Disclosure Day with Steven Spielberg & David Koepp

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_3** (1:31)
People have a right to know the truth. It belongs to seven billion people.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:37)
What is it?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:38)
You won't believe me if I told you, so I'm gonna show you.
What are you gonna do? Full disclosure to the whole world, all at once.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:58)
This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and today, we've got some special brewing. Oh yeah. We're gonna talk about Disclosure Day. Not just in the abstract, but I've got with me here the one, the only, Steven Spielberg. It's his story and he directed it. But we also have the writer, David Koepp, who not only wrote Disclosure Day, but wrote many other science fiction films, not only in collaboration with Steven, but also of his own. So we know this episode is gonna serve your geek underbelly. And that's coming right up on StarTalk.
Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
Steven, good to see you again. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on to the podcast. We did a little bit of homework. And I did not know that your first student film was called Firelight, about aliens.

**Steven Spielberg** (3:10)
Yeah, it was called Firelight. I made it in 8mm, on 8mm film, I was 17 years old, I was in high school.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:17)
So, aliens have just been a thing.

**Steven Spielberg** (3:20)
Well, it was more about UFOs, it was, and it wasn't peace-loving aliens. The first one I did was much more of the formulaic, you know, monogram movie exploitation, but it was in an area of interest ever since I was a kid.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:38)
And, I mean, why wouldn't it be? Because everybody's interested in aliens at some point, but you have the power to bring it to life, on levels that no one could have imagined.

**Steven Spielberg** (3:47)
Well, it's not really so much my interest in aliens, it's been my interest in the unknown.
And the feeling I've had, you know, for a very long time, having been a consumer of everything involving the unknown, not the unknown, you know, a million light years from here, but the unknown right here. And it's always been something that's really interested me. And I've always wondered, you know, if the unknown is known by a very small group of people, the injustice of not everyone knowing what they know is kind of what drives me, especially to tell the story of Disclosure Day.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (4:27)
It never occurred to me to think of people left out as being the consequence of an injustice.

**Steven Spielberg** (4:34)
And inequity, maybe, is a better word for it.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (4:36)
Yeah, no, but still, I'm applauding the term, because when it's an injustice, you want to correct that. As a viewer, you want to right the wrong, and you clearly establish that in Disclosure Day. I mean, that was the greatest feeling any of us had as we watched this. A question that I've always had as a director, what is the value of the eyes of whatever it is you're looking into?
Not only in Disclosure Day, was there a lot of eye contact from animal to, you know, non-human animal to human animal, but also human to human, where you're kind of seeing into their soul, imparting a bit of empathy, I guess, for lack of a better word there.