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00:01We're sending you back to the future!
00:05Why is time travel fun?
00:07Here we go.
00:09Because who doesn't wonder about the past?
00:11Who doesn't wonder about the future?
00:13If somebody comes back from the future to change what happened,
00:17are we basically in a movie that's already been shot?
00:20I'll be back.
00:22Time travel stories embrace the potential
00:24that we might open up new timelines, new worlds,
00:27and new possibilities for ourselves as people.
00:30That kind of imagination which can see through everything.
00:36What are we always trying to do when we tell stories about time travel?
00:39What I'm always trying to do is to touch people in the heart.
00:42Today I'm the age you were when you left.
00:44This would be a real good time for you to come back.
00:47If we can go any place we want in time,
00:50time is no longer our jailer.
00:52Every second of our past makes us who we are.
00:56And the idea that we could relive that
01:00or view it from another perspective
01:02is so human and so spiritual
01:05that I think it touches everyone.
01:07It touches everyone.
01:08It touches everyone.
01:09It touches everyone.
01:11It shoots everyone that means no need to know
01:13It's so, it doesn't seem to be filled.
01:14It brings me four other places and ethic.
01:17You've basically covered just about every base in science fiction,
01:45from alien contact, monsters, space travel, everything.
01:50And you executive produced the Back to the Future series of films, three films.
01:55Do you think time travel is possible?
01:57I asked Stephen Hawking that one day when I worked with Errol Morris.
01:59How many people get to say that?
02:01But when I was working with Errol Morris as his executive producer on the documentary on Stephen Hawking's book,
02:07Brief History of Time, I asked Stephen Hawking that question because Back to the Future had just come out.
02:11And Stephen Hawking said it's very possible to go into the future, but impossible to go back into the past.
02:16Hey, we're time traveling right now, one minute per minute.
02:21So he kind of was alluding to the fact that everything at Back to the Future could never happen.
02:26Couldn't really happen.
02:29The classical idea of a time machine, which you can go into it at one point in time
02:34and come back out the other side at some other point in time.
02:37It's almost certainly impossible.
02:44But what's beautiful about filmmaking is you don't have to listen to the physicist.
02:49Whether or not time travel exists, it speaks to that question of free will, essentially.
02:54That's the question we're playing with when we're playing with time travel.
02:58It opens up all sorts of fascinating thought experiments about how that might play out.
03:04In the summer of 1980, I discovered my father's high school yearbook.
03:09And that was where the proverbial bolt of lightning struck.
03:13What if you could go to high school with your dad?
03:17And what if your mom went to the same high school?
03:19Don't I know you from somewhere?
03:21Yes.
03:22I'm your density.
03:24Who wouldn't want to be a fly on the wall on their parents' first date, right?
03:27So in Back to the Future, a kid named Marty McFly accidentally goes back in time
03:34and interferes with the event that made his parents meet and fall in love.
03:41So Marty has two problems.
03:44One, he has to get back to 1985.
03:46But before he can do that, he has to make sure that he puts the love affair
03:51between his father and his mother back on track.
03:54Everybody has that fantasy, time travel.
04:00And I feel Back to the Future just makes it so rich.
04:05The possibility with a kid, this crazy guy, and a DeLorean.
04:11You know, I mean, it's just, my God.
04:13So there have been time travel stories in the past, such as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol,
04:20in which Scrooge travels by means of dream visions that allow him to visit the past and the present and the future.
04:27In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court,
04:30our protagonist is bonked on the head, and that's what returns him to medieval England.
04:35We never bought that stuff.
04:39We wanted it to be scientific.
04:43It's got to be via a time machine of some sort.
04:47So that would be some guy who invented time travel in his garage.
04:52And that, of course, is Dr. Emmett L. Brown.
04:56Doc?
04:58Don't say a word.
04:59I just love this doc, who is feverishly trying to invent everything he could imagine inventing.
05:07And time travel, of course, would be the ultimate.
05:10When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're going to see some serious s**t.
05:15His excitement about achieving that was incredible.
05:20I loved it.
05:22Mark.
05:23Action.
05:25Movies like Back to the Future provide a kind of tutorial about how paradoxes are things you can play with.
