The question: What`s on the inside of a black hole? The answer will take awhile. Physicist Stephen Hawking is putting the words together, but for now, there is only the barely perceptible movement of the three fingers of his left hand, just about the only part of his body he can use. Even to work the small control that spins out sentences through a computer voice processor is a strain. His listeners shuffle a little nervously. Is it polite to talk during these pauses of several minutes?
Now Hawking lifts his clear blue eyes. His jaw drops open, forming a lopsided grin that reveals a deep mirth-and mischievousness. The voice processor, in its synthetic but somehow endearing dialect, unspools the answer.
”We don`t have much idea what goes on inside black holes. At Alton Towers, a theme park in Britain, there`s a ride called the Black Hole that is a roller coaster in the dark. I thought I should go on it to find what is inside a black hole. I nearly didn`t survive.”
Everyone laughs. Immobile as he is, Hawking has a way of cracking people up.
Time waits for no man, but Hawking is giving it a good run for the money. Time, after all, is Hawking`s stock in trade. Time. He arguably has done more to define its nature than any scientist since Einstein. In the process, he has been elevated in the popular imagination almost to the level of Shaman. On a more personal level, he certainly has defied time by fighting his own battle against the muscle-wasting Lou Gehrig`s disease that doctors predicted would kill him nearly 30 years years ago. And then there`s his book.
Published in 1988, ”A Brief History Of Time,” was Hawking`s effort to popularize his complex theories of the birth and fate of the universe, of
”singularities” and black holes