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00:00If you're looking at the future, I think you've kind of got to look at the dark future of it all.
00:14This is the world as it exists today.
00:17If you look at all the things that could take us out, overpopulation, climate change, planet overheating, maybe AI emerges but is used as a weapon.
00:26Science fiction can be a metaphor for the human's darkest side.
00:33I need you to know me.
00:36To me, a dystopian story is a warning.
00:39They're coming to get you, Barbara.
00:42You realize that's absolutely terrible. Let's not let that happen.
00:45Your move, Kree.
00:47Not every advancement is going to be used to better society.
00:50It's human nature. There are evil people in the world.
00:53Where is she taking them?
00:55Some people's dystopia can be someone else's utopia.
00:59Surviving can be much more of a burden than a blessing.
01:05Damn you all to hell!
01:08That's Ch plagiarism.
01:26Why are we so fascinated with these dark futures?
01:46It's who we are in our intimate rage and our social rage.
01:50So the angst that we have is really the fear of the end of humanity.
01:56Yeah.
01:57You know, with nuclear energy and the potential for pathogens and so on, all the things that
02:03we've been dealing with for the last 50, 60 years are manifesting in these post-apocalyptic
02:08fantasies.
02:09And I would submit that everybody that watches these movies believes that they are going to
02:13be that one in 10 million people that survives and has the apartment in Manhattan with the
02:19steel door and all that.
02:20Sure, you've got to shoot a few vampires, but it's actually a pretty good life.
02:23It is.
02:24And at the end of the day is the fantasy of having to hunt to survive.
02:29Mm-hmm.
02:30I mean, the quintessential fantasy in the 20th century for post-apocalyptic is you, your
02:35car, and your gun.
02:37I had been aware of I Am Legend for years.
02:52Arnold Schwarzenegger had it for about 10 years, and he wasn't letting it go.
02:58And I was like, come on, man.
03:00Come on.
03:01You're the governor, man.
03:02You're not going to make it.
03:03And eventually Arnold was like, okay, okay, I'm not going to make it.
03:06Dr. Robert Neville, he was a virologist, and he was supposed to save humanity, and he missed.
03:13There has been a worldwide epidemic, and it has turned the population into these vampire
03:20zombie-like things.
03:22And Neville is the last man on earth.
03:26What will the world look like after we have finally found a way to make sure it has rid itself
03:35of us is at the heart of the narrative.
03:38How does a guy survive after losing all of that and make it day to day to day to day?
03:47Being the last person on earth speaks to the concept of existential loneliness.
03:54It speaks to a very terrifying reality for human beings that we actually are born and we die alone.
04:03Come on, Hank.
04:04Surviving can be much more of a burden than a blessing sometimes.
04:09And part of the beauty is that's how a lot of us feel in life.
04:15When Will and Akiva and I kind of crafted the movie, we wanted to keep elements that made
04:20I am legend, I am legend.
04:25One of my favorite ideas in the novel is at the end of Neville discovering,
04:32wow, the things that I thought were the monsters aren't really the monsters.
04:36I'm the monster.
04:37This idea that this creature that he has down in his lab is the, you know, love of the sort
04:45of alpha creature that's, you know, stalking him.
04:47Then he discovers that if he gives this creature back, this guy may let him live.
04:51And he does.
04:52I'm sorry.
04:53The same way he saw them as monsters, that's how they saw him.
05:00Now, conceptually, that is a spectacular idea.
05:04That is the truth of all conflict.
05:09But the audience just short of booed.
05:13Just like right on the edge of booing.
05:17So we went back and the eventual ending, he sacrificed himself to save the cure.
05:26There was something about the difference of science fiction in a novel versus science fiction in the cinema.
05:36The genre actually shifts when you add the images.
05:40I am legend is a novel which was published in 1954 and is not only one of the most important disease apocalypse story of all time.
05:52It is the most influential.
05:55It's had many adaptations.
05:57The first adaptation was in the early 60s with Vincent Price.
06:01Another day to live through.
06:03Better get started.
06:04Then we had the really popular 70s version called The Omega Man.