05:31Prior to this point in time, somewhere in the past, the timeline skewed into this tangent, creating an ultimate 1985.
05:39It's necessary for Doc to say it, not just for the audience to be caught up with the story,
05:45but because he's got to say, I've got to do this because of this, because if that happens, then you've got this going.
05:51Marty, whatever happens, you must not let your other self see you.
05:54The consequences could be disastrous.
05:56Excuse me, sir.
05:58He's in total terror that one mistake of judgment and the whole cosmos could collapse.
06:06This is the thing that every writer always struggles with in time travel stories.
06:10If you go back in time and something that you do when you're back there causes the death of your grandfather before he has impregnated your grandmother,
06:20and you therefore cease to exist.
06:23Right.
06:24But if you cease to exist, then you wear it around to get in the time machine in the first place and to go back in time and do that.
06:32So, what happens?
06:35They call it the grandfather paradox.
06:38Now remember, according to my theory, you interfered with your parents' first meeting.
06:41If they don't meet, they won't fall in love, they won't get married, and they won't have kids.
06:44Back to the Future laid out its rules so clearly.
06:47It effectively taught the movie audience, this is what happens when you change the past.
06:52This is what an alternate timeline might look like.
06:56There are also kind of creepy questions like what happens when your mom falls in love with you as a teenager.
07:00The most memorable piece is Marty's photograph of himself from the 80s, which he carries around with him back into the 50s
07:12and keeps looking at it to make sure he's still in the picture.
07:17Erased from existence.
07:19So the photograph itself is obviously incredibly paradoxical because why would his brother and sister be there if his parents had never met?
07:26And, like, why would there even have been a photograph in the first place?
07:28But nobody ever stops to think about that because we've set up this rule that says that when Marty disappears from this photo, he's going to fade out of existence.
07:39It's a perfect dramatization of the idea of erasing yourself from the timeline.
07:48Time travel movies sort of invent whatever device will create the best story.
07:52Back to the Future really sets up a mousetrap to create the perfect kind of suspense.
07:58Time travel opens up a lot of possibilities. So you can have an alternate history, you can have an alternate present. It allows us to change a lot of different weird things about our reality.
08:13And the possibilities are kind of limitless.
08:28Why is so much of our fantasy, our imagination in the science fiction genre taken up with this idea of time travel?
08:43Because we can't do it. I think it is just wonderful to see it on the screen and to imagine ourselves being in that situation. I would have loved to be able to time travel.
08:54Yeah. I mean, imagine to go back and to say, I'm not going to do Hercules in New York.
08:59My name is Hercules. Hercules, mycules, give me the dough.
09:03I mean, it's like, it's like, unbelievable.
09:05That's the thing you want to go back.
09:06It's the first thing that they do.
09:07Not meet Jesus, not kill Hitler.
09:09You want to go back and fix that one move.
09:12This wants you, doesn't it?
09:13To kill Hitler or to go and be back in the Roman days.
09:16Wow, that would be really interesting to be able to time travel.
09:19But the question is, if you can move back and forth in time, do we have free will?
09:24Right.
09:25Because the Terminator movies are kind of about that. They're about free will.
09:29If somebody comes back from the future to change what happens down there, then are we just all puppets of a timeline?
09:39Well, I have total faith in you that you will figure it out.
09:50There's an interesting theme in Terminator about, can we change the past? Can we change the future?
09:59And what you see is the future coming back to destroy the past.
10:02The Terminator coming back to try to kill Sarah Connor also brings back Kyle Reese.
10:10Who becomes the father to John Connor and creates the leader of humanity.
10:16The time machine was a mechanism to put the Terminator and also Michael Biehn, the soldier, into the past.
10:23That character was sent by John Connor in the future to go back in time to protect this girl from the Terminator.
10:35Once they're there, then you have this chase. Who's going to rescue Sarah Connor or is she going to get killed?
10:41Science fiction is a great place to ask, is our destiny fixed or can we change it?
10:49I didn't do anything.
10:51No, but you will.
10:52The question is, are we locked into one series of events?
10:55Like by the end of the first film, you realize you're seeing the creation myth of the thing they've gone back to prevent in the first place.
11:02The second film opens up the possibility and Sarah Connor speaks to it directly.
