172 | David Goyer on Televising the Fall of the Galactic Empire

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2021

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Science and storytelling have a long and tumultuous relationship. Scientists sometimes want stories to be just an advertisement for how awesome science is; storytellers sometimes want to use science for a few cheap thrills before abandoning it in the morning. But science is about ideas, and ideas can make for thrilling stories when done well. David Goyer is an accomplished screenwriter and director who has taken up a daunting task: adapting Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation series for TV. (Available on Apple TV now.) We talk about the challenge of making a television version of a beloved series whose central character is a mathematician, and how science and storytelling relate to each other more generally.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

David Goyer graduated from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He has written stories or screenplays for a number of well-known films, including Dark City, Blade, the Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel, and Batman v Superman, as well as TV series such as FlashForward and Constantine. He has also directed and produced numerous films and shows. He has written novels, comic books, and video games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops. In addition to Foundation, he is currently working on a TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels. Episodes of Foundation are released every Friday; the finale of the first season will be available Nov. 19.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:03.6	There's a great scene in the Big Bang Theory. I'm thinking of the sitcom, not the scenario for the
0:08.8	Cosmological Origin of the Universe, but in the Big Bang Theory they have a scene where they're trying to
0:13.3	dramatize theoretical physicists doing their work. Now the problem is, theoretical physicists just
0:19.7	sort of often stand in front of a blackboard silently thinking. So that's exactly what they show in
0:26.1	the sitcom, but they play eye-of-the-tiger in the background to make it seem very dramatic and
0:31.9	then there's some cuts from different angles and so forth. The joke of course is that the work of
0:36.6	theoretical physics or doing math or related things is just not very cinematic. It's not lend itself
0:43.4	very well to being shown on the screen, but that is a challenge undertaken by today's guest David
0:49.7	Goyer. I'm sure you know David's work. He is a screenwriter, storyteller, novelist comic book writer
0:57.2	who has been involved in things like the Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel and Batman the Superman,
1:03.6	Blade, Terminator, as well as being the co-writer for video games like the Call of Duty series and so
1:10.0	forth. And his most recent project, On Going Right Now, is a multi-season adaptation of Isaac
1:15.0	Asmol's Foundation Stories, which is currently being shown on Apple TV. So for those of you who don't
1:20.8	know, the Foundation series started back in the 1940s. It's the story of the fall of the Galactic
1:26.2	Empire. I think one of the first stories involving a Galactic Empire, although there obviously
1:31.1	been other ones since then, and the conceit is that a future mathematician named Harry Selden
1:38.8	has invented a way to use math to basically predict the future of large-scale civilizations.
1:44.2	The idea being that just like you can ignore the motions of individual molecules, if you want to
1:48.9	predict the motions of a fluid, you can ignore the idiosyncrasies of individual humans if you want
1:54.7	to predict the future of a society. So the Foundation series has originally written,
2:00.7	there's a lot of scenes in there of math being done or talked about or argued about and so forth,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.