06:10If you look at apocalyptic ideas in science fiction, they tend to come in waves.
06:14And the 70s was a very strong wave of skeptic thinking.
06:17But you're coming out of the 60s and a certain unleashing of human consciousness.
06:22So, you know, of course it was going to manifest itself that way.
06:26And after September 11th, there's a big resurgence of it.
06:29Sure.
06:30Almost immediately.
06:31Things like I am legend.
06:32There's a big wave of...
06:33Right, right.
06:34You know, very, very concerned back to that 70s idea of, you know what, we may well screw this all up.
06:39I'm fascinated by the way that science fiction is always, you know, manifesting our angst, our dreams and our nightmares.
06:47Every generation has its own version of the apocalypse.
06:53Some horrible event that basically annihilates a bunch of people all at the same time.
06:58Apocalypses are a big theme in science fiction and always have been.
07:02The reason they're interesting is because we always feel like the clock is at five minutes to midnight.
07:08That the apocalypse is going to come.
07:10The science fiction authors and filmmakers may have given us the ammunition by illuminating for us the dark possibilities, which are now becoming more and more real.
07:21I think that one of the most powerful, dazzling, nasty ends for humankind is Planet of the Apes.
07:31The book on which is based by Pierre Boulle, it's just a vision of another world.
07:37But at the end, there's, of course, this famous big reveal that makes your heart turn upside down for a moment when you discover they didn't travel to another planet.
07:47Unwittingly, they have traveled to the future of the Earth itself.
07:51God damn you all to hell!
07:55So it turns out to be a story about our own future, about our destiny.
08:00It's a far, far, far future post-apocalypse where humans have been replaced by apes and humans are now kind of dumb animals.
08:08Within the first series, but especially in the second series of films, we discover that humanity's demise, it's not just caused by a rain of nukes from the sky, it's not just caused by a zombie pandemic.
08:21It's actually a whole bunch of different factors.
08:24The hallmark of really good science fiction that stays with us is this idea that the apocalypse is complicated.
08:33And the series is a great example of an apocalypse which also has an element of hope in it.
08:42We think of Planet of the Apes as this cynical movie where humans are going to ruin everything.
08:49But there's that lovely moment at the beginning, from the very first film, Charlton Heston is speaking aloud to the humans of the future, who he thinks are going to discover him in 700 years.
08:58And he says,
08:59You who are reading me now are a different breed. I hope a better one.
09:05And the optimism of that just breaks my heart, especially when you're re-watching the film and you know what happens.
09:11It's trying to warn us about what's going to happen if we screw up today.
09:16It's almost like you drop a stone in a pool and he wakes up at the 20th ripple where what's happened in 1972 has ruined the world.
09:24It's frighteningly a promissory note.
09:27I think we all watch those movies.
09:29Kill them all!
09:30And feel some truth, some inevitability to the idea of it all going away.
09:38Us rendering us dispensable and dispensed with.
09:47If you look at all the things that could take us out, overpopulation, climate change or nuclear war, maybe AI emerges but is used as a weapon.
10:01There won't be one thing.
10:02That's right.
10:03I think dark futures in what we do as entertainment, the engine of that is paranoia.
10:09Yeah, right.
10:10Is it healthy, paranoia or unhealthy?
10:12Oh, it's very healthy.
10:13It's healthy because you're constantly saying what if.
10:16Yeah.
10:17And if you're not saying what if you're a fool.
10:20There's so many different kinds of stories that are basically about a really bad future.
10:25So there's an apocalyptic story and then there's dystopia.
10:30How do we come to this?
10:31Silent breed is people!
10:35Dystopia is something went wrong along the way and things are not working out right.
10:39And it's about a future looking at a worst case scenario of society where often this is something humans are doing to humans.
10:47Primrose Everdeen.
10:50Prim!
10:52I volunteer!
10:55I volunteer as tribute.
10:57The world of the Hunger Games is a very brutal, hard, dystopic world.
11:01You have a tyrannical government and they are just gonna at random once every four years grab one of your kids and make them fight to the death.
