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

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.

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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.

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0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. There’s a great scene in The Big Bang Theory. I’m thinking of the sitcom, not the scenario for the cosmological origin of the universe, but in the Big Bang theory, they have a scene where they’re trying to dramatise theoretical physicists doing their work.

0:00:20.7 SC: Now, the problem is theoretical physicists just sort of often stand in front of a blackboard silently thinking, so that’s exactly what they show in the sitcom, but they play Eye of the Tiger in the background to make it seem very, very dramatic, and then there’s some cuts from different angles and so forth.

0:00:34.8 SC: The joke, of course, is that the work of theoretical physics or doing math or related things is just not very cinematic, it does not lend itself very well to being shown on the screen. But that is a challenge undertaken by today’s guest, David Goyer. I’m sure you know David’s work, he is a screenwriter, storyteller, novelist comic book writer, who has been involved in things like the Dark Knight Trilogy, Man of Steel, and Batman v. Superman, Blade, Terminator. As well as being the co-writer for video games like the Call of Duty series and so forth. And his most recent project, ongoing right now is a multi-season adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories, which is currently being shown on Apple TV.

0:01:19.8 SC: For those of you who don’t know, the Foundation series started back in the 1940s, it’s the story of the fall of the Galactic Empire. I think one of the first stories involving a Galactic Empire, although there obviously been other ones since then. And the conceit is that a future mathematician named Hari Seldon has invented a way to use math to basically predict the future of large scale civilizations.

0:01:47.8 SC: The idea being that just like you can ignore the motions of individual molecules, if you wanna predict the motions of a fluid, you can ignore the idiosyncrasies of individual humans, if you want to predict the future of a society. So the Foundation series as it was originally written, there’s a lot of scenes in there of math being done or talked about or argued about and so forth, and it’s almost like given ahead of time what’s going to happen, the math will always win.

0:02:11.8 SC: So this is a special challenge for an adapter, and it’s a very interesting test case because you should watch the show. I personally have seen the first season, and I think it’s wonderful, but your tastes may differ. The adaptation is not the same as the book, they take many, many liberties. Let’s just put it that way. I consider it to be a separate work that is extremely successful in its own right, but it’s very challenging, you gotta watch it.

0:02:38.2 SC: There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of different stories, and one of the problems with adapting Foundation, the original stories were a collection of stories unrelated to each other in terms of characters or places in the universe. So you have to make that into something that is a little bit of a through line where you can follow characters and everything. I had no idea how they were gonna do that, and they pulled that off extremely successfully, as well as making the math exciting and of course adding in some sex scenes and some Starship battles just to make it cinematic and fun to watch on the screen.

0:03:12.4 SC: I talk with David both about general challenges of adapting big science fiction stories like this, and the specific ways in which science and math come into these kinds of adaptations, where you take them on and learn something from them, and where you have to bend the rules just a little bit for the sake of the story. It’s something we all gotta do.

0:03:34.9 SC: Occasional reminder, we have a website here for the podcast, you can go to preposterousuniverse.com/podcast, every episode has show notes and links, and you can get full transcripts of all the episodes. And of course, we also have a Patreon, if you’re interested in supporting Mindscape, go to patreon.com/seanmcarroll.

0:03:53.3 SC: That’s the way that you can get to ask questions for the Ask Me Anything episodes, and also you get ad free versions of the podcast, so do that to support Mindscape. Sign up for Apple TV if you haven’t already, to support Foundation. And let’s go.

[music]

0:04:24.5 SC: David Goyer, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:04:26.9 David Goyer: Thanks for having me. I’m a bit… There’s a little bit of trepidation, not being a scientist myself. I’m worried I’m gonna tank your signal to noise ratio in terms of quality guests, but we’ll see what happens.

0:04:42.5 SC: We love it. You’re an expert in your domain, you’re a domain expert, as we say, so that’s completely fair.

[chuckle]

0:04:48.3 SC: But the first obvious question I have to ask is, you’ve been responsible for telling stories on TV and film about Batman and Superman and the Terminator. And now, Asimov’s Foundation series, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. So the obvious question is, how big of a glutton for punishment are you in telling these stories that already have huge fan bases with very, very specific requirements and expectations?

0:05:18.0 DG: Well, it’s funny because there’s a pithy answer and a serious answer, and I’ll give you both of them. I’m fortunate enough that I’ve been doing this quite a long time. I sold my first screenplay when I was 21 and it was made as a film when I was 22. I’m over 50 now, so I’ve been in the game over 30 years. We’ve all heard about 10,000 hours and whatnot, and I think that the longer you’re in it, you wanna be challenged more.

0:05:55.9 SC: Sure.

0:05:56.9 DG: There’s no question that this is something… Well, I did pass on it in my 30s and then again in my 40s, Foundation, but after having done some trickier adaptations, I felt I was up for the challenge, and I also felt I was mature enough to do it. But the other answer in terms of adaptation. It’s funny, I didn’t set out to become the guy that adapts tricky properties, but I’ve sort of become known as that now, amongst Hollywood. Is like, “Oh, this seems really hard to crack, get Goyer.” Or, “We need to reinvent this thing, get Goyer.”

0:06:40.7 DG: But the other thing that’s funny right now is all of the TV… You’re seeing this consolidation now with all the streamers, this vertical integration. And one of the things that’s sad is increasingly, as everyone’s fighting for a slice of the pie, they’re interested in pre-existing IP, so it’s harder to sell and set up original projects, particularly expensive ones, because they believe that some kind of pre-association means that they have a better chance at making a profit, frankly.

0:07:16.1 SC: And I mean of course I know that’s true, and I guess it makes sense to me, but surely they realise that all these pre-existing projects or IPs did start somewhere as non-pre-existing ideas? [chuckle]

0:07:32.1 DG: Well of course, of course. No, I mean, it does and it doesn’t make sense. Because then you’ll get an original film or television… Yeah, no, I think it’s kind of circular reasoning, frankly, but this is what they tell themselves. And I can just tell you anecdotally, trying to set up an original now is much more difficult than when I began.

0:07:58.1 SC: And that’s too bad. But I mean, on the other hand, maybe there is just a more complicated ecosystem where we field test things in graphic novels or just regular novels to see, get some of the kinks worked out before we spend $200 million.

0:08:10.2 DG: The farm team.

0:08:12.2 SC: Yeah, the minor leagues. [chuckle]

0:08:14.3 DG: Yes, yes. It’s funny though because it can extend to almost ridiculous extremes. For instance, you could have a tiny, tiny comic book that might have sold literally 3000 copies, but because it’s a pre-existing IP, “Well, gosh darn it, this is a hot property.” And then Hollywood’s convinced that they can make a billion dollars off of it as a feature film.

0:08:38.0 SC: Interesting to know. For any of the… I always like to give our audience little tidbits, so if there’s any young film producers or screenwriters out there, that is definitely something to keep in mind. Why don’t you tell us… Why don’t you set up for the folks who are not fans of Isaac Asimov’s classic series of novels, what is Foundation? Why is this an important story to tell?

0:08:58.1 DG: Well… [chuckle] With the larger audience, I think the slice of our audience that are people who are not fans, who have not read the book is quite large. But I think in terms of your listeners, I would venture that most of your listeners have actually read it.

0:09:16.7 SC: It’s very possible.

