This interview contains major spoilers for Don’t Look Up.
What would the end of the world actually look like? This question has weighed on Dr. Amy Mainzer for more than two years now, ever since she was first approached by writer and director Adam McKay to act as science consultant on his new film, Don’t Look Up.
The dark comedy stars Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as two scientists who discover a comet on a collision-course with Earth, kickstarting a countdown to the apocalypse. Seems like something we should all take seriously, no? But as astronomy Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence) and her advisor Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) soon find out, reconciling facts with public perception in a culture wracked with divisions isn’t quite as simple as looking up toward the sky.
“My job was to help provide the scientific grounding for this story,” says Mainzer, a professor in the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona, and the principal investigator for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE). That mandate included everything from designing the comet to coaching Lawrence and DiCaprio through complicated astronomy jargon such as “Oort Cloud” and “Gauss’s method of orbital determination,” as well as giving them the tools to understand how scientists really feel about their work.
In this conversation with Tudum, Mainzer opens up about the most challenging parts of the job and what she hopes audiences will ultimately take away from the movie. In return, she soothes our fears about the likelihood of a real-life Don’t Look Up scenario. Well, sort of.
Let’s start at the beginning: How did you come to be a consultant on Don’t Look Up?
I was able to meet up with Adam [McKay] just over two years now, which seems like a lifetime ago because of the pandemic. [I was there to] offer scientific background on the subject matter because it’s a pretty complex technical subject, so he was looking for someone who worked in that area, and specifically [looking] for a woman working in this area, because one of the main characters, Kate Dibiasky, is a woman.
What were your responsibilities? What did you specifically help with?
I helped with a lot of different aspects of the film. I had to design the comet — we decided that it would be a comet, instead of an asteroid. But then, also, we had a lot of discussions about the culture of scientists, and those struggles we have when we try to communicate and [aren’t] always successful at that. And then we talked about how you show the end of the world in a way that’s ultimately respectful. On one hand, we’re grappling with, “We gotta show this comet crashing into the Earth,” but, on the other hand, the other side of this movie that I think is very important, and is partly why I care so much about it, is that at its core, it is a very deeply felt movie about why it’s important not to destroy the Earth. We really wanted to portray that in a way that felt good.
Walk us through the process of designing the comet.
The movie has a certain timeline to it. It spans about six months. Part of the reason we went with a comet is that long-period comets really come in with these incredible velocities because they’re coming from so far away. These are things from the outer part of our solar system, way far away. They orbit the sun maybe once every hundreds of million or billions of years, so you can imagine they pick up a lot of speed when they get into the inner solar system.
The comet [in the film] is very loosely modeled after Comet NEOWISE, which the team I work with discovered in late March 2020. It made its closest approach to the sun by early July. In other words, it just came speeding into the solar system really quickly, and that’s really typical of this class of objects. And they’re big; these comets are pretty large. In this case, the object is about nine kilometers wide, which is really large enough to cause a problem, so it fit the needs of the story.
How likely is it that the scenario presented in the movie would ever happen? Asking for a friend...
Well, the great news is that this is incredibly unlikely. If huge extinction events were common, human life probably wouldn’t be here on planet Earth. The odds of us having survived long enough to have evolved would be slim, if these big impacts were happening regularly. There was one point in the Earth’s history about four billion years ago when the Earth was bombarded, but fortunately things aren’t like that anymore.
You mentioned having conversations about how to portray the destruction of the Earth — how did you land on the final outcome?
In true science fashion, I made a set of PowerPoint charts with a summary: This is how it would look, this is not how it would look. In other words, this comet is really big, but it’s not big enough that it’s going to crack open the planet. That’s not going to happen. The planet isn’t going to explode like the Death Star blowing up Alderaan. But what does happen is really bad, and that’s enough. The visual effects folks, especially Raymond [Gieringer], were just fantastic about really taking all these scientifically based calculations and implementing them into the movie. So, you get a pretty good look at it — for dinosaurs, that’s probably what it looked like.