11:14I think Pete is a great character.
11:15I really connected with his idea of even though this insanity is happening around him and this is like absolute dire circumstances.
11:21He still doesn't change who he is.
11:26Hey, let's go!
11:28Get out of here, go!
11:29What are you doing?
11:30When entertainment turns into this kind of dark spectacle, it can become an instrument of oppression.
11:38The idea of violence as political distraction comes from Octavian Caesar Augustus, who literally said give the people bread and circuses.
11:47Make sure their bellies are full and they've got something to watch and distract them, then they're not gonna take to the streets and protest.
11:53Oh, one of my favorite years and one of my favorite arenas.
11:56Suzanne Collins in the creation of the book series, she was flipping channels during one of the wars in Iraq.
12:03You know, embedded footage live.
12:06And then you'd flip a few channels and you'd be on MTV watching one of these, you know, reality game shows.
12:15And then starting to see these kids battling one another and then she started to put the two ideas together.
12:21The Hunger Games really hits right at the core of things that we worry about today.
12:25Reality TV being something that's more cruel than it is entertaining, but us not even noticing.
12:31And the idea of surveillance culture for control has its roots in George Orwell's novel 1984.
12:391984 is a stunning book and film.
12:43Its vision of the future has been used to describe the age we live in since it was published.
12:50With the rise of fascism, the rise of war technologies, suddenly science fiction shifted from optimistic futures to futures that nobody wanted to live in.
13:01I'm reading the rumor on the order.
13:02Orwell updated totalitarianism for the media age.
13:06I deliberately.
13:07Things like telescreens and Big Brother show us how surveillance would become part of a technological network.
13:14Now we can see you.
13:16Clasp your hands behind your heads.
13:17What was frightening about it is that he didn't insist on a radically new world.
13:22He said, look, we can do this with the technology we have now.
13:25The house is surrounded.
13:27Science fiction has never been about predicting the future.
13:29It's about choosing a future.
13:31It's about the world that we're in now and what direction we take.
13:34Dystopian science fiction grows into the launching pad for social dialogue.
13:45And even then it grows into real world experience.
13:49We turn to Thailand where protesters have been inspired by the Hunger Games movie.
13:54A three finger salute is now a symbol of uprising.
13:58Is the Hunger Games about revolution?
13:59It absolutely is.
14:01Suzanne created these stories about war and the consequence of war for teenagers and didn't hold back.
14:08High school feels like the worst kind of dystopia.
14:12Someone else is controlling what's possible for you and telling you what to do and where to go and who to be.
14:18But in young adult literature, like in the Hunger Games and in Divergent, I think these are stories in which young people, especially young women, have agency and the power to do something about the world around them.
14:31Katniss is this great character and fights in a plausible way.
14:37This is what they do and we must fight back!
14:41She's given skills that allow her to take down a monster in the form of that society that's so much bigger than her.
14:49The Hunger Games does not end with a pretty little bow on top where the world is just a better place and everybody's happy.
14:55It takes a lot of casualties and typically a lot of death and a lot of pain to make any kind of change, but the people that remain will always be damaged because those scars definitely remain.
15:14I don't think the human mind is meant to exist in two different dimensions.
15:24It's very confusing. You don't know what's real and what's not.
15:27But you know what's real and not.
15:28Yes, sir, I do.
15:31The darkest thing about the science fiction of the future is the idea that you might be in the dark future already and not know it.
15:41Where do you draw the line between reality and memory and dreams?
15:46And I think the fundamental message of every dystopic sci-fi novel is you're living in a dystopic world and you either see it or you don't.
15:55This is going to be very difficult for you to accept, Mr. Quaid.
15:58I'm missing.
15:59I'm afraid you're not really standing here right now.
16:02You know, Doug, you could have fooled me.
16:06Total Recall was adapted from a short story called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick.
16:12And he was the most outstanding, surreal, satirical science fiction writer of the age.
16:19People claim to remember past lives. I claim to remember a different, very different, present life.
16:25And there were the subsequent Hollywood adaptations of his stories.
