And I just immediately realized that this was another geoscience topic, like volcanoes, that entangled the nature with the culture and with the human — what they mean to us, these stones that fall from the heavens. And it put me in mind of the Black Stone in the Kaaba and the Grand Mosque in Mecca — one of the holiest relics of Islam — which may well be extraterrestrial in its origin.
And so I got back from that trip, very excited about this idea. And I spent a couple of weeks putting together some ideas and put a 3–4 page pitch together, outlining the themes: the origins of life, our destiny, and heaven and the heavens. So, I then got in touch with Werner and explained what I had in mind and we took it from there.
Astronomy: My favorite scene in the film is the one that, Werner, you called “science at its best” — a clip of the KOPRI researcher Jong Ik Lee on the ice fields of Antarctica, falling on the ground and shrieking in ecstasy at finding a meteorite on the ground. How did you find that clip and why did it resonate with you?
Herzog: Well, it’s sheer ecstasy. It’s just the incredible joy of discovery. It’s very cinematic. And then something odd happens: Somebody in the background is entering the frame with his rear end first. [It’s the] wrong timing. No apparent motivation. It’s very odd. It has everything — the joy of filmmaking, the joy of science. And Clive saw this material from Lee. He actually had the video and Clive immediately understood, we need to have that for our film.
Oppenheimer: That’s right. Jong Ik Lee and his wife, Mi Jung Lee, are both leading Antarctic geoscientists in Korea. They were the ones who’d invited me to the institute in the first place three years ago. And he invited us to film, to join on a meteorite search up on the polar plateau near the Korean research base in Antarctica, Jang Bogo Station.
And Jong Ik — he’s someone that truly comes alive when they’re in the field, when they’re out there against the elements and looking for things and finding them. And so the wildness to his character hadn’t really struck me.
In the clip, his exuberance on display was so, so wonderful. I mean, Jong Ik is in floods of tears. And I totally understand that — as a geologist, if I found that, I would be in floods of tears, and I was almost in floods of tears just watching this video.
Astronomy: Then you actually did find a meteorite when you were shooting in Antarctica, which is also captured in the film.
Oppenheimer: That’s right. I was thrilled to find that — not only because I’ve never found a meteorite before and I am a geologist, but also because I knew that our cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, was up in the helicopter with the cameras rolling. So I was quite hopeful and confident that we would get some wonderful footage of it.
There was also a huge thrill because our meteorite expert, Takashi Mikouchi, from University of Tokyo, recognized instantly that it was not an ordinary chondrite. Ninety-five percent of finds are so-called ordinary chondrites, stony meteorites. He recognized that this was something different. In the end, it turned out to be a ureilite — a very rare variety of meteorite — which we learned when it was analyzed back at KOPRI’s lab in South Korea. So that’s an additional thrill.
Astronomy: Werner, you’ve been known to sometimes modify facts in your documentaries to better capture what you call “the ecstatic truth.” Did you modify any facts for this film, and if not, were you tempted to?
Herzog: Not really. I think when you do a film of this nature, you just take facts as they are and you respond to it. And my response has always been a response of awe, and that’s a form of ecstasy where we almost step out of our own existence. That’s quintessentially cinema.