Were there different variations on the ending?
Adam [McKay] always had a vision that it wasn’t going to end well, but that it would end with humor, that there would be this little stinger at the end of justice. He played around with how exactly those pieces would play out. But he always knew at the beginning of the script that it wasn’t going to work out well for most people. The movie is a cautionary tale in that respect.
One crucial point in this movie seems to be that we don’t make much room for nuance in the way that scientific news is communicated to the public. As a scientist, does the movie reflect your own frustrations with the way we talk about facts?
Science is ultimately about probability. All measurements are probabilities, ranging from the extremely likely to the not very likely. Every measurement has an uncertainty associated with it, and even the word “uncertainty” is a little bit fraught in that to a scientist, the word uncertainty has a very specific scientific definition. We use it in a certain way. Whereas if you say that something is uncertain, that means in normal everyday life, it’s usually interpreted as “I have no idea!” But to a scientist you do know, and you’re quantifying exactly how well you know when you use that mathematical term. So there’s a lot of confusion in terms of conveying when we say something is certain to a degree, we have an understanding of what that means, but are we explaining it in a way that is going to be understood?
The pandemic has really showcased this problem in a big way in that science has become such a huge part of our lives, but there’s still a lot of pushback out there.
It’s funny. When I first saw the script, I thought, “Oh, nobody’s gonna disbelieve a comet! There’s no way!” And then, of course, [the pandemic] happened. We’ve seen a lot of science denial before in a lot of topic areas, but I thought the comet would be so crystal clear to everybody, so obvious. And yet, here we are, and people are denying the existence of this virus that has killed millions of people at this point. It’s absolutely mind-blowing to me that anybody could just say, “Nope, that’s not happening.” But they do.
What do you think of the meme-ification of scientists? It’s something that comes up in the movie related to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, and we’ve seen it happen in real life with figures like Anthony Fauci.
We sure don’t learn about that in grad school, I can tell you that. Grad school doesn’t prepare you for that level of interaction with the public. Our training focuses on the science itself, on the technical aspects of it, at least my feeling is that it doesn’t leave you prepared to deal with [a] very changed landscape. The internet didn’t exist when I started undergrad. It just wasn’t a thing. So there are just a huge amount of changes that have happened to our society and scientists are people, too. We’re not experts in communication usually. It’s just not what we learn.
Don’t Look Up was one of the first productions to begin filming under pandemic restrictions. Were you on-set during the shoot?
I didn’t travel — a lot of this was done when it wasn’t possible to get vaccinated for most of us. However, with the magic of technology, I was able to be there. They stuck me on an iPad and wheeled me around. It was great! It worked really well. I had long periods of time where I was staring at Meryl Streep’s back.
What actors did you speak with the most?
I spent a lot of time talking with Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s the one who has a lot of the heavy lifting in the movie in terms of the technical jargon, the technical discussions and all that. And, of course, Jen Lawrence and Rob Morgan. But Leo and I spent a lot of time working on the dialogue, because it’s very complicated. He was really interested in making sure that it really represented the point of view of a scientist. His character undergoes a significant evolution throughout the movie, so I told him, “You really have to speak for scientists. That’s your job, to portray our fears, our frustrations, the love of the subject, and really all of the heart that we put into it.” He nailed it. He did a brilliant job.
Obviously, you and Jennifer Lawrence also talked a lot about her character. What were those conversations like? What kind of questions did she ask you?
She’s fantastic, first of all. I’ve been a fan of hers since Winter’s Bone. Her ability as an actor to convey emotion and intent is really phenomenal.
We talked a lot, just comparing notes about what it’s like to be in a field that’s not majority women. What does it mean to be true to your own identity in all the different ways that that manifests? How do you bring that to your profession? Whether it’s acting or science, we bring our whole selves to that effort. And, of course, there are a lot of parallels in all sorts of different fields where women and others face all kinds of challenges. She was very sensitive to that. I think she was also keen to get inside the mind of what’s it like to be a scientist. What are the things that make you happy? What are the things that are frustrating? What’s your daily life like? We talked a lot about ordinary stuff. The snacks thing is absolutely on point. We’re a little bit obsessed with food in science, in general.