16:30I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks.
16:32Again and again, characters are thrust into what they learn later is a constructed universe, fooling the people who wander into it into thinking it's actually real.
16:43When we're asleep, our mind can do almost anything.
16:47That's what good science fiction does. It makes you do a double take on reality.
16:54And the things you have taken for granted your whole life, it makes you look at them in a new and sometimes very paranoid way.
17:03What the hell?
17:08You can see that Philip K. Dick's ideas are popping up in something like The Matrix.
17:13The sense of paranoia, the sense that there's no ground truth to hold on to.
17:18You take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
17:23You take the red pill, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
17:26The Wachowskis gave me the script. I read it.
17:32This idea of reality not being reality.
17:37This is the world as it exists today.
17:40What's really cool about The Matrix is you get to see what's behind the curtain.
17:44The enslavement of humans to support machines.
17:48How do you define real?
17:51So you've got virtual reality and agents and Morpheus.
17:55Oh, and then Kung Fu.
17:58Lawrence Fishman and I have been training the dojo sequence for about seven, eight months.
18:09So it was really exciting to actually be there on the day and start doing it.
18:12Because you can train, but then there's the game, right?
18:15And then someone says, action, and it's on, right?
18:25I know Kung Fu.
18:27In the synthetic world of The Matrix, we're not limited by our bodies.
18:31We're limited just by what we can imagine.
18:34Which is how you can have these innovations like bullet time.
18:37I think what's really interesting about The Matrix is that it employed special effects in a way that was inherent to the narrative.
18:47The reason that bullet time exists in The Matrix is as an exemplar that this is not reality.
18:52When you're in The Matrix, you're capable of doing things which you cannot do in the real world.
18:58And the first time we see Trinity jump up into that crane pose, we had never seen that before.
19:04That was a technology that was effectively invented for that film.
19:08And then later on in the film, when you see the bullet time more and more,
19:12it becomes the distinguishing feature that tells you you're in The Matrix and you're not in the dystopian apocalypse where we actually exist.
19:20The Matrix certainly is a very exciting film if you're just interested in seeing cool graphics and Kung Fu.
19:33But you can also have all sorts of debates with friends about its philosophical underpinnings.
19:38The Matrix predicted a society where people could just plug in and lose themselves.
19:44Where people see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe, because it's comfortable and safe, even though it's a lie.
19:50I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, The Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
20:02You know what I'm saying? I just want to eat some steak and I want to stay asleep.
20:06Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really seductive choice, right?
20:09I don't want to remember nothing. Nothing.
20:11The Matrix is perfect science fiction because it has the great moment of personal choice.
20:17Do we plug in and do we just become mindless cogs in a machine or do we unplug and choose to live in a world that is cold and dark and complicated and hard and real?
20:34You flirt with science fiction all over the place.
20:36Very much.
20:37I just admit that The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises are actually dystopian science fiction.
20:42Right.
20:43Because you're looking at a hyper-trophied corrupt state.
20:47Yeah, Dark Knight Rises, it's an experience of a dystopian future and looking at demagoguery or looking at all these things that can happen.
20:55I think there's an aspect of science fiction that celebrates human potential where only a hero is your answer, is your salvation.
21:02Yeah, very much.
21:03Thank you very much.
21:04Ooh, you want a play? Come on.
21:09Terminated .
21:12The role of the heroes in most dark futures is to defeat the forces that have made these dystopian futures happen.
21:20Dystopian fiction often consider just how much one person can do to change the world around them.
21:25It's fighting against the system that has become oppressive and corrupt.
21:27Drop the gun, you are under arrest.
21:31Thank you for your cooperation.
21:34Robocop is a cop who is ultimately turned into a half-man, half-machine, but he's a good cop who believes that there are bad guys and he's there to stop them.
21:45Ooh, guns, guns, guns!
21:51And I kept thinking about a science fiction story that was kind of set in the business world.
21:55You know, it was the 80s and it was kind of the beginning of the greed generation.
21:59So in Robocop, it was saying that now we live in a world that is really run by money and corporations.