11:10Maybe that's not the universe we're stuck in, that maybe the future isn't written.
11:14Sarah sticks a knife at the table and says, there's no fable we make for ourselves.
11:18She's been told that she can change the future.
11:22But is that just an illusion?
11:24Are we basically in a movie that's already been shot? It's already rolled up in the can someplace?
11:29That could be.
11:30You can play it forward and backward as much as you want, but the ending never changes?
11:34I think that we have control over ourselves and I think that we have the power to create changes.
11:41Your son gave me a message to give to you. The future is not set. You must survive or I will never exist.
11:47The future is not set, you know? I mean, that's kind of the line. The future is not set. And it can be altered.
11:54Should I tell you about your father? If you don't send Kyle, you can never be.
12:00The point that the film makes is that you can change history. You can't escape the Terminator.
12:06But time travel is not about history and it's not about time travel.
12:11It's about accepting responsibility for all the possibilities in your own life.
12:16The idea of taking the wrong turn and making a correction later on, it's not a new idea in science fiction.
12:24It's not even a new idea in the movies.
12:29Looper is one where you're essentially trying to not change the world, but change your world, change your life.
12:38In Looper, the time traveler is a hitman, wouldn't you know?
12:42He's a hitman played both by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis.
12:50When you agree to be a Looper, it's not a long-term job. There's not much of a future in it.
12:54One day, you know that your future self is going to show up in front of you.
12:59And you're going to have to shoot him.
13:06That's going to be his final hit to kill himself.
13:09And he and all of the other Loopers enter into this bargain.
13:15And you have to do it. If you don't do it, it's a really big problem.
13:18The older one, the Bruce Willis character, knows the whole story, but the younger one is learning for the first time what's going on.
13:31And he naturally has a few questions.
13:33So do you know what's going to happen?
13:35I don't want to talk about time travel.
13:38Because if we start talking about it, then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.
13:44Talking about time travel, it makes you go crazy.
13:48And the option of coming through a conversation like that with you at a younger age would make you even crazier.
13:56Move! Damn it!
13:59Time travel is a device that a story is using to tell a story about human nature and how humans treat each other and why.
14:09Move.
14:15Then I saw it.
14:17If Looper's a story about how violence perpetuates more violence, to me the lesson is that you just create more problems and worse problems.
14:27I saw it.
14:29And the path was a circle.
14:31It's kind of about changing your own destiny and it's kind of about how your destiny is always being shaped by people more powerful than yourself.
14:41And how do you really get out of a dark cycle?
14:47The movie is pointing out another way to end that cycle.
14:51So I changed it.
14:53It is an existential dilemma. A lot of time travel is very philosophical in that way.
14:59Joe finally takes control of his life by ending it.
15:04Why are we fascinated by time travel?
15:09Well, you know, people very often ask me why am I interested in time?
15:13I say, well, because I've always lived in it.
15:15Yeah, right.
15:16And we are. We feel very trapped in it.
15:18It's like we try and hang on to the moment. We take photographs of everything.
15:21Right, right.
15:23We desperately want to hang on to this reality and it recedes.
15:27Yeah.
15:28What time travel allows us to do is to say, okay, but what if we could?
15:32What if we could preserve that moment? What if we could revisit that moment genuinely?
15:36Well, that's all science fiction is about what if.
15:38Yes.
15:39What if we could travel through space?
15:41Yeah.
15:42What if we could travel through time?
15:43What makes Interstellar so compelling is that the filmmakers devise these turns of plot to create a real classic family story with the deepest possible emotions.
16:02Fundamentally, Interstellar is about the human cost of time travel.
16:06It's a deeply and intensely personal drama and a story of what happens when a father is separated from his child.
16:13It says stay!
16:15No, I'm coming back.
16:17When?
16:18Will he go and save humanity or will he stay with his daughter instead?
16:22I mean, by the time I get back, we might even be the same age.
16:27Ah, Murph.
16:28You have no idea when you're coming back.
16:30Interstellar projects us into the near future in which the world has gone through an enormous global catastrophe.
16:43Nelson's torching his whole crop.
16:45Light?
16:46They're saying it's the last harvest for okra.
16:49Ever.
16:51I play Cooper's father-in-law.