0:09:17.1 DG: So the pyramid’s inverted. Foundation started as a series of short stories written by Isaac Asimov for Astounding Science Fiction in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Asimov was a very young writer trying to just break into the game. I think he was in his early 20s when he was writing first short stories.

0:09:40.9 DG: Eventually the first six stories were collected into a novel. And the premise is, he was interested in the law of mass action, he was interested, he was studying the… Well, he was always an avid fan of history, but he was just interested in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, reading Gibbons. And he was fascinated by the concept of statistics, that if given a large enough sample size, one could predict the broad movements of history, social science.

0:10:13.1 DG: And so the premise is X amount of thousands of years in the future, there’s a galactic civilization, a galactic empire, and one mathematician, a man named Hari Seldon has come up with a predictive model called psychohistory, which does just that, it predicts the broad movements of history. Can’t predict the individual person’s lifeline or action, but it can predict the broad movements of history. And he predicts that the Empire is going to fall and fall quickly.

0:10:41.6 DG: And he can’t do anything. The Empire is too far gone. Some would obviously make analogies to what happening today in terms of climate change. So he can’t stop it, no one can stop it. And if we do nothing, humanity will fall into 35,000 years of chaos. However, if we follow his plan, we can shorten the age of darkness to a thousand years.

0:11:14.6 DG: The first short stories are anthological. We jump forward 50, 60, 100 years in time between characters, and by the time these became popular, he settled in progressively into a series of novels. But it’s interesting because Asimov himself never made it to the end of the thousand years. He wrote an original trilogy, I believe the third book was published in 1952.

0:11:41.9 DG: In the ’80s, people asked him to write some more. He wrote two sequels. He couldn’t figure out how to end the damn thing, so he went back and wrote two prequels, and then he passed away. I think he only got about 578 years into the thousand years. So the future is yet unwritten.

0:12:00.4 SC: I’m a big fan of the original trilogy. I have to say, just being extremely candid here, the prequels, man, I just did not like very much. I thought that he had become so facile with writing that the original stories, as you say yourself, like the fall the Galactic Empire is a few sentences, whereas in the later books, it’s like every coffee shop conversation is 5000 words. So there’s gotta be some happy medium in there.

0:12:27.5 DG: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. The other thing that he did, Asimov, was he sort of retroactively in the prequels decided to tie the Foundation universe, Foundation books into the I, Robot universe. The I, Robot universe was not part of Foundation and he kind of retroactively tried to create some kind of grand unified Asimovian field theory where he tied a lot his works together.

[chuckle]

0:12:57.5 DG: It depends. There are people that like the original trilogy, there are people that adore the prequels and sequels as well. You are not alone. Amongst… In fact, some fairly famous literati who I will not name, who love the original trilogy, but don’t like the prequels and sequels. I think there are elements in the prequels and sequels that are interesting, and in fact, for this particular adaptation, we pulled some characters from the prequels into the present, so it was sort of a mix and match.

0:13:30.7 SC: Did you ever meet Asimov?

0:13:32.5 DG: No, I didn’t. He passed away in the mid-’80s, ironically of AIDS as a result of a blood transfusion. Never met him. I would have loved to have met him. I got to meet Ray Bradbury a couple of times.

0:13:47.9 SC: Okay, that’s cool.

0:13:50.6 DG: I hold him in the same regard. Never Asimov. But his daughter, who’s the in charge of the Asimov estate, is an executive producer on the show and we liaise quite frequently. And of course I had to, I had to pitch the my adaptation to her and run various things by her, so she’s as close as I’ve gotten.

0:14:13.6 SC: I did actually get to meet Asimov a couple of times. He was hilariously funny guy, he’s a raconteur.

0:14:18.6 DG: Wow.

0:14:19.8 SC: He was well into his grand old man stage, and he was a lot of fun to talk to. But as you mentioned, back when he was writing the original, it was a trilogy first, it was a series of stories, and furthermore, it was disconnected stories, it was not even the same characters in the different stories, so obviously there’s challenges here at adapting it.

0:14:44.7 SC: I’ll be very, very honest, I’ve seen the first season and when I heard that it was being adapted, I wondered how I would do it, and I was like, “No, I couldn’t do it. It would have to be different characters in every episode, it’s just impossible.” But that did not stop you, you’ve really invented a number of clever ways to make it seem like a connected story.

0:15:02.9 DG: Well, if you read interviews with Asimov, like I said, originally, he was just throwing anything against the wall that would stick, he was trying to make his way as a writer. So he pitched this idea for the first Foundation story, he didn’t know if it would work or not. And eventually it worked, and his editor, Campbell said, “Well, why don’t you do another one?” He wrote another one.

0:15:30.4 DG: But he didn’t go into it planning it as if it were going to be some kind of unified series. Perhaps if someone had said, “Here’s a contract to write a novel,” at the beginning, he might have… Well, in fact, Asimov said he would have constructed a different story. He was just making it up as he was going along.

0:15:46.0 SC: As one does. [chuckle]

0:15:48.2 DG: It was only by the time he got to the third… Yeah, yeah, it was only by the time that he got to the third novel that it was actually written as a novel. In fact, the second novel are two disconnected novelettes. But yeah, that was the… There were two primary issue… Three primary issues. One, the books are fascinating, but they’re dry. Almost all the action happens off-screen, the Empire falls off screen. There aren’t any character arcs, certainly in the first two books, that the characters don’t grow and change.

0:16:26.9 DG: And that’s difficult when you’re doing a television adaptation, and as you said in the short stories, Salvor Hardin is in two stories, but beyond that doesn’t exist. Hari is in the first story and then exists as a recording in a couple of the subsequent stories, and there’s no continuity beyond that.

0:16:51.4 DG: So it was, how do we address all those things? Also the fact that Foundation was an influence, obviously, on Lucas for Star Wars, it was an influence on Herbert for Dune. And so some of these ideas have already been strip mined, and so the idea of a Galactic Empire is not something new when people think of it, the general audience, they think of Star Wars.

0:17:17.7 DG: So we had to also figure out ways to make what was old new again, or seem fresh. But I think one of the things that you’re alluding to in terms of the adaptation, which was the key for me, was how do I take as amongst themes and express them through character?

0:17:36.5 SC: Exactly, yeah.

0:17:39.8 DG: And so we had this notion of a Galactic Empire that was resistant to change, that its fall is predicted, there’s nothing that they can do about it. I wanted the empire to be embodied in a character, which it’s not in the books, or at least in the original trilogy, it’s not. I thought, “Okay, well, how do I come up with an embodiment of empire that’s resistant to change?” And that led me to the idea of the genetic dynasty, which is a concept that’s not in the books.

0:18:11.9 DG: And it’s the idea that this one character, Cleon 1, about 400 years prior to the pilot, decides to keep cloning himself over and over again. At any one time, there’s three of him on the throne, it’s the triple throne. There’s one of him as a 30-year-old man, and one is a 60-year-old man and one is as a 90-year-old man.