22:06And I thought, oh, we should make a movie about how this is inevitable, but maybe you can stop it.
22:11You are under arrest.
22:13Robocop thinks he's catching one bad guy, and then it turns out the bad guy is even bigger than him.
22:17It's a system.
22:18That's the power of sci-fi. It makes it possible to sit there and kind of think about these very big topics while you're watching, you know, robots shoot guys in the penis.
22:30Your move, creep.
22:35The violence of Robocop is absolutely startling.
22:39You know, it shows that this is dystopia and there is something very terrible that has happened to the world to get us to this place.
22:45I'm always a bit amazed that people ask, why is there so much violence in your movies?
22:50Then I would answer, why is there not violence in your movies?
22:54Violence is built into the universe.
22:56And that was for me something that I understood from a, let's say, a religious point of view.
23:03I felt that the death of Murphy should be a crucifixion.
23:08This has to be horrifying, so it had to be extremely violent.
23:13I think it works very well.
23:15Then slowly you get these electronic movements and then you start to recognize things.
23:21That is the resurrection.
23:24I can see the beauty of that story and I wanted to impose that on the movie.
23:29And basically it came to me the idea that he should walk over the water.
23:35And that's what I always felt about Robocop, that he was the American Jesus.
23:39Robocop is a political satire and the realization that this is an allegory for Jesus Christ just shows that we really attach cultural significance to the idea of saviors who sacrifice everything to help us.
23:54Science fiction shows us an absolutely dystopian, a horrific future, but we find a beacon of hope from the heroes of a story.
24:05You want to get out of here?
24:08You talk to me.
24:10Mad Max, the reluctant anti-hero.
24:13Mad Max was like, you hear a piece of music and you're like, oh my God, where was that been?
24:20George Miller, he was a kid who grew up in Australia and when he was a teenager, he saw a lot of his friends die in car crashes.
24:28And then when he was a doctor, he saw lots of corpses come in that had been mangled from roads.
24:33So when George Miller becomes a filmmaker, this idea of telling life and death stories set on roads feels very natural to him.
24:39In the very first movie, society is kind of on the verge of collapsing and Max, he was a cop, goes sort of insane over the course of the film, trying to stop criminals and losing his family.
24:54And then the second movie, Road Warrior, there has been this unexplained nuclear war and that now gas supplies are incredibly scarce and that has given way to this post-apocalyptic wasteland that Max is now wandering through.
25:07Mad Max might save the situation, but the world itself just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
25:16There are certain films that the culture pivots around and Road Warrior was one of them.
25:22As the science fiction writer J.G. Ballard said, it's the Sistine Chapel of punk.
25:27You! You can run, but you can't hide!
25:31I'm a comic book artist. I write and I draw and I'm used to words and pictures all the time.
25:36So when I got a call from George saying, I've got some stuff on Mad Max I'd like to talk to you about.
25:41I said, yeah.
25:47In the fourth Mad Max, Fury Road, we had to plot every single thing on that movie and we did it through nearly 4,000 drawings.
25:54We really changed the hero myth as well.
26:01In Fury Road, Mad Max, he's much more of a product of sort of a post-traumatic stress disorder and there's nothing to live for except to live.
26:0920 years out in the outback on his own in this beat up old car.
26:13So this guy is like a feral animal.
26:16He's placed as a hood ornament on a hot rod.
26:18He's used as a blood bag.
26:20That's my commodity!
26:22Because in Fury Road, the commodity is not oil, it's actually the human body itself.
26:26You're more than welcome to come with us.
26:29I'll make my own way.
26:32I feel like when you watch the Mad Max films, after the first one, he doesn't even see himself as somebody who could be a hero.
26:39It's not his world.
26:40It's up to women like Furiosa to do the work of actually making it a better place.
26:45They're looking for hope.
26:46What about you?
26:48Redemption.
26:50Furiosa is George's character.
26:52That was George saying, I'm going to make a female road warrior and she's going to be an icon of the times.
26:58Even though it was a Mad Max movie, it really allowed this heroine character to sort of rise up and almost steal the hero role.
