Jane Root: Well, it began [with] Tim Pastore at National Geographic. He [said’ ‘I really want to do a really big project about the Earth and how connected it all is and what the big ideas are.’ And it was a very kind of general conversation and we just kicked it around for a bit and talked about some other things. And we went away from that meeting and we were like, ‘Well that’s interesting. I wonder if that’s something that we could really do something big with.’ And then we started working on finding scientific ideas and also working on visual ideas. It kind of grew from there.
Arif Nurmohamed: I think what’s always driven us, what we were very keen to do was something that felt fresh and original as well. Because obviously there’s been a number of series about the Earth and they’re all wonderful series. We felt that actually often times these series only look at one element of a much more interesting bigger picture. And that’s what we tried to do with this series. It became a real challenge for us and was very exciting in trying to find a way of telling the story of our planet that felt true to the bigger picture of the planet and the way that we tackle the individual sort of genres within the mix. So it’s a real mashup, actually, in some respects that has an emotional connection with the audience because I think they feel like they’re seeing how things connect in ways that don’t normally get shown in this way.
The show uses the International Space Station as sort of a framing device for the episodes. Beyond giving the series that unique starting point, what was the intention behind that?
On an episodic level there’s a focus on one particular astronaut, whether it’s Chris Hadfield or Nicole Stott or Jeff Hoffman. Tell me a little bit about the process of working with these individuals and blending their experience and expertise into the series as a whole.
Nurmohamed: I think very simply it’s that you can only really see the Earth from above. You can only really understand the Earth if you leave it and look back down and that idea of it being a platform for a greater understanding of our planet is so true and so obvious to the experience of the astronauts who’ve been on the International Space Station. It’s honestly not one of those kind of television conceits. You talk to any of these astronauts and they know they had a privileged view and it’s changed how they think about our home planet. The ISS happens to be the platform where most of [the astronauts] have experienced that view, but not exclusively. Jerry Linenger was on Mir, the Russian station. Mae Jemison was on the shuttle [Endeavor]. She and Jeff Hoffman flew before the ISS was in orbit. Hoffman’s story connects to the Hubble, of course, which is another platform in space, so the idea of having that perspective was very much at the heart of astronaut’s experience and something we wanted to tap into.
Nurmohamed: Well, it was remarkably easy. They’re all super keen on participating because they could see there was an ambition that might reflect their experiences and the message they were trying to put across. They’ve been an absolute delight to work with and we had long conversations where we tried to understand how their experiences might inform the episodic theme, and in some cases there were things that we needed to say that we were able to get them to talk about through their experiences in space.
So it was very much a two-way process as we developed the themes and stories that we wanted to tell on the ground. We were able to tap into their experiences in space. In the case of [series premiere, ‘Gasp’], you get Chris Hadfield’s extraordinary story about venting oxygen into the void. That is obviously a great springboard to have him explore oxygen. And it’s something that he’s thought deeply about. And each one of the astronauts have really thought about the subject matter. So, Nicole Stott, as an engineer, saw the Earth as an incredible work of engineering. Jeff Hoffman… he’s an astrophysicist who’s studied the sun, so of course, when he looks at the sun in space he sees it as a scientist as well as a relatable human being. So I think it was very satisfying when we realized there would be great astronaut communicators who had something meaningful and personal to say about the subject at hand.
Root: I think what’s great about them is they have a scientific relationship with the idea of the connectivity of the Earth, but they also have an emotional response to it as well. They don’t only talk with their brains, they talk with their hearts, too. And that was always at the core of what we were trying to do is make a project that could be seen and understood on lots of different levels. You can understand it with a notebook in your hand thinking ‘Wow, that’s interesting. I must find out more about that.’ Or it can be an emotional, sensory experience where you just go ‘Oh, my god, look at that.’ And that’s exactly what astronauts do, they experience it in both those ways.
Will Smith is the series’ host. Can you talk about what he brings to the series and why his presence works so well?
Root: I think he brings joy. I think one of the things that’s at the heart of Will is the fact that he’s filled with joy about everything. He’s a smart, inquisitive, clever guy, who wants to ask lots and lots of questions about what things are and how they work and how they make you feel. And right now, where he is in his life, he’s absolutely asking a ton of questions about the planet. So, there’s a really natural fit there. We wanted to have him as someone who would be the everyman’s way in. He would be someone who wasn’t a scientist. We have a lot of great scientists and great astronauts connected to the show, but we wanted to have someone who was just going to ask the questions about ‘What does it mean? What does this make me feel?’ And he’s utterly surpassed our expectations in how great he is.