16:54Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former astronaut who by several turns of plot goes shooting into outer space.
17:03We've got to move to another planet or we'll not survive.
17:06Interstellar is an unusual time travel film because instead of building a literal time machine and having it be about an invention, it's about the way time works in space.
17:19The way that it speeds up or slows down depending on wormholes and gravitational pull.
17:23I think there are all sorts of different ways of looking at time travel.
17:29And when I came to do Interstellar, which is not a time travel movie, but has that element in it.
17:35It does fold time at the end.
17:36It does.
17:37You still approached it very rigorously.
17:39Yes.
17:40By going to some of the top experts.
17:42It was a really fascinating part of the process because Kip Thorne, who was one of the originators...
17:47Caltech, I think, right?
17:48Caltech.
17:49Yeah.
17:50And Kip is one of the great minds in physics.
17:52What he taught me is that once you can grasp those physical concepts, the concepts of astrophysics, they offer you this great launching pad for story possibilities to do with relativity.
18:05Right.
18:06Time dilation.
18:07Exactly.
18:09There are two forms of time travel.
18:11There's the time travel that is probably impossible, and that's going backwards.
18:15Then you have time travel, which is not only possible, but already a feature of our world, which is time dilation forward.
18:25In science, there's this thing called the twin paradox, which basically says if my twin gets in a spaceship and goes traveling near to the speed of light and then returns to Earth, when my twin gets back to Earth, my twin will be younger than I am.
18:38That's a form of time travel.
18:41And that is actually brilliantly illustrated in the movie Interstellar.
18:46Go, go, go, go, go.
18:49Seven years per hour here.
18:51Let's make it count.
18:53Interstellar explored in the most advanced way how time travel really might work.
18:58When they go to the water planet, time works differently.
19:04They come back to their ship, and the guy who stayed on the ship has grown old.
19:09I've waited years.
19:12How many years?
19:16By now it must be.
19:17It's 23 years, four months, eight days.
19:20Interstellar suggests that time travel will always have a certain kind of trade-off.
19:25So on the one hand, the scientist's ability to travel through space and time is essential to saving humanity.
19:33But the fact that he has to go on this journey in the first place and to be separated from his daughter for most of her natural life suggests the very real cost.
19:42Hey, Dad.
19:46I ain't married.
19:47You son of a bitch.
19:50There are moments when Matthew is allowed to see his daughter by video stream.
19:58It's absolutely heartbreaking.
20:00You once told me that when you came back we might be the same age.
20:06And today I'm the age you were when you left.
20:13It's going to be a real good time for you to come back.
20:15People talk about my kid was born and I blinked and I sent him off to college.
20:21The movie is literally about that.
20:26The sacrifices that go along with whatever it is that you've given your life to at the expense of these moments with your family.
20:35Which I think is the very poetic part of Interstellar.
20:38So if Interstellar explores the human cost of time travel, Primer does something very similar, but it does so in a different way.
20:49We have two everyday engineers who accidentally create time travel.
20:53Some people think it's the most credible, complicated time travel movie done on a very low budget.
21:09Do you know who directed that?
21:11Shane Carruth.
21:12He's in it.
21:13He's lovely in it.
21:14Wow.
21:16What is it feeling?
21:18I don't know if I'm making it up.
21:20These two guys, Abe and Aaron, keep investigating this phenomenon.
21:24There's this weird anomaly that shows up.
21:26What they finally realize is that they have created a space that you can travel through time.
21:36And so they take this and create a bigger box.
21:40Big enough for a human to be in.
21:44When they do this, they use it for really mundane and very human purposes.
21:48One uses it to play the stock market.
21:50And time travel ends up pulling the friends apart.
21:52I just want to know what box you used.
21:54You built the one for you, right?
21:55Just the one.
21:56Yeah.
21:57How many do you think I have?
21:58They are suspicious of each other and they're also deceiving each other because
22:01something about going back in time affects their brain.
22:04And they do start losing their minds.
22:10Like many other movies, Primer does indeed suggest that there is a cost to time travel.
22:14And in this case, the cost is both emotional and physical.
22:17What's on your hand?
22:19Are you bleeding?
22:20So when we start seeing our characters show up and they've got, you know, bloody ears and they lose the ability to write,
22:26their right-handed writing looks like their left-handed writing.