27:09Furiosa is a much more compelling hero than we see with Max.
27:13We understand her backstory a lot better and her motivations.
27:17No!
27:18She has to protect these women who are trying to escape from a really cruel, terrible slave owner.
27:24Remember me?
27:30There comes a time when Furiosa being very injured, stabbed in the side, losing vast amounts of blood.
27:37And then Max penetrates her with a knife and gives her his blood and mingles with her.
27:43He's now getting invested in spite of himself.
27:46You see the male and the female energy coming together. It was very powerful.
27:50And in a way, this is their love scene.
27:53And then he leaves.
27:55When you see Furiosa on that platform rise above this village, you realize this might be the first time where there's a little bit of hope at the end of a Mad Max film.
28:07There's a chance now, a real hope, that a new type of society can be formed by these girls with the muscle of Furiosa.
28:13These heroic women will now bring forth a new dispensation to this world.
28:19They're going to remake the world that exists in their ideology.
28:23What will happen, we don't know. But that's another story.
28:26We as a society hunger for our nightmares writ large on the big screen or the small screen.
28:34So it seems to me that's a big part of what science fiction is.
28:37It is.
28:38But as we got into the technological age and the science age, it's our fear and our angst of where this was all going, this big human experiment.
28:45Right.
28:46We're always worried about where's the world going and is this world coming to an end.
28:50Yeah.
28:51And a lot of science fiction capitalizes on those fears.
28:53Sure.
28:54Can we at least retard the apocalypse and delay it?
28:56Yeah. Sound a warning or think twice about a policy.
28:59All science fiction are cautionary tales. The best science fiction are cautionary tales.
29:04What you're about to watch is a nightmare.
29:07It is not meant to be prophetic. It need not happen.
29:10But in this place, in this moment, it does happen.
29:14This is the Twilight Zone.
29:17The Twilight Zone was the first great science fiction show on television, period.
29:24Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
29:27I mean, we all think of the 1950s as apple pie placid.
29:32But the Twilight Zone offered up the dark side of that.
29:36Everybody's dead except me.
29:40There were always these great twists.
29:42And I just loved that. I loved the poignant irony of,
29:46Oh, he's got all the time in the world with his books and then he breaks his glasses.
29:50That's not fair.
29:52Before the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling was the great mainstream dramatist of 1950s television.
30:00But he was censored at every turn when he wanted to talk about social issues, racial issues, political issues.
30:06I think it's criminal that we're not permitted to make dramatic note of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society.
30:14This dissatisfaction, this frustration led Rod Serling to create a show in which he could talk about the issues, but in a way that the censor and the advertisers wouldn't object.
30:24We are the minorities!
30:27To me, a dystopian story is a warning.
30:29This is a way that it can raise its hand and say,
30:31Hey, everybody, it seems like we might be going in this direction.
30:34And look, it won't be good if we go there.
30:37So maybe we want to do something about it now.
30:40You're all desperate to point some kind of a finger at a neighbor.
30:44But believe me, friends, the only thing that's going to happen is that we're going to eat each other up alive.
30:49Any time you read or watch a dystopic story and you think, well, we're past that now, that couldn't happen.
30:56Look, I swear it isn't me!
30:57Suddenly we're handed a curveball with politics, with issues of the day, and we realize we can always be blindsided.
31:03My name is Offred.
31:05I had another name, but it's forbidden now.
31:09So many things are forbidden now.
31:13In The Handmaid's Tale, we are plunged into this future world where men are the absolute rulers and women are the underclass.
31:23This is a very old-fashioned religious regime.
31:26They have special clothing that they wear.
31:28They go into supermarkets where nothing is labeled with letters.
31:32It feels like an alien place.
31:35It feels like another world.
31:37And yet we get these constant reminders that, no, this is Boston.
31:42But it's a very different world.
31:44I think I fell in love with The Handmaid's Tale because of Offred.
31:49Really how she was able to keep up her strength and her belief and her hope in this horrible situation.
31:56God whipped up a special plague.