0:18:32.2 DG: The younger one, Brother Dawn is an emperor in training. The middle one, Brother Day is the ruling emperor. And Brother Dusk, the older one is the sort of advisor, the consigliere. And I thought, “Wow, what could be a better expression of being resistant to change, than literally try to clone yourself over and over again, impose your ego, of one man across an entire galaxy? And so…

0:19:03.0 DG: And at the same time, it allowed me to cast three characters that we could make a deal with, that would appear in episodes after episodes. But then… So that started from a place of necessity, and then it led to these… Oddly, I think for the audience to feel empathy for these monsters, it led us to tell all these interesting stories about nature versus nurture.

0:19:29.8 DG: Because even though they’re ostensibly monsters, they’re also tragic. They’re all desperately trying to individuate, and they’re living in the shadow of Cleon 1, of this great man. That was the key, and then I said, “Well, how can I apply that process to other ideas and to other themes?”

0:19:54.1 SC: So I actually also saw by contrast, Dune, the other night, another big major big adaptation that just came out. And it’s interesting because I think Dune is, like most adaptations of these sprawling works, the question is, what do you leave out? Whereas here with Foundation, you have a pretty sprawling work to start with, but you’re adding things to it. That must be a different challenge, you have to sort of think about the themes and being true to the original material in a different way?

0:20:26.0 DG: Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that, because prior to this, people that were tempting to attempt Foundation were attempting to do it as a movie or series of movies, and when I was approached in my 30s to adapt it, I was approached by Bob Shaye, who was running New Line, who’d done the Lord of the Rings, had produced The Lord of the Rings films.

0:20:47.9 DG: He wanted to do something similar with Foundation, he wanted to make a trilogy of films, adapting it. And he approached me and said, “Come on, I worked with Lord of the Rings,” and ironically, even in three films, they had to condense some things and cut some characters out, and I said, “I don’t think it can work with Foundation as a series of films. I think there’s too much that you have to condense, and too much that you would have to leave out.”

0:21:13.5 DG: It wasn’t until the advent of these big novelistic streaming shows like Game of Thrones that I thought, “Oh, maybe this could work.” Because now, instead of trying to figure out how we can do it in nine hours, three, three-hour movies in success, maybe I can figure out how to adapt it over the course of 50 hours or 60 hours or more.

0:21:36.7 SC: Yeah, and you are aiming, everyone knows it, you’re aiming for how many seasons ideally?

0:21:41.7 DG: I am aiming for eight. Doesn’t mean we’ll get there. Doesn’t mean I’ll change my mind or I’ll say, “I give up.” But yeah, I think it was such a big gamble on behalf of Skydance and Apple, that they wanted to know that I was writing towards something, that we were writing towards something though, I wasn’t just vamping.

0:22:03.3 DG: So I did have to take them through about an hour or so broad strokes of in success where the story would go, and where would it go, given that Asimov himself didn’t finish it.

0:22:14.9 SC: Right, right. And when you are adding these things, cloning the emperor, I think is a wonderful idea, and also we can imagine that’s something that Asimov would have done if he had thought that and been in that, trying to do something like that. I mean, how much…

0:22:29.6 DG: Well, that’s just it. That’s just it. I mean, nanotechnology, this kind of cloning, that wasn’t something that was being talked about or even possible in 1948. I imagine if you were writing it now, he would have embraced science fiction concepts like that.

0:22:49.9 SC: So I guess that’s my question. Are you literally trying to put yourself into the mind of Isaac Asimov when you add these things? Or is it just that you’re saying, “Well, here are the themes we’re trying to get across that come from Asimov’s book. Let’s just see how we can fill in the story to make that happen.”?

0:23:05.7 DG: I would say it’s a little both. When I’m adapting something, what I try to do is I try to identify the core elements or concepts that make the property unique, that make Foundation, Foundation. If the author or originator of it is still alive, I bounce those off of him or her. In this case, I bounced them off of Robyn and I said, “Here are the things that I think make Foundation, Foundation. And if we agree, then A, we’re… ” It’s like we’re each, at least we’re agreeing that we’re each accepting the same model of reality. Right?

0:23:54.7 SC: Yes. [chuckle]

0:23:56.3 DG: Or the same, the same model of the universe. If we don’t agree, then there’s trouble. But in this case, Robyn and the estate felt that, “Yes, it seems like you’ve nailed the fundamental concepts,” and then I said, “Okay. Well, here are some things, given… ” Well, that’s the other challenge.

0:24:13.8 DG: The other challenge is, when Foundation came out 70 years ago, the audience was completely different, much less the world was completely different. So he was using science fiction as kind of social allegory, and he was… The Empire, yes he was basing Foundation on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the empire that he was interrogating with his metaphors was a post-World War II environment.

0:24:43.4 DG: It was the empires that were falling with the realignment of Europe, with the ascension of America, the ascension of the Soviets, things like that. That’s what he was writing about. Well that’s, A, that’s not the world that we live in today. So I had to think about, “Well, what are empires that are falling today?”

0:25:05.6 DG: And that leads you to everything that’s happening. I’m not saying it’s political, but the rise of nationalism, climate change, the Me Too movement, things like that. It’s just, we’re watching a big realignment right now, and the old guard is being challenged. But the other thing is that the audience has changed.

0:25:29.4 DG: So the audience that were reading his original stories in astounding science fiction were largely men, largely White men. The field of science fiction was almost entirely dominated by White men. Even if you looked at the original stories that were being written by Asimov himself, there were virtually no female characters whatsoever in the first Foundation book. I’m not even sure that there were any speaking female characters.

0:25:58.3 DG: So it seems obvious now, but the audience consuming this is much more varied than the audience that was consuming Foundation when it came out, and it seemed to me that, especially because we’re contemplating a Galactic Empire that exists 25,000 years from now, that the characters in the show wouldn’t be reflective of the audience that was consuming it.

0:26:25.4 SC: Do you know that famous clip of Carl Sagan on the Johnny Carson show complaining about Star Wars being all White men, back in the ’70s. [chuckle]

0:26:33.2 DG: Yes, yes. That strikes close to home, because Carl Sagan is my wife’s… Was my wife’s godfather.

0:26:44.8 SC: Wow.

0:26:45.8 DG: So there’s a connection there. Ann Druyan is my wife’s godmother.

0:26:51.1 SC: Oh, okay. Cool.

0:26:53.3 DG: Yeah. Asimov himself talked about that later in life. In some of the subsequent books, he introduced more female characters. But you have some purists that are extremely upset that we dared to gender flip some of the characters. They’re accusing us of doing a woke adaptation of the book.

0:27:16.0 SC: I tend to think that, this is getting off topic, but that’s okay. I tend to think that people are just out there waiting for things to be adapted so they can express their outrage that it is varied in some way from the original thing. It’s become just a tool in the culture wars, rather than a legitimate honest reaction sometimes.

0:27:34.9 DG: I don’t disagree, but also we live in a time of outrage culture. That’s everything that social media is stoking. It’s, outrage the coin of the realm. We know now, with Twitter and Facebook, that negative posts gain more traction.

0:27:53.4 SC: They do, they do.

0:27:58.9 DG: This is the era of outrage, and I hope we survive it.

0:28:02.3 SC: Well, this is why I’m very happy to be a pretty successful but never absolutely top podcaster. Because I am not trying to stoke outrage with the episodes here, there’s better ways to go. Speaking of which, there’s an obvious issue that raises itself when you adapt Foundation. Not only that it’s a sprawling story and the characters are different in every part, but there’s a lot of science and math.

