It’s hard to politicize a robot: Ryan White on Good Night Oppy | Interviews

It’s not just machines. My favorite movie growing up was “ET” So to do a documentary with Amblin was so amazing. And ET in the Basket is on our poster that I keep pinching. But I think it’s an account of those times when human beings bond with non-humans. Our film also has a scientific message about climate change.

I think it’s something when you strip people down. It’s hard to politicize a robot. So, no one disputes the fact that these robots have found that there has been some crazy climate change on our sister planet, because they are robots, they have several instruments that make measurements that prove it.

I think it is something similar in the feelings we experience. I remember a tweet went viral in 2019 and that’s when Opportunity sent its last message to Earth. “Battery dead and going dark.” They had millions of hits on Twitter. So there was something about this little robot in distress on another planet that did something to people’s hearts. It’s very Wall-E style. This idea that she is traveling alone and is she going to be okay.

I hope people connect with these robots in the film because of the people behind the robots. The robots are the people. They created these robots. They drive these robots every day. It’s just that these human beings can’t go to Mars safely, so they send these robots as their avatars. So really, these are two robots that stand in for thousands of people who have poured their hearts into them.

Did robots really respond in such a conversational way? Because that, of course, helps to personalize it as well.

We had a whole scene describing how these conversations happen, and I was gutted when we finally had to cut the part that showed him going through binary code and traveling through this wormhole to space. The orbiters I talked about were characters in our film because they are often personified as the big sister in the sky looking down on the robots, and the messages go through them. And we just realized that you have to be kind of sane in a function. People don’t need to know every single technical detail of how these messages come. So we do it in an instant messaging way, but it’s all through binary code and then it’s translated by NASA. So, “my battery is dead and it’s getting dark” they get that message in binary, then translate it for us civilians.