31:59There's been an environmental disaster and the fertility rate has gone down precipitously.
32:04Hannah!
32:05No!
32:06Please!
32:07Please!
32:08Don't take her!
32:09Help me!
32:10She's ripped away from her husband and her child.
32:11And because Offred is one of the few fertile women left.
32:13This is the new one.
32:14She's kept as a reproductive slave in the house of this commander.
32:18The handmaid shall lie between the legs of the commander's wife.
32:23The two of you will become one flower waiting to be seated.
32:28We're flowers.
32:30Lita.
32:31What?
32:33It's nice.
32:35One thing that I especially love so much about Janine is that everybody thinks she's a lunatic.
32:40But she's taken the reality that's been presented to her that she cannot seem to fight and fights it in her own way.
32:47Hi.
32:48Because the only thing that is guaranteed in your future as a handmaid is you will be going to the market and you will be raped.
32:55They didn't put anything into the book that human beings have not already done at some point in history or that they're not doing now.
33:02For instance, in Nazi Germany, the SS men had assigned biological wives.
33:07She took directly from horrible atrocities that have been committed against people and put them in her book and just formed them into the world of Gilead.
33:15Margaret Atwood was fascinated with the Salem witch trials and the ways in which women who were considered deviant from the norm were punished.
33:24It was about sending a clear message to all women that if you get out of line, the wages of that are death.
33:33The Iranian revolution was a very interesting analog for Margaret.
33:38It was a religious revolution.
33:40You know, one day women were wearing mini skirts and the next day they were kicked out of college.
33:47All within 24 hours.
33:49Ladies, you can't work here anymore.
33:52It's the law now.
33:54Offred has her job taken away from her.
33:57And realizes she has no more control over money or property.
34:00I think this would have very much resonated with readers in the 1980s because women had just earned the right to own credit cards in their own name in 1974.
34:10You realize that we've been there before.
34:13You realize that there but for the grace of God could go all of us.
34:16It's not that difficult for society to shift just a little bit in order to recreate that dystopian future.
34:23Science fiction pieces often portray the breakdown of society as a warning.
34:28You know, it's a lot easier to look back on a TV show and see where the important things happened.
34:33It's a lot harder in your life to look back.
34:35When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up.
34:39When they suspended the Constitution, we didn't wake up then either.
34:43In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
34:48The idea of the slow burn, that's what makes The Handmaid's Tale so powerful.
34:53It's about the evolution of a very small batch of variables that becomes kind of like the butterfly of his wings that cause a huge storm.
35:01Why'd they send the army?
35:03I think it's just a warning. I don't think it's a prediction.
35:07In the very subtle bits of resistance, that's how the fire stays alive.
35:13Because you can take everything away from these women.
35:16You take their families away. You take their eyeballs away.
35:19But you can't take away their own very unique humanity.
35:24That's why you have to stay awake. Because otherwise, you're left with Gilead.
35:29This may not seem ordinary to you right now, but after a time it will.
35:39This will become ordinary.
35:43I'm keeping this group together alive.
35:47We get one thing straight.
35:49You're staying.
35:51This isn't a democracy anymore.
35:53Post-apocalyptic stories are really about just trying to restart and maybe make a better world if we can.
36:02Can we rebuild society after the apocalypse?
36:06You're not going to get color TV back very quickly, but the answer with The Walking Dead is I hope it can.
36:12But not everyone's going to come up with a peaceful way of existing.
36:16I wrote a comic about a group of normal, average, everyday human beings trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse and kind of build some semblance of the life that they once knew.
36:31Oh, God.
36:33The real reason you go back on The Walking Dead is because those characters fascinate you and they are all fighting to find out who they are in a world in which society has been wiped out and the rules have all changed.
36:50Please don't.
36:51Do it, Dad.
36:53Do it.
36:54Post-apocalyptic stories always talk about what happens to people and what these people become.
37:03And I think that's a classic science fiction theme.
37:07And I think that is something that exists in the Romero zombie mythology in his movies.
37:14They're coming to get you, Barbara.