Nurmohamed: We think he’s incredibly engaging. There’s a lot of emotion in our shows and I think Will adds to that. We found him incredibly responsive to the overall themes and each episode, where we often end with Will summing things up and reaching an emotional pitch in his delivery, which I hope reflects what the audience has learned. When he talks in ‘Gasp’ about every breath you take, and when you start thinking about everything that goes into it, he is an audience proxy in some respects; what he’s doing is he’s articulating, in an incredibly accessible, engaging, and emotional way, the audience’s own journey in the film and the astronauts journey in the film. So he’s an absolutely brilliant, brilliant communicator for us and it was very important that we had a consistent voice across the 10 episodes. I think what Will gives us is some continuity that’s hugely important across the whole series, because then you’re not resetting each time, you have Will to help you in and sort of hold your hand through this particular episode and this particular astronaut.
How did Darren Aronofsky become involved with the series, and what did he bring to the project?
Root: He became involved through Peter Rice through Fox, which was the parent company at the time of National Geographic. There was a lot of discussion about how we wanted to really work with a visionary in terms of the look and feel of the project. That was something we all discussed from early on. And Peter said, ‘What about Darren?’ We mainly thought about Darren as somebody in terms of his narrative fiction, but he and his producing partner, Ari Handel have a deep interest in science – I mean their company is called Protozoa. And Peter suggested we all meet and we did, and it was a real instant kind of click. We spent an hour with him and were instantly like, ‘Okay, this is a really great thing to explore.’
Nurmohamed: Darren is immensely respectful of the skillset of the team that we built at Nutopia, who are really prime factual filmmakers in this field. It was real pleasure working with him in a sense that he didn’t tell us how to shoot documentary. What we worked with him on was a visual language that was coherent consistent across the series. It’s one of the interesting things about working with someone like Darren, what he does is he sets the limits first and then you work within the limits. And I think that was very useful for us because we could have very easily gone around the world with six different main directors and multiple crews and ended up with a real mess of a series, but I think the combination of working with Darren, defining a look, and a visual language really helped cohere the series for us. The other thing, Ari, his producing partner is a neuroscientist, loves storytelling and loves science and his storytelling is emotion-based and so we were able to work with him really sort of developing the narratives in a way that felt the best of both worlds. So they were great partners, actually a great fit for us. And very clear in their own minds that we ultimately at Newtopia knew what we were doing because this is what we do and working with us in a very sort of helpful way.
Where does the process of making One Strange Rock begin on an episodic level? Where do you start?
I was particularly taken with the free diving segment with Guillaume Néry. I don’t know as though I’ve seen anything quite like that. Was there anything that stood out for either of you in terms of seeing something that really surprised you or had an unexpected impact on you?
Nurmohamed: Well the first thing is working out what the theme of the episode is going to be and we had 10 episodes to explore life,, the universe and everything else [laughs]. Defining what the episode is is something that we do at the outset. Then we look at stories and locations that are relevant. If you think about the ‘Gasp’ episode, the first sequence is the most extraordinary landscape and there’s real science happening there that informs our story. That was not an easy location to film in believe me; it was incredibly hostile because they were effectively sitting on a volcano, which was messing with and sending out a very strong magnetic field. So, it was a really challenging location to film in, but one that was obviously defined by the look of the place and its relevance.
So the scene at the Magha Puja ceremony in Thailand, we knew it was a spectacular event and we just parked it and didn’t think about it for a while, and I had the idea that the episode was very much about balance and it was about fire, air, and water working together in a way to create a balance that allowed us to breathe and then it just became a lightbulb moment – they’re gathering with flames and they’re actually celebrating balance, so maybe we should go there. There’s no science there, but there is belief and an understanding and a wisdom that this speaks to what we want the audience to take away from the show. And it also happened to look like a spaceship that had landed in this field of buddhists.
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Nurmohamed: Actually it’s a simple thing that you probably don’t notice in the context of things, like that free diving sequence, which is obviously spectacular. But just the challenge of capturing oxygen bubbles being produced by algae by microorganisms, something that’s not been filmed in 4K time-lapse before. Or in time-lapse at all, never mind what K it is. We really struggled with that because we had special lenses devised and special camera a rig that we set up, and we were still struggling to capture that moment of oxygen production. And then the cameraman we were working with had the idea of taking the rocks the algae were on and got some snails from his local pond to crawl over the rock, leaving a trail of mucus; and then when the algae produced the oxygen the mucus just held those bubbles together for just a fraction of a second longer. They got slightly bigger and we were able to capture them on film. So we love that story because sometimes you take the most high-tech gear – we shot F-15s during the eclipse with rigs all over these jets and we did some extraordinary things technically – but my favorite moment is just that left-field thought of using old-school technology.
Root: It’s finding the awe and amazement and strangeness in something that you don’t even consider. I think that was the pivotal moment for us all.
Nurmohamed: Nobody will know what went into getting that shot but that’s one of my favorite moments. As much as all the spectacular places we’ve been to.
One Strange Rock continues next Monday with ‘Strom’ @9pm on NatGeo.