22:29There's something going on mentally that they are paying the price with.
22:33The time travel story, it's a kind of Faustian tale.
22:40The bargain with the devil.
22:42Everything is a barter.
22:44If you sell your soul to the devil, you can have everything you ever dreamed of.
22:49But eventually you pay the piper.
22:52Who doesn't wonder about the past?
22:57Who doesn't wonder about the future?
22:59How many times has that game been played?
23:01You know, if you could go back in time, where would you go?
23:05Can you remember the first time you ever heard of time travel?
23:08The ancient Greeks must have had time travel.
23:11Isn't there some time travel thing in Shakespeare?
23:13Right?
23:14But there isn't.
23:15Time travel is new.
23:17Time travel is a new idea.
23:20Before H.G. Wells, it didn't exist.
23:24What Wells gave the time travel story was the machine.
23:30The idea that somebody could build a machine that would do for time what rocket ships would do for space.
23:35And the idea was just irresistible.
23:37It's literally true that the words time and travel in English were never used together
23:45before H.G. Wells invented this character that he called the time traveler.
23:51The night came like the turning out of a lamp and in another moment came tomorrow.
23:59The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and even fainter.
24:04Tomorrow night came black, then day came, night again, day again, faster and faster still.
24:13My grandfather H.G. Wells wrote that in 1895.
24:17This is a first edition of The Time Machine.
24:22Firstly, he was writing anything he could sell.
24:26The novels that we now know, which are these great science fiction novels,
24:30came after he'd spent years writing as a journalist.
24:33But there was an enormous amount of kind of revolutionary science going on at the time.
24:37Darwin was talking about the history of human life in terms of millions and billions of years.
24:46Archaeologists were doing the same thing.
24:48Humanity was developing a longer view of time than ever before.
24:54When I speak of time, gentlemen, I'm referring to the fourth dimension.
24:58H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, his character goes forward in time.
25:03No problem there.
25:06Going back in time, entirely different thing.
25:09If you go back in time, then you start running into all sorts of issues with causality.
25:14And that's the view that's expressed in the phrase, the butterfly effect.
25:19A tiny change, a tiny perturbation in a complex system can have enormous and unpredictable consequences in a fairly short time.
25:29And it starts with The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury.
25:37The basic idea of this story is that you can travel back in time, but you're going to be on this suspended platform.
25:42And you can shoot a dinosaur, but it has to be one that was going to die anyway, so that you don't change anything in the future.
25:48And this fairly arrogant game hunter steps off and kills a butterfly.
25:54And comes back and this future is turned into this kind of dystopian version of his own world that he barely recognizes.
26:05Bradbury creates these deep metaphors that give shape to a lot of the way I think people have subsequently understood ideas like time travel.
26:13Oh, if you change a butterfly in the past, the entire future might be different.
26:19When writers of time travel stories consider the logical implications of everything that happens, they get tied up in these paradoxes.
26:30Robert Heinlein is the first writer to get the pleasure and peculiarity of time travel paradoxes and how they can be exploited again and again and again.
26:39He sees that the problem with time travel stories isn't a problem, it's an opportunity.
26:44He wrote stories like all you zombies, which has nothing to do with zombies, by the way.
26:49But it has to do with probably the most completely confusing and delightful science fiction time paradox story there is, which was made into the film Predestination.
27:00I can do this, I can change my past.
27:03Yes, you can.
27:04Have you ever thought about changing yours?
27:07I never deviate from the mission.
27:10Predestination is about an intersex time traveller who starts life as a woman, is forced into gender reassignment, becomes a man, that man then travels back in time, falls in love with his female self.
27:28That female self then has a child, which ends up being the creation of themselves.
27:33So it's an intersex time travelling incest love story.
27:39And in fact Playboy magazine rejected the story, because all the sex made the editor queasy, the editor of Playboy.
27:47Well I think it had to do with the idea of having sex with yourself to create yourself, which is kind of crazy that Playboy would have an issue with something like that.
27:58But it was 1959.
28:00Well it's the age old question which came first, the chicken or the egg?
28:07Yeah, we say the rooster.
28:09Some things are predestined.