0:28:26.6 SC: There are a lot of scenes where there are people sitting around a table talking about math. This does not lend itself immediately to the kind of cinematic spectacle we’re used to now. So how did you think about that challenge?

0:28:39.3 DG: It’s true, it’s solving math problems or debating statistics are not particularly cinematic, are not particularly dramatic. And I know that the die-hard fans are a lot of people that are either scientists themselves who are familiar with science. Do you know the phrase “uncanny valley”?

0:29:03.8 SC: I do a lot.

0:29:05.7 DG: When dealing with… I first heard of it, I don’t know if it originated here with animation, with computer animation, and so I don’t know… The idea being, when Zemeckis was doing things like Polar Express or Beowulf, these motion capture animated films, the animation was getting good enough that it was almost realistic.

0:29:33.0 DG: But there was something about it that was uncanny, that creeped people out, and so they decided that, a lot of people decided that better to do a more stylised kind of animation, that you can actually invest in the characters more easily than reaching… 99% realistic somehow is worse than 70% realistic.

0:29:58.7 DG: So anyway, when dealing with science and math and things like that in a show, I call it almost the uncanny valley of adapting science, which is to say that I appreciate science, I read a lot of science magazines and articles and books, and I listen to your podcast, I listen to other science podcasts, and I’m always trying to work more scientific accuracy into my work.

0:30:33.3 DG: In fact, I work with an organization called the Science Exchange, which is attempting to do just that with National Academy of Sciences, which is partnering filmmakers with scientists and trying to get more scientific accuracy in these depictions.

0:30:50.6 SC: Well, I know while we’re speaking of our wives, my wife, Jennifer Ouellette was the founding director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange.

0:30:57.2 DG: There you go. Oh my God, I didn’t even realise that.

[chuckle]

0:31:00.3 DG: Okay, so I… Okay, I have to go off into a tangent for one second, which is, I went to one of these first mixers, I guess, and one of the things that was really remarkable was there were maybe 10 or 20 of us creators that were partnered with various experts in their fields, and the creators that were there, we all just thought we’re a bunch of knuckle heads listening to these incredibly passionate and brilliant people talk about their work, they were doing presentations on their work.

0:31:37.7 DG: At one of the mixers, we’re all having a couple of drinks in us, and we were saying, “Why are you here, you scientists? You guys are legitimate, you guys are saving the world.” And to a person, one of the things that they said was, “Because the reason I got into science was because of Star Wars or Star Trek.”

0:32:01.7 DG: Then a lightbulb ball went off on all of our heads and we said, “Wow, there’s a service then that we can provide.” It’s not even like Star Wars was even remotely accurate, or Star Trek wasn’t that accurate either. Anyway. And that sometimes gives me some hope and maybe we’re inspiring a few random young people to get into science. If we’re able to do that with Foundation, then that in and of itself made it worthwhile.

0:32:32.2 DG: Anyway, back to the uncanny valley. So I’m trying to work math and science into this, I’ve got some science advisors on the show. Kevin Hand, who works at JPL and NASA, is on the show. He’s helping us.

0:32:45.7 SC: Previous podcast guest.

0:32:49.1 DG: Oh. Oh, okay, I need to look up his episode, love Kevin. Had a couple other mathematicians advising us. It’s tricky because it’s not like there aren’t moments where we’ve depicted something where I know it isn’t exactly accurate. I’m aware that it isn’t exactly accurate because I’ve had my science advisors tell me that it isn’t.

[chuckle]

0:33:14.3 DG: The problem is, sometimes the exactly accurate way of doing it is just boring. Just boring when you’re depicting it on screen. And then we will have these other drafts where, in episode five, we got the scene where she’s, one of the characters, Gaal, is trying to use optical navigation to sort of figure her way out of this problem.

0:33:37.5 DG: And I understand that in and of itself, that’s a relatively simple thing that’s discussed in terms of navigation, but it’s not for the mainstream audience, and so what we depicted was an incredibly dumbed down version of it. And I knew we were depicting it, and even so, various stakeholders in the show were saying, “Can you trim it down? Can you cut it back? Cut it back.” And I knew that that was the most dumbed down version possible.

0:34:11.9 DG: And so that’s what I call the uncanny valley, is where… Or we can get into, we’re traveling from star to star, planetary system to planetary system. I’m aware of the fact that these ships would have to travel faster than the speed of light, and we would get into issues of relativity, but at a certain point, you just have to kind of hand wave it and say… [chuckle]

0:34:39.4 DG: That being said, I do wanna correct myself. In one podcast, someone said, “How long did it take for the slow ship,” which is this ship that Hari and his people take to Terminus, and we’ve said that Trantor is in the center of the galaxy. If I remember correctly, isn’t the galaxy about 106 light years across or something like that?

0:35:00.8 SC: Oh, no, it’s thousands.

0:35:01.6 DG: Thousands of light years. Really? Oh my God. Well, we got even that wrong. Anyway.

[chuckle]

0:35:07.8 DG: But obviously, what they call the “slow ship”, it’s supposed to take five years to get from the center of the galaxy to the edge of the galaxy, and the only way that the slow ship could get from the center of the galaxy to the edge of the galaxy, is to travel faster than the speed of light. I believe. You can correct me if I’m wrong.

0:35:26.2 SC: Yes. No, that one is definitely right, yeah.

0:35:27.6 DG: So that means that the slow ship is traveling faster than the speed of light. Well, what I’ve said in the show is that only Empire can fold space. Only Empire. So we did have a scene in which Empire sets up these sort of pre-determined jump gates that these slower ships go to and then jump incrementally. Anyway, it got cut out.

[chuckle]

0:35:50.4 DG: But on a podcast, on another podcast I said that it was travelling something like half the speed of light, and a bunch of science people threw up their hands and said, “That’s wrong, that’s wrong.” And it is wrong. All I can say is, I’d just flown in from Prague that morning, I was incredibly jet lagged and I got it wrong.

0:36:08.4 SC: I’m 100% on your side in this one, and I will advise you to never go see a science fiction movie in the company of a bunch of physicists. Because… [chuckle]

0:36:19.1 DG: I’m sure. I’m sure. Because they’re just laughing. It’s ridiculous.

0:36:21.9 SC: It takes away from the pleasure, yes. That’s right.

0:36:23.6 DG: I know.

0:36:25.3 SC: But it does raise an interesting story, or an interesting question, because like you say, it has an enormously influential reach, these big movies. The way I like to say, look, if I write a book, I can try to get everything right in my book and I’ll reach, if all goes well, tens of thousands of people and they will really understand something and learn something about science.

0:36:47.9 SC: But a TV show or a movie will not try to get it exactly right, but will reach millions of people, so there’s a different role for that to play. So I guess you’ve already answered this in some extent, but I wanted to know, how do you balance the getting it right, versus what serves the story?

0:37:06.2 DG: Well, that’s just it, right? That’s the tightrope you have to walk. I mean, Foundation is already being received by an audience in the millions, the show. Far beyond anyone who’s currently read the novels. That’s a tiny, tiny, tiny subset of our audience. And so you ask yourself, “Well then, if we have to take some artistic liberties, is it worth it?”

0:37:34.0 DG: I would argue it is. Is it worth it if we can inspire some people to go into science? I would say yes. Is it worth it if we’re telling a show that’s fundamentally about faith in reason, and faith in science in this era? I would say yes, it’s incredibly worth it. We need our scientists right now, and this is a show that says it’s only through science and reason that the human race is going to survive.