To your point, there are a few scenes in the movie where Kate will say something and people will disregard her, but then Randall says something similar, and he’s taken seriously. Is that something you’ve come across in your own career?
Oh, yeah, I have this joke: “We need to just bring a man. If we bring a man, maybe the problem will go away.” That kind of thing happens all the time. The good news is that there’s been a huge advance in the social sciences that have been studying this, really bringing scientific rigor to the question of how do we deal with these inequities? How do we quantify them and how do we fix them in a way that’s actually going to stick? There’s now a huge field of literature that really wasn’t as advanced, just because there are more people entering the field now, more people recognizing the seriousness of the problem.
There’s one scene in particular that really hits home for me, which is when they’re about to launch the first US mission, and the president says, “Well Dr. Mindy, it’s your discovery.” Actually, it’s not. It’s [Kate’s] discovery, she found the object, she recognized that it was unique, and Dr. Mindy did the calculations and recognized the orbit. And there’s a brief exchange between Kate and Dr. Mindy where he looks a little bit like, “I know that’s not right,” but he doesn’t speak up. You can see the impact of that on her face. Her face kind of falls for a second, because she knows that her contribution has been ignored in a pretty bad way.
I thought that little snippet there is really on point because, of course, that happens to lots of people in many different contexts, based on many different aspects of identity, not just gender.
Do you remember what drew you to astronomy in the first place?
I was always just a nerdy little kid. I loved bugs and rocks and plants and birds, especially. But it was really funny because I had a little kiddy book about Greek mythology when I was probably 6 or 7 and I remember this reasonably well. I went to the library, my mom took me to the library at some point, and I remember getting an encyclopedia — remember those? Before the internet we used them, books! And the funny thing about the Greek myths is that many of the constellations in the sky are named after the Greek mythological characters. I remember going and looking up Andromeda, also the name of this incredibly gorgeous galaxy. I remember looking at the picture in the encyclopedia and just thinking, “Wooooow, what is that?” And that was it, I was hooked.
What was your reaction to finally seeing the movie? Did it leave you hopeful, or did it leave you scared for our future?
It’s funny because I’d seen the script many times, of course, lots of iterations of the script and had a lot of conversations with Adam and everyone else on the cast and the effects team and props people. But that didn’t prepare me for seeing the movie for the first time. First of all, it was so funny, I just laughed and laughed, and then I cried. I cried at the end, I keep crying at the end every time I see it again. But there’s always this little stinger at the end where you just start to laugh again. This is a movie that, even though it has a difficult ending, has a very hopeful message, which is that our fate is up to us. We choose it, and we can choose how we want things to go in our world, in our lives, based on decisions we make. Ultimately, if we make decisions that consider science and are science-based, the outcome doesn’t have to be bad. It can be good!
What do you hope audiences leave the movie thinking about?
My main thing is that science is happening. It’s the laws of the universe, the universe obeys the laws of physics. So, you can either accept that this is what’s happening and try to deal with situations as they come up, like climate change or the pandemic or extreme weather, or you can say, “No, that’s not happening, I’m ignoring it.” You do so at your peril. Science is happening. You either pay attention or it’s going to keep happening.
There’s a lot of reasons why there’s a lot of confusion about science, and what is real, what is true, what is not. And I hope that one of the things people will realize when they watch the movie is that the people who practice science [do it] because we love it. Whatever you study, whether it is birds or bugs or rocks or plants or viruses, you have to love doing that. You have to really love nature. Science is ultimately about the appreciation of nature. And so hopefully people will get to know scientists as human beings a little bit better with all of our glories and our flaws, and maybe that will be the basis for a little bit of trust.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