28:11I made you who you are, you made me who I am.
28:14It's a paradox, right?
28:15But it can't be paradoctored.
28:17We've had time travel in science fiction movies for most of the 20th century.
28:23So I guess the question is, why?
28:25Well, because what you're doing is you're exploring possible futures.
28:29You're exploring the decisions that we make now.
28:31It enables us to imagine what the future would be like or what the past would be like if we interacted with it.
28:38It's an incredibly important way of exploring potential futures.
28:42The future is now.
28:48So many science fiction movies are about these brilliant scientists
28:52and astrophysicists, biologists.
28:57And Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is not.
29:00No way.
29:02Yes way, Ted!
29:05In a way, Bill and Ted becomes important just because it's so different from everything else.
29:11It makes you think, what is wrong with us, the people writing these films,
29:14if we can't imagine the future as anything but awful?
29:17Two dudes can be the heroes, man.
29:20Ready, Ted?
29:21Ready, Bill?
29:23Let's go back into history.
29:25Alex Winter and I became Bill and Ted.
29:30Bill S. Preston Esquire, Ted Theodore Logan.
29:34Excellent!
29:36Yay!
29:37Bill and Ted are idiots, and our teacher tells us that if we don't pass our history exam,
29:41we're going to fail out of school.
29:43The lady in that car over there said that Marco Polo was in the year 1275.
29:48It's not just a water sport. I knew it.
29:50If they fail, Ted's dad is going to send him to military school.
29:54And if they're separated, their band will never form and save the world.
30:00Someone from the future shows up and says, we're going to help you.
30:03Do you know when the Mongols ruled China?
30:06Perhaps we could ask them.
30:11Bill and Ted, of course, can accept everything.
30:13Dudes! You guys are going to go back in time!
30:16Yeah!
30:17They're kind of like these modern fools of kind of an eternal optimism.
30:22We had a funny moment.
30:25Chris Matheson and I, when we wrote it,
30:27we were not involved in the casting of the film
30:30and didn't know who would play Bill and Ted.
30:34We had flown to Arizona where we were shooting the movie
30:36and we were at a McDonald's in line
30:38and we saw a couple kids in front of us goofing off
30:42and we were like, those are the guys.
30:44That's who should be playing Bill and Ted.
30:46And later in that day, we met Keanu and Alex.
30:49And those were the guys that were in front of us at McDonald's.
30:52And we were like, that's perfect.
30:55And, you know, of course, we are bequeathed
30:57a time-traveling phone booth by George Carlin
31:00and set upon a mission through space-time
31:03and collect all the various characters from history
31:05because that would be the most awesome report you could have,
31:07would be to actually have the real people there.
31:11We loved toying with all these paradoxes
31:13and one of my favorite parts of the Bill and Ted movie,
31:16it is when all the historical figures are in jail
31:19and they can't get out.
31:21Can we get your dad's keys?
31:22We could steal them.
31:23Good thinking, dude.
31:25After the report, we'll time travel back to two days ago.
31:28Steal your dad's keys and leave them here.
31:32See?
31:33Whoa, yeah!
31:34So after the report, we can't forget to do this,
31:37otherwise it won't happen.
31:38Ted is, like, connecting to his future self
31:41through his present self
31:42to know where his future self will want to hide the keys
31:45because the future self already knows what the past self did,
31:48but the past self doesn't know what the future self did,
31:51but he knows the character.
31:53Come on, Ted.
31:54We've got some historical figures to rescue.
31:57And it perfectly encapsulates the absurdity
31:59of the time travel paradox.
32:00You just have to remind yourself to have done them in the past,
32:03and they will be done in the future.
32:04And I just thought that was terrific.
32:06You know, it just says, yeah, don't worry about it.
32:08It's pretty fascinating, honestly,
32:11how rare Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is
32:14in the grand history of sci-fi films.
32:16And to have a sci-fi film that says,
32:18ah, this is just fun,
32:20is an incredible strange relief.
32:23No way!
32:25But it's not the only science fiction film
32:27to have fun with time travel.
32:29In fact, this comedy was the first to popularize
32:32a particular form of time travel called the time loop.
32:36Rita, I'm reliving the same day over and over.
32:41Groundhog Day, today.