0:38:05.1 SC: I think I told the story before on the podcast, but it’s so suitable here. I once was doing a consult for a movie, like many movies, one that never appeared, as you’re I’m sure very familiar with the phenomenon. But they came to my office at Caltech to talk to not only me, but some of my graduate students, and they wanted all these opinions from my students, and so they said, “Well, here’s the scenario for the movie.” And the students are instantly like, “No, that would not happen.” [chuckle]

0:38:31.2 DG: Yeah, yeah.

0:38:31.8 SC: And we had to say, “Well, that’s not a helpful response. You have to… ” The lightbulb went on for them when I said, “What you’re being told when you told the movie script is not a theory of physics. Take it as data. This happened, like it or not, and now your job as the scientist is to come up with an explanation that makes it all makes sense.”

0:38:51.7 SC: And then they all got it, they were having a lot of fun bouncing that around. I think that can be the role of the science consultants, to really just not say, “This is right, this is wrong,” but, “Here’s how you make the story makes sense.” And that serves the purpose of telling a good story.

0:39:06.4 DG: Well, I’ll give you an example, right? So there’s a place in season one, no spoilers, that Hari Seldon is from, a place called Helicon. And that ostensibly orbits a dark star, which is I guess a black hole or a brown dwarf or something like that, and that ostensibly, this world is sort of in an accretion disc, and it’s not a very hospitable place to have a planet. And Kevin Hand, our consultant, say, “Oh, it wouldn’t really work.”

[chuckle]

0:39:43.8 DG: And on top, on top of it, this is a tiny preview of next season, but on top of it, I said, “I want there to be a moon that’s incredibly close to the world, that’s so close that they share an atmosphere.” And he said, “There’s no way that would happen, because the tidal effects of the moon would just create these ridiculous winds. And then on top of it, the radiation and whatnot from the black hole or brown dwarf, everyone would have to live underground. There’s no way. There’s no way. There’s no way.”

0:40:19.1 DG: But I just said… He said, “Why do you want it?” And I said, “Well, for all of these visual reasons, and it’s important metaphorically, and it looks interesting and whatnot.” He said, “Well, I suppose if you invoke some kind of type 2 civilization, engineering.” I said, “Well, that’s great. Because it’s… “

0:40:37.5 SC: “Let’s invoke that.”

0:40:38.0 DG: “The Galactic Empire is a type 2 civilization.” And so he’s said, “Yeah, if you had this whole array of satellites on one side, they were helping with the gravity and you did this and did that,” and I said, “Great. Done. We’re adding all of those things.” It’s certainly going to make, when we get to season two, some really arresting and exotic visuals.

0:41:03.5 SC: Well, I think that’s the right attitude, that’s the right strategy for handling science advisors, which is never to take the first no for an answer. Just push them on it and they’re like, “Well, okay, then you could do this.” And then often, I think that leads you to some place more interesting, because the real world is made of constraints, and drama is all about overcoming obstacles, and science can give you some good obstacles to overcome.

0:41:26.2 DG: Yeah, absolutely, and it certainly led us time and time again into some really interesting storytelling iterations. We did… We have many times changed our story based on the advice we’ve gotten from our science advisors. In some cases, we just corrected things in the dialogue, but in other cases, it’s led us to tell a more interesting kind of story.

0:41:54.3 DG: Because constraints in storytelling are fascinating and interesting. Constraints can inspire you to take a more creative approach to something, and constraints are interesting for the characters to have to navigate their way through.

0:42:06.4 SC: Absolutely, yeah. Speaking of constraints, along the same lines, the foundational idea, pardon the pun, of the original stories was psychohistory. Parenthetically, I do think that psychohistory is entirely BS. I don’t think there will ever be something called “psychohistory”. In fact, I’m writing a book about the physics of democracy, where I explain why Asimov was mistaken about that. But for the purposes of the book, I think it’s perfectly fine.

0:42:39.1 SC: How do you, or do you just not, dramatise sitting around and thinking about math? Is that something that is intrinsically unfilmable? Or is it just you make it pretty without worrying about explaining it? Or do you just sort of shift it onto more character-based ideas?

0:42:54.8 DG: All of the above. One of the first things we did, you’ve seen this show, is our depiction of math, I think is incredibly beautiful. I think it’s unique in terms of filmed entertainment. I remember when we were developing that, we did a lot of look development and a visual effects house, a design house called Tendril were the ones that cracked it.

0:43:23.9 DG: I talk a lot when I’m talking to my fellow filmmakers and department heads and whatnot. I’m a story guy fundamentally, so I talk in adjectives or I’ll be emotionally descriptive, and I said, “I want our depiction of the math to be very beautiful, and I want it to look like the language of angels.” That’s what I said. “What does that mean? I don’t know.”

[chuckle]

0:43:46.5 DG: “You figure it out and come back to me.” And I said, I didn’t wanna use Arabic numerals, because that was… I didn’t want it to look like the depictions of Nash’s work in A Beautiful Mind. I want it to look…

0:43:56.7 SC: That’s the obvious comparison.

0:44:00.6 DG: Yeah, exactly. Something beyond that. And we came up with this depiction that’s, it’s swirling and it’s beautiful, and the math swoops and spirals, and it’s somewhat based on the murmuration of birds or starlings or things like that. It’s meant to be beautiful and godlike, because I often think that if angels spoke, I’m not particularly religious, they would speak in math because it’s sort of the code that the universe is based on. So that’s quite beautiful, that when we see the math in the depictions of psychohistory.

0:44:46.6 DG: But then my other way of approaching it, or our other way of approaching it was to not talk about the dryness of the predictions, but talk about how the predictions relate to the people in the story. So some people are fearful, some people are hopeful, some people believe that the predictions are being misused or that Hari’s become a cult leader.

0:45:15.9 DG: And then there’s also this whole idea of, are they predicting a deterministic future? Are they depicting a future that can be changed or that can’t be changed? Do we have any free will? Does an individual have any agency? That stuff’s interesting, and that’s… Those are some of the things that we traffic in in the show, and we’ll traffic in the show again and again and again. Is the math our salvation? Is the math our damnation? Are we prisoners of the math?

0:45:44.7 SC: Alright, now you got me thinking about this. I gotta… These are very good questions. But also at a stylistic level, as you said about Asimov’s original text, not only were the characters all men and there’s not a lot of ethnic diversity talked about, whether it was there. I mean, maybe he didn’t mention it so that we can read it in.

0:46:03.8 DG: We don’t know. To my knowledge, most of the characters, the ethnicity wasn’t described in the books.

0:46:10.8 SC: Yeah, it’s just not there.

0:46:12.7 DG: But it’s implied that it wasn’t very diverse.

0:46:14.4 SC: But it’s also, he was not talking… He didn’t have a lot of sex scenes. He didn’t even have a lot of action scenes or battles or anything like that. I think once I read an interview with him saying that he didn’t have any bad guys, he just had problems that the universe was giving you. That must be part of your tool box to add and spice things up a little bit?

0:46:35.2 DG: Well, and in fact, the protagonists certainly of the first novel and the second novel by and large, also don’t have any conflict. They’re fully formed and most of them don’t have any doubts, and just when you’re watching filmed entertainment, that is simply not interesting. I mean, filmed entertainment, it’s based on conflict.