37:16George Romero invented the zombie.
37:18I mean, the zombie did not exist before George Romero, not in the way we think of the zombie.
37:22George Romero read I Am Legend and loved the concept of being at war with the mindless world.
37:29Now, what Romero did, which is critical to modern zombie lore, is Romero put in social commentary.
37:36All right, Vince, hit him in the head, right between the eyes.
37:39The great things about zombie movies, they get into our fear of betrayal.
37:44That paranoia that we all have as human beings, that people that we love are going to turn on us.
37:49They tap into our fear of a predator.
37:51We're afraid of them because they're going to eat us.
37:54It has the fear of overpopulation.
37:56Oh, and the fear of disease.
37:57The chimps are infected.
37:59The thing that really bugged me about those movies was that you have these really great setups with these interesting characters.
38:05And then the time limit runs out on the movie.
38:08And as a writer, I was like, oh, my God, like, you're really missing an opportunity here.
38:12You could follow these people for years and years and years.
38:14I would say after eight seasons of The Walking Dead, we have probably created over 16,000 walker makeups.
38:26When I was younger, I studied physiology and anatomy quite a bit.
38:30I minored in art.
38:31So for me, it's always been important to elevate the level of realism and create something the audience immediately saw as horrific.
38:42I'm sorry this happened to you.
38:44And transform it into something that you felt sympathy for.
38:48The Walking Dead shows the various ways we might rebuild society after an apocalyptic event.
38:56Rick Grimes and his group encounter many different types of civilizations over the course of The Walking Dead.
39:01You have a place like Woodbury that's led by the governor.
39:03We get to Alexandria, which is a safe haven that was built for people in Washington, D.C. to kind of retreat to.
39:10But the worst of the worst when it comes to the societies that we've encountered is Negan and his group, the Saviors.
39:16I'm going to beat the holy hell out of one of you.
39:21As a writer, you know, sometimes I worry that people think, like, oh, that guy, he's just having fun and he's callous.
39:33I like killing these people.
39:34I'll kill anybody.
39:35It's really not that easy for me.
39:37I need you to know me.
39:41When the characters die, like, I get upset the same way that the audience gets upset.
39:46I cry sometimes while I'm writing.
39:47That's a thing that totally happens.
39:49It does wear on me sometimes.
39:51Back to it.
39:54There have to be people that keep things in balance morally.
39:59Otherwise, it's all chaos.
40:01It's all about groups of people that you can trust in terms of making a better future.
40:07Everything that they're fighting for is about building a new society.
40:11There will be something after.
40:13We have to keep our faith in each other.
40:16If we can hold on to that with everything we have, the future is ours.
40:23The Walking Dead captures these amazing little snippets of what human nature is at its best and worst, and when it's tested.
40:33And the fact that you might never be redeemed, you may be beyond redemption, but look how many other characters are redeemed in some way.
40:42It is very much about coming from the darkest point and finding a way to work together to bring ourselves up out of that darkness and the rebuilding of civilization.
40:53And so, to me, on a long enough timeline, it's a very uplifting story about people who have lived through the worst of the worst and have become the best of the best.
41:02And so, I've always looked at it as an optimistic story.
41:06Science fiction is talking about the human condition.
41:09It's ridiculous to say good and evil, but I think the idea of competitive, aggressive versus compassionate, empathic, you know, and we have both.
41:16Yep.
41:17And nature has selected for both, in a way, because we're social beings.
41:21We didn't get to survive without taking care of our kids and learning how to hunt together and all the things that we give and share with each other.
41:29And we all have empathy and we're mindful and we have deep sympathy even if we don't act that way in our lives or people don't see that in us.
41:38Everybody has that capacity.
41:39Right.
41:40And that is the capacity, I think, that will always pull us back from the brink.
41:59And that is the capacity, our clients have to come to see that the capacity.
42:04We all have to understand the capacity for our kids.
42:10Where are we, people from the brink.
42:12We all have to understand their family and and our families they have to come to see.
42:17We all have to understand.
42:19We all have to know.
42:21We all have to learn.