32:43Groundhog Day uses the device of a time loop
32:46as a way to explore ways you need to work on yourself
32:49before you can grow up
32:50and have meaningful relationships with other people.
32:53When I was first brainstorming ideas,
32:57I actually wrote on the little index card time machine,
33:00but I didn't really know what was going to be involved
33:04or how it was going to work.
33:06Phil? Phil?
33:08Phil Connors?
33:09Phil Connors, I thought that was you.
33:11I just thought, okay, whatever it is, the rule is,
33:14he can remember, but nobody else can remember.
33:17So for them, it's just the same day.
33:20And for him, it's part of a long, long, long repetition of days.
33:25And the audience learns to expect that
33:28and can begin to sort of map the day along with the character
33:31and see if they can figure out
33:33how to get out of this time loop before he does.
33:38And the real time travel machine is your brain.
33:40In here, we're constantly recoiling
33:43through different versions of ourselves,
33:46memories and daydreams, alternate paths
33:49where we might end up somewhere different.
33:51Do you ever have deja vu, Mrs. Lancaster?
33:53I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen.
33:56And this is what the time travel story crystallizes for us.
34:00It's a model of consciousness,
34:02which is constantly reeling with ultimate freedom through time
34:05and then finding itself stuck once again in the real world.
34:12In the first stretch of Groundhog Day,
34:14Bill Murray knows everything that's going to happen to him.
34:16He can make that work to his advantage.
34:18And he does it in the way that an adolescent would,
34:21just having fun and also becoming kind of sociopathic.
34:25You don't really care about the other people.
34:27They are objects in your life.
34:29And it moves on to a depression
34:31where he finally decides to kill himself.
34:35And he finds that he cannot even do that.
34:38This is Tom.
34:39He worked in the coal mine until they closed the town.
34:41This is where he, for the first time,
34:43starts to notice other people
34:45and realize that they have lives, too,
34:49and that he's part of a community.
34:51And by seeing himself differently,
34:53he actually opens up a whole new world to himself.
34:56Hello, Father.
34:58Let's get you someplace, Will.
35:00The wonderful thing about being stuck in a time loop,
35:04it makes us look at our lives in a fresh way,
35:06which is one of the great things that movies can do,
35:08and especially science fiction,
35:10because it can so immediately place you
35:13in a different time and place.
35:16Maybe we all do need a time travel movie
35:18to make us a better version of ourselves,
35:19but I hope that we're not stuck as long as he is.
35:23Anything different is good.
35:28My name is Doctor Who.
35:30It's not, is he?
35:31I like it.
35:32You don't know it yet,
35:34but in a short time,
35:35you will trust me with your life.
35:38Doctor Who is a very British,
35:40slightly eccentric, extraordinary series
35:43that's been running for more than 50 years now,
35:45and it involves a charming, peculiar Time Lord.
35:50We're time travelers.
35:52We tread softly.
35:55He's an alien who has come down
35:56to protect us from the rest of the universe
35:59by traveling through time
36:00and by interacting with real historical events
36:03in both the past and the future.
36:05We're unarmed.
36:06You wouldn't open fire
36:07on the unarmed civilians, would you?
36:09It wouldn't be the first time.
36:13Shut those now!
36:17I love Doctor Who.
36:20Over the past 50 years,
36:21there have been a total of 12 Doctor Whos.
36:24Each new performer brings his own thing to it.
36:26I've seen literally every episode of Doctor Who
36:29that's ever been made,
36:30from an unearthly child,
36:32which is made in 1963,
36:34all the way up to the current
36:36Peter Capaldi, Doctor Who's.
36:39You are the Doctor!
36:40You are an enemy of the Daleks!
36:42Oh, yes I am.
36:43Exterminate!
36:46I grew up with a show.
36:48You know, I lived in a tenement
36:49in Glasgow, in Scotland,
36:51and through these flickering little blue images,
36:55I'd be taken to other planets
36:58with strange creatures,
37:00with wonderful imaginative designs.
37:02Do you think you're the first to try and kill me?
37:05And also there has always been
37:07a kind of B-movie element to it,
37:11which I've always loved.
37:12Is everything out here evil?
37:13Hardly anything is evil.
37:14But most things are hungry.