0:47:00.4 DG: We wanna see people doubt themselves and overcome those challenges, we wanna see them fail. We wanna see soap operas to a certain extent, we wanna see people fall in love and fall out of love and betray one another. That’s filmed entertainment. No one would have made an adaptation of the show that was simply men in a room sort of smugly self-satisfied, having thought of, thought of the answer and then presenting it to other people and not having any dark nights of the soul.

0:47:37.0 DG: No one would have made that show. Perhaps a tiny, tiny sliver of the audience might have loved that version of the show, but it never would have been made.

0:47:50.3 SC: Well, it’s interesting because despite my formative science fiction reading years being in the ’70s, I read a lot of stuff from the ’30s and ’40s, the pulp era, and it certainly was part and parcel of the style of Heinlein and Campbell and Asimov, that there were competent men solving problems, and that’s what we needed.

0:48:11.1 DG: The great man theory.

0:48:13.3 SC: Yes. Very, very much. And I still like the competent side of things, the competence porn aspect of… I don’t like my characters being stupid, but that’s, I guess that’s, I’m putting words in your mouth. But characters can be flawed and make mistakes without being stupid, and that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for, right?

0:48:30.5 DG: By and large, yes. Although, I’m a fan of Succession, right? And Succession has a lot of characters in it that are flawed and stupid. [chuckle]

0:48:40.6 SC: And stupid, yeah. “That’s not nothing.” [chuckle]

0:48:45.6 DG: It’s a brilliant show. I have just a question for you, working in the rarified field that you do. Can you enjoy a work of soft science fiction, or just as an audience member, can you enjoy it?

0:49:02.7 SC: Oh, 100%. Yeah, no, I have no trouble whatsoever, violating laws of physics or inventing complete fantasy. The two things that bug me are, not making sense, and like I said, just total incompetence purely for story reasons, like this person has to be dumb to make this event happen. Oh, come on. You just working hard enough as a writer there. [chuckle]

0:49:25.6 DG: Well, I’ll tell you something that, I can’t remember, someone might have taught this to me, or perhaps I’m remembering it incorrectly. But we’re in the writers’ room, one of the things that I’ll say frequently is, and which is not to say that sometimes we have failed, but that I hate coincidences that work in the favour of the protagonists. That’s just bad storytelling.

0:49:52.6 DG: However, I think coincidences that work in favour of the antagonist and that make it worse for the protagonist, I think are okay, because you always wanna make it as difficult for your protagonists as possible, and so I do think an occasional coincidence that works to the favour of the villain is permissible.

0:50:13.9 SC: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I’m on board with that. It’s the self-harm that bugs me. [chuckle] That’s why.

0:50:22.5 DG: No, I know. And I’ll tell you another example. Okay, have you seen Breaking Bad?

0:50:26.5 SC: Oh yeah.

0:50:27.2 DG: Okay.

0:50:27.6 SC: Very, very flawed, obviously.

0:50:30.1 DG: Or Better Call Saul. Both are incredible, incredible shows. Walter White or Saul Goodman, in both shows frequently self-harm themselves.

0:50:41.9 SC: That’s true.

0:50:43.8 DG: I mean, they both trip over themselves. Part of the fun of that… I won’t say fun, but part of the reason I think you watch those shows and you say, “Oh, please don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Please don’t do that.” But the fact of the matter is that human beings work against their own self-interest all the time.

0:51:02.8 SC: No, it’s true. It is true.

0:51:04.1 DG: All the time. Anyway, I’m just arguing against your quibble.

0:51:07.8 SC: No, I get it, and in fact, this is one of the… I think that’s what stopped Breaking Bad from being one of my all-time favourite shows. But on the other hand, he was super competent at his domain expertise, right? He was the best chemist around, so when he got to that, he could shine.

0:51:26.5 DG: One of the things that we’re playing around with in the latter half of the season, as a preview on Foundation, and then in future seasons, are the sort of… Yes, I mean, Hari Seldon is the consummate domain expert. But he has his shortcomings, his personal shortcomings. And we’re going to…

0:51:52.5 DG: And they’re a product of his experience and as a product of his childhood, and we’re gonna start to explore those. They do inform his math and they did inform psychohistory, and so… But that’s interesting as well, and certainly something that Asimov wasn’t interested in exploring.

0:52:13.2 SC: No, we didn’t learn a lot, at least in the original series.

0:52:14.5 DG: Yeah, original stories.

0:52:17.5 SC: That’s right. So this all brings up a bigger picture question, maybe you have thoughts about this or maybe not, but science fiction of that era, and maybe even today has a self-image of being the literature of ideas. This is where, even if you’re not… In fact, you’re not trying to predict the future, but you’re trying to imagine the future in different ways it can be. How much does a creative person like you take that on board as a duty to sort of be the literature of ideas?

0:52:49.8 DG: I do. Fundamentally, I would say my job as a storyteller is first it’s, the do no harm of storytelling, it has to be a watchable show. It has to be a show that people wanna tune in week after week. So that’s my first job, is to make people want to keep watching. Selfishly for me, it’s because I like working in this medium and I’m a big nerd and a big geek, and that means if I can keep watching the… If I could keep making the show, then I have an opportunity to depict black holes in the future.

0:53:31.4 DG: I have an opportunity to sort of depict some of these other things like a space elevator falling, that I’ve always read about and dreamed about depicting. I like doing that stuff, I like telling the kinds of stories that can only be told with the boundaries or complications. I am interested in telling a story about relativistic time, I am interested in depicting all of these things or figuring out what happens prior to the Big Bang, or depicting that on the show. And so the only way that I can get to do more of that is if the show is successful and a big enough audience watches it.

0:54:15.2 DG: But I do take it seriously. I do think as the show progresses, I’m interested in depicting what are the social politics of the future, what are the gender politics of the future? What happens in the future when you can not just clone people but predict… Not predict, but assign gender. Perhaps there are three, four, five genders that we can assign. And so all of that, I find interesting. And so I do think part of the remit of the show is to get our audience to think about some of these big ideas and some of these big concepts.

0:55:03.8 SC: Well, I know that in the movie business, there’s been worry both about the economics of the giant blockbusters and also the prevalence of comic book movies, do they even count as cinema, as Martin Scorsese has argued, and so forth. The economic worries aside, you’ve done both the comic book stuff and then this science fiction stuff, which is a little bit different. So I guess, do you consider this idea, again, I’m trying to put words in your mouth. I shouldn’t do that.

0:55:33.3 SC: One might argue that thinking about the large scale sweep of the future of human history is just as important as talking about someone middle-aged and breaking up. [chuckle] That’s just as human and real and dramatically relevant. Are there worries in your mind or do you even care about, is it as significant from an artistic point of view to be telling these big space opera stories?

0:56:02.7 DG: I understand what you’re asking. Am I worried that my little show, our little show won’t be taken as seriously when it comes to award season.

0:56:14.3 SC: That’s one way of putting it. Right, exactly.

0:56:16.6 DG: No, I’m not. There tends… Historically, there’s been kind of a snootiness when it comes to genre, both in film and television. Historically, science fiction and fantasy are not genres that have been held in high regard, at least beyond that sort of what they call the technical awards, but that started to change with Game of Thrones. At the end of the day, no.

