stuff I notice maybe you didn't notice. I highlight the science the movies got right, the science they attempted and got wrong, and the science they don't care about at all. For me it's a fun intersection of science and culture, and if there's any measure of culture, it's what movies are doing and what topics pique people's interest."
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Tyson's turn as film critic began, for most, when he turned to Twitter to fact-check Gravity on October 6, 2013. Some of his tweets were snarky: "Mysteries of #Gravity: Why anyone is impressed with a zero-G film 45 years after being impressed with 2001:A Space Odyssey." Others, insightful: "Mysteries of #Gravity: How Hubble (350mi up) ISS (230mi up) & a Chinese Space Station are all in sight lines of one another." Others still, dismissive: "Mysteries of #Gravity: Why we enjoy a SciFi film set in make-believe space more than we enjoy actual people set in real space."
He would later tweet that he "enjoyed" the film "very much." But for a moment, he became the most talked-about film critic - the scientist with the itchy thumbs-down.
"I didn't know they'd be picked up the morning news, by the evening news, by Saturday Night Live," he says. "My first thought was, 'There's an interest about how science is portrayed in movies. I mean, if no one cared, no one would be retweeting those tweets and they wouldn't show up in the blogosphere and in the news. People really cared -- and not just some small subset of my Twitter followers. If I get can get them talking about science, that's a good day."
So every day must be a good day for Tyson, whose every utterance and aside becomes blog fodder. When he says he prefers Star Trek to Star Wars, it's a headline. When Star Wars: Rogue One screenwriter Chris Weitz sends Tyson a "twitter hail mary" with "a brief astronomy Q," it becomes a headline. And when Tyson jokes that, yes, Texas is the center of the universe, it becomes a headline. (Though, to be fair, he did receive his master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin.)
If you've never seen Tyson speak, be prepared: It's a free-form affair that can last hours. He likes to make it "a night out," he says, "and I like hanging with people as long as they're interested and not falling asleep." He laughs, maybe because he knows that's not likely.
Expect Monday night's talk to touch only the familiar and the unexpected. During the course of our chat, we discussed everything from the original Trek ("an attempt to get the science and the politics right") to Deep Impact (which he loves, because "they really thought that through, and it was good storytelling") to A Bug's Life and ... Steve Martin's L.A. Story? Let him explain. Because he loves to explain.
"I know L.A. Story is supposed to take place over a two-week period," he says. "There is no calendar on the wall. That would have been cliché. But in the film, Steve Martin shows the crescent moon grow scene by scene through the movie to end up as a full moon That's a nice touch, and I have to give him props for that. The problem is, it grew in the wrong direction. He could have just called the local museum, and anyone could have helped him out. But I applaud him for going there."
And so we're clear: He likes Star Wars. But just because it's "science fiction" doesn't mean it has a thing to do with science.
"Star Wars is like a fairy tale set in space," he says. "You wouldn't judge the science of it any more than you'd judge the science of Lord of the Rings."
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Star Trek vs. Star Wars: "Star Trek has storytelling, and it's also the conflict between good and evil, and it's also set in space -- and it also has an attempt to get the science right. That's important. I don't know how many people are looking at Star Wars and saying, 'Let's invent that.' Maybe the hover thing or the light-saber, but it's further into the world of fantasy. And politics course through the veins of Star Trek. There's the United Federation of Planets, which you can see as an extension of our world when we reach space."
On A Bug's Life: "There's a scene that's brilliant. The ant, the excommunicated ant, is looking to help find people to fight the grasshopper, and he goes to the local bug bar. It's almost cliché: You get the meanest, toughest people to help you. And sitting at the bar counter, there's a mosquito ready to order a drink, and, of course, he orders a Bloody Mary. It comes out, and it's just a small blob of liquid placed on the counter. It's not in a vessel. It's a reminder that when you're that small, surface tension -- a very real thing in chemistry -- wraps liquids into balls, which is why water beads up on a freshly waxed car. It's why certain insects can skate across the surface of the water. And they knew this. So they put this blob in front of it, and the mosquito puts its beak into it and sucks it up, and looks like he took a hit of heroin -- his eyes roll back. I want to highlight: There's important science there that helps the storytelling, that enhances the storytelling."
On Deep Impact vs. Armageddon: "Deep Impact, they really thought that through, and it was good storytelling. Vanessa Redgrave was in it, and she was a strong, fascinating character -- a compelling character in the story whose emotions you related to deeply. It wasn't just some gratuitous role -- and they got to tell a great science story about a comet hitting the earth.
"Maybe I will pull out the scene in the observatory dome with the comet coming and all the lights are on. No. All the lights would be out. But in that case you can't film the person looking at the comet. That's why I am not a buzzkill! I get it! You have to show the person looking. It's just more fun for me to show movies that intend to get the science right. In Armageddon, everything is wrong, so it's not that interesting. Everything is wrong.
"Even the movie's tag line -- 'No more taxes ... ever' -- is wrong. They made a movie where the entire effort to save the world is conducted by NASA, a tax-supported government agency, and they are saying they don't want to pay taxes. Within a year of that was Deep Impact, and that made a fascinating contrast."