37:16Hunger looks very like evil
37:18from the wrong end of the cutlery.
37:19Or do you think that your bacon sandwich
37:21loves you back?
37:22I think one of the things that's appealing
37:24about Doctor Who is
37:25there's a tradition of English humor
37:27which suggests that
37:29the future is all a joke.
37:31He's a Time Lord, yes,
37:32and he can travel back and forth in time,
37:34and he does it in absurd ways.
37:36Time and relative dimension in space.
37:41TARDIS for short.
37:44The Doctor's Time Machine, the TARDIS,
37:46is one of the best ever
37:48because it invokes the playing with physics
37:53that is going to be necessary
37:54to travel through time and space.
37:56Because his machine is bigger on the inside
37:59than it is on the outside.
38:01So your box can move?
38:04It can go anywhere it likes.
38:06He always has a human companion,
38:08and he brings that companion along with him
38:10on his adventures.
38:11Where are we?
38:12The end of the road.
38:14The last planet.
38:15He seems to have a special place
38:17in his heart for humans,
38:19picking individual, ordinary people
38:22and showing them all of time and space
38:25and giving them a broader view on life.
38:28He's the Doctor.
38:29What do Doctors do?
38:30They heal sick situations, sick people.
38:33But why do you have to destroy?
38:35Can't you use your brains?
38:36Only one race can survive!
38:39This senseless, evil killing!
38:42The first actor, the wonderful William Hartnell,
38:45became ill and couldn't carry on with the show.
38:48So they came up with this rather brilliant idea,
38:51which is that the Doctor has the ability
38:54to reconstitute himself.
38:57This has allowed the show to last,
39:07because we change the lead actor every three or four years,
39:11which no other show does.
39:15It has all these other levels
39:17of philosophical and reflective nature
39:22that make it very, very rich.
39:24People always ask me,
39:31what is it about the show that appeals so broadly?
39:35The answer I would like to give,
39:37and which I'm discouraged from giving,
39:39because it is not useful in the promotion of a brand,
39:43is that it's about death.
39:46And it has a very, very powerful death motif in it,
39:51which is that the central character dies.
39:54Doctor!
39:56Let it go!
39:59Die be loved!
40:02And I think that is one of its most potent mysteries,
40:06because somewhere in that,
40:08people see that that's what happens in life.
40:11You have loved ones, and then they go.
40:16But you must carry on.
40:19There are a lot of ways in which time travel stories
40:23sneakily are about eluding death.
40:27Time is what kills us, after all.
40:29Time is a bastard.
40:31There's something that speaks to our souls about time travel,
40:41where there's a fatalism involved.
40:43Mm-hmm.
40:44Mm-hmm.
40:45That is reassuring somehow.
40:46Right.
40:47Because it tells you that mistakes were always going to happen.
40:49Yeah.
40:50I mean, one of the fascinating things,
40:51I was explaining to my kids the other day,
40:53that you look at your idea of a telescope.
40:55Telescope is a way of looking back in time,
40:58not just space.
40:59It's a time machine.
41:00Yeah.
41:01It's a time machine.
41:02And you look, the smaller the star, the further away,
41:03the further back in time you look.
41:04Yeah.
41:05And theoretically,
41:06you could make more and more powerful telescopes,
41:07and you can look further and further back in time.
41:09Yeah.
41:10Which is, it's just a mind-boggling concept.
41:11Yeah.
41:12Theoretically, the sun could have gone out
41:13seven and a half minutes ago,
41:15and we just don't know yet,
41:16because it takes light a while to get here.
41:18Exactly.
41:19Let's hope not.
41:20Yeah, well...
41:21But that idea of looking back in time
41:23as you look out into the world,
41:24the fact that everything we see in this room
41:26when you look around,
41:27you're looking back in time.
41:29I think the potential is limitless
41:32for time travel stories.
41:33Chris, thanks for doing this.
41:35No, well, thank you for having me.
41:36It's exciting to talk about.
41:37Okay, good.
41:38All right, give us a cut, then.
41:39I'll give you a cut.
41:40Done.
41:41Done.
41:42Going home.
41:56Finally, just a nap.
41:57Done.
41:58Done.
41:59I can imagine.
42:00Someday a lot would think