0:56:46.6 DG: I think even in the first season, we get into some pretty heady philosophical stuff. What’s interesting for me is that we get into some pretty heady philosophical stuff in a way that… And I adore Breaking Bad, but in a way that they never could or would. I think that’s kind of unique about our show, and I think people will be surprised when they get to the end of the season, for a show that was based on relatively dry, hard.

0:57:18.5 DG: Series of relatively dry, hard, science fiction stories, my hope is that we will be surprised at just how moved they end up being, and how thought-provoking some of it is. You said you’ve seen the first season, so I’m alluding to Episode 8, which I think is pretty intense, and I would argue is in terms of just existential questions, is about about as intense as it gets, by the end of that episode.

0:57:49.4 DG: We’ve already written season two, and part of the fun of season two is we’ve gotten through the exposition and there are some extremely interesting philosophical questions that we get into, existential questions in season two. But also even in this season, as the season progresses, we get into the nature of Demerzel, who is a humaniform robot, and whether or not Demerzel is a being, whether or not Demerzel has a soul.

0:58:17.2 DG: Whether or not Demerzel is a machine, or she/it is not a biological life form, but whether or not she/it is a life form. And we get into some of the interesting constraints of Asimov’s laws of robotics as well. I think we go to some pretty rarified philosophical places in this show.

0:58:39.8 SC: Yeah, no, that’s a very, very good answer. But since I do have you here, let me lean on your domain expertise a little bit and talk about the…

0:58:47.2 DG: Go for it.

0:58:49.1 SC: What goes into making something like this? First at the most basic level, you already alluded to the fact that it could have been done as movies. Doing a TV show is just a very different thing. On the one hand, you have a lot more room to work, on the other hand, something’s gotta happen every episode. How do you balance that? Do you think it’s more freeing to do the TV show, or is it more like demands on you to have so many cliff hangers or twists or what have you?

0:59:13.2 DG: Both. I will say I started out working almost exclusively in film, and over the years, I’ve started to gravitate more and more towards these serialised shows that are happening on the streamers. My personal preference for these days, consuming something tends to be long-formed serialised narrative. I like digging in and knowing that I could be with characters from multiple seasons.

0:59:41.1 DG: I love the experience of watching Game of Thrones and knowing that… In a movie, you can usually have a character change once, and it happens fairly quickly. It has to happen over the course of two hours or three hours. But in a 50 or 60-hour or 70-hour serialised show, characters can grow and change and fail, good people can become bad people, bad people can become good people, they can screw up multiple times.

1:00:14.4 DG: I just find that kind of storytelling jazz more interesting, personally, these days. But it does come with its constraints, as you say. People like their cliff hangers. There’s a cadence to the way people consume storytelling these days that comes with its own set of assumptions, and I’ve been experimenting with not sometimes going with that cadence, you know, in this show.

1:00:44.9 DG: Sometimes people are upset that we’ll be with a character for a couple of episodes and then we won’t come back to them for a couple of episodes. Or that we’ll slow things down and do a short film at the beginning of an episode. That’s very deliberate on my part. It’s interesting because I think some of that comes from the audience being unconsciously trained by watching things like Game of Thrones.

1:01:07.2 SC: Very much, very much.

1:01:08.0 SC: Which was I thought a brilliant show, but wasn’t experimenting with the form quite as much as we’ve been experimenting in season one. Some people love it, some people don’t, but I’m cognisant of that. The other thing that’s interesting, just in terms of the way it’s being consumed is, different… Netflix releases all their shows at once. HBO Max has been experimenting with recently releasing them two at a time, or four at a time or something like that.

1:01:36.3 DG: When we started producing this, Apple hadn’t even existed as a streamer, and so they hadn’t decided how their shows were going to be consumed. Ultimately, they decided that they felt that they can create more water cooler moments if the show comes out on a weekly cadence. On one hand, that’s infuriating to the audience, who are used to… Who are used to binging things.

1:02:01.6 DG: And some of our audience have been very angry that the show is, that we’re daring to release the show on a weekly cadence. But they’re talking about it. So I’m, just as a kind of social scientist, I’m really interested to see… We just released Episode 6 this weekend, we’ve got four more of the season.

1:02:22.9 DG: I’m really curious to see what the experience of the audience is and how it differs when you’re watching it once a week. Or how an audience will experience our show, if they can just binge it, once Thanksgiving is out and they can watch all 10, and new people are coming to it. I’m just really curious to see what their perception of the story is like and how that changes from consuming it on a weekly cadence.

1:02:45.4 SC: No, I think it’s a great question, and I will say to the listeners out there who are thinking about watching it, number one, my advice would be to come at it as a completely new experience if you’ve read the books. Don’t try to shoehorn it into the books. Accept it for what it is. Because it is a completely different thing.

1:03:05.3 SC: And the other is, I actually think, and we’ll see how this goes, but I think that your season one is like the paradigmatic case of something would be much better to watch over two nights rather than over 10 weeks. [chuckle]

1:03:18.4 DG: I suspect you’re probably right, and it probably works better two at a time, or three at a time or not. That decision was just above my pay grade.

1:03:33.3 SC: Of course. And people can always wait, right? People don’t have to watch it every week.

1:03:36.7 DG: Yeah, but it’ll be interesting though, once… I’m just really curious to see what happens once Thanksgiving hits, then over the course of the next three months. Because inevitably more people will come to it, they’ve been hearing about it, and how that changes. And then the question is, when we get to season two, and our audience has been building, does Apple decide to stick to their guns and release it once a week, or not?

1:04:03.2 DG: Game of Thrones was very successful, coming out once a week. On the other hand, I think season two will be easier for us as storytellers because a lot of the big exposition, we’ve gotten over that hurdle and now we could “just tell the story”.

1:04:20.6 SC: Yeah, but I do think, again, Apple will do what it does. It’s certainly beyond my pay grade, if not yours. But your storytelling techniques in the show are more formally inventive than Game of Thrones was, it’s a different kind of thing. And it just helps the audience a little bit to remember what happened from moment to moment, so they can watch it very quickly. [chuckle]

1:04:44.9 DG: The other thing that will happen which is interesting is, season one, the show comes out. So A, from the die hard fans, there’s an expectation of what an adaptation of Foundation should or shouldn’t be. After our season’s come, by the time we got to the second season, we’re not dealing with those expectations anymore. Hopefully. We’re just dealing with it is what it is.

1:05:07.8 DG: The same will be said, prior to the show coming out, a lot of people were saying, “It’s the next Game of Thrones.” Or, “Is it the next Game of Thrones?” Or, “It’s Game of Thrones in space.” I understand why they’re talking about it, but it’s not particularly helpful. Of course it’s not Game of Thrones.

[chuckle]

1:05:23.6 DG: It’s not intending to be Game of Thrones. But hopefully by the time we get to the second season… Nor was Game of Thrones at the beginning. People were freaked out when Game of Thrones came out, because it defied conventional storytelling. There were too many characters, it was a slow burn.

1:05:40.0 SC: People died. [chuckle]

1:05:41.7 DG: Yeah, people died. It also broke some of those storytelling conventions, and hopefully by the time we get to season two, they won’t be comparing it to Game of Thrones, it will just be Foundation has set this tone, and it is what it is.

