It’s not just the machines. My favorite movie growing up was “ET”. And so, doing a documentary with Amblin was so amazing. And ET in the basket is on our poster, which I keep pinching on. But I think it’s a story of those times when human beings were connecting with non-humans. Our film also has a scientific message about climate change.
I think it’s something when you skin humans. It’s hard to politicize a robot. So no one disputes the fact that these robots have discovered that there has been some kind of insane climate change on our sister planet because they are robots, they have a few tools that take measurements that prove it.
I think it’s something similar in the feelings we have. I remember a tweet going viral in 2019, and that’s when Opportunity sent its final communication to Earth. “The battery is low and it’s dark.” They have had millions of hits on Twitter. And so, there was something about this struggling little robot on another planet that did something to people’s hearts. It’s very Wall-E-esque. This idea that she’s traveling alone and that she’ll be fine.
I hope people connect with these robots in the movie because of the humans behind the robots. Robots are humans. They created these robots. They drive these robots every day. It’s just that these human beings can’t go to Mars safely, so they send these robots as avatars. So really, these are two robots replacing thousands of people who put their hearts into it.
Were the bots really responding conversationally? Because that, of course, also helps to personalize it.
We used to have an entire scene detailing how these conversations happened and I was gutted when we finally had to cut the part that showed how it goes through binary code and travels through this wormhole to space. The orbiters that I talked about were characters in our film because they’re often personified as the big sister in the sky watching the robots, and the messages flow through them. And we just realized that you have to be kind of judicious in a feature film. People don’t need to know every technical detail about how these messages arrive. And so, we kind of do it like instant messaging, but it’s all done by binary code and then it’s translated by NASA. So, “my battery is low and it’s getting dark”, they get this message in binary, and then they translate it for us civilians.