1:05:56.8 SC: That’s right.

1:05:58.5 DG: And now they’re judging it on its own terms.

1:06:00.8 SC: Good. Two questions to wrap up. One is, I can’t let you go without at least mentioning the Sandman. If Foundation wasn’t already wickedly difficult to adapt into an episodic TV show, it would seem to me like Sandman is an even bigger challenge. Is it, do you feel like you’ve practiced now with Foundation, and it’s gonna be easier? Or are the challenges completely unique?

1:06:27.6 DG: Well, they are unique, they’re both long considered unfilmable. The biggest challenge with Sandman is that it doesn’t adhere to any one genre, it skips around. It’s a horror episode, it’s a philosophical episode, it’s a fantasy episode, it’s a largely historical fiction episode about, I don’t know, Shakespeare in the way that he wrote his plays, where his inspiration came from. Some of them are funny, some of them are farcical, some of them were deeply steeped in DC Universe mythology.

1:07:15.3 DG: That was always the biggest challenge, is it’s always been a bit of a feathered fish. It’s not easily categorise-able, if I got that word right. In the case of Sandman, the creator is still alive, and it’s someone that I’ve gotten to know, Neil Gaiman, over the years. It was kind of remarkable, because for years I was, it’s also something that I felt would benefit from long-form storytelling, that they were having to cram too much into a future adaptation.

1:07:49.5 DG: But was in the case of Sandman, I finally convinced Warner Brothers to do it as a big serialised show, and the thing that was remarkable with Sandman is no one had ever thought of making Neil producer on the show.

[chuckle]

1:08:08.2 DG: I insisted that that be the case and said I wouldn’t do it unless Neil was a producer, and then I said I want Neil to co-write the first episode with me. So we have that imprimatur, we have that stamp of approval. I suspect when the show comes out, it’s largely high fantasy, so we’re not going to get into issues of whether or not we’ve screwed up on relativity or things like that.

[chuckle]

1:08:30.6 DG: But it’s got its die-hard fans, some of who are already angry that a piece of casting doesn’t adhere to their preconception of who or what it should be. I suspect largely, and similarly to Foundation, we had to figure out a way to cleave to the organising precepts of Sandman. What makes Sandman, Sandman?

1:09:00.8 DG: But a way to also make it digestible for a large scale mainstream audience who who have not read the source material. And we had to sort of hold both of those against one another. I suspect like Foundation, I hope that the mainstream audience will largely like it, and I’m sure there will be some purists, for lack of a better word, who will be very angry that we dare to collapse these two characters into a single entity. Or that the gender or race of a character doesn’t fit with the original depiction in the comic books.

1:09:39.6 SC: I was surprised when I had Seth MacFarlane on the podcast, that he admitted he reads all the comments. He’s very invested in what the audience is saying online about his TV and his movies. Are you that way? Or do you just try to stay away from all that drama?

1:09:57.1 DG: I read some of them. I’m not on social media. I made a decision a long time ago not to be on social media. I know myself, and I think I would go down a rabbit hole too quickly. I also have a very dry sense of humour that doesn’t translate well.

[chuckle]

1:10:15.0 SC: Say no more.

1:10:20.7 DG: You know, I read some of the comments on Reddit, I did an AMA on Reddit. I think it’s helpful to know the broad strokes of the audience’s reaction, but then it’s also important to remember, one of the things that’s great about the internet, one of the things that’s terrible about the internet, is every voice has an equal megaphone.

1:10:44.2 SC: Right, good and bad.

1:10:47.8 DG: And there’s some incredibly, we all know there’s this incredibly toxic and virulent kind of underbelly to the internet. In the case of Foundation, there was some incredibly misogynistic and racist things that emerged with some of the casting. And so, yeah, once you get a sort of smell of that, I have no desire to go down a 4chan rabbit hole. On that, in that regard.

1:11:12.9 SC: Good. And then the final question is, up to you to say how much you wanna say about it, but the best character in the Foundation series is obviously the Mule. For those who have not read it, we will give away too much, but like a singular being in this universe that Asimov invented. And we haven’t met the Mule yet, or are we gonna need to wait until season six to meet this character, or is the Mule coming soon?

1:11:37.3 DG: Well, it’s interesting also, the Mule, I will say was a character that Asimov created because his editor said, “This is boring. You’ve been telling you stories… “

[chuckle]

1:11:46.5 SC: The same pattern.

1:11:48.5 DG: And pschohistory predicts that this gonna be outcome, and then we’ll have a great man say, “Well, of course, this is what’s happening and it’s boring.” And so to a certain extent, Asimov was listening to his critics, his main critic being Campbell, so he created the idea of the Mule, this mutant that was something that psychohistory could not predict.

1:12:06.7 DG: And it’s exciting because it throws the plan into disarray. The Mule, I liken to a scene in Game of Thrones called the Red Wedding that happened in season three. Fans of the books really wanted to get to the Red Wedding first, and Benioff and Weiss, who were adapting the book said, “We need to earn the Red Wedding.”

1:12:29.3 DG: And so the first thing I said to Apple, they said, “Is the Mule gonna be in season one?” And I said, “No. The Mule is not gonna be the season one.” And here’s why. I would argue that the Mule… The Mule happens in the second half of the second book of Foundation.

1:12:44.1 DG: And I think the reason why the Mule is so effective is because Asimov did that storytelling set up where there was this expectation that the Seldon crisis would be solved in a certain way, and that psychohistory would work, and then this spoiler came in. I don’t think the spoiler would have been as effective if the spoiler had emerged in the first book or in our first season.

1:13:10.6 DG: So the Mule will not be showing up in season six, the Mule will not be showing up in season one, but somewhere in between the Mule will show up. But I will say the Mule will and will not show up in the way that the audience is expecting. I’ll just give you one, fans of the books, something to think about, which is, in the books, there is a second Foundation, it’s sort of a surprise.

1:13:39.7 DG: But in the books you meet the second Foundation, and they already exist, they’ve already been created. And they’re introduced as a sort of late stage act three reveal, almost like a deus ex machina, in regard to the Mule. Well, in our show, we don’t have the liberty of just introducing the second Foundation as a deus ex machina.

1:14:04.3 DG: Or rather, that wasn’t interesting. So in our show, I’m interested in showing how the second Foundation formed, I’m interested in depicting how the Mule became the Mule.

1:14:19.1 SC: Okay. Very, very interesting. That is something to think about. ‘Cause I do think it’s fun to… What fans should do is really take seriously how they would adapt their favourite properties, and then compare it to what it is. ‘Cause it’s really hard, you can’t just fill in what’s there in the comic book or in the novel. It’s really, it’s a tremendous amount of creative effort goes into doing that.

1:14:44.3 DG: Well, in the case of the Mule in the books, the Mule just suddenly we start… We start one of the novellas and the Mule’s just a thing, and he’s already taken over half the galaxy, and we have no context whatsoever about him, and then the Mule destroys the Empire off screen.

[chuckle]

1:15:00.8 SC: Alright, something to think about. David Goyer, I’m sure you’ve been doing many, many of these interviews, so we very much appreciate your time. Thanks for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:15:06.7 DG: And thank you for being very gentle with me with regards to science matters.

1:15:10.7 SC: Science is gentle. That’s its motto.

[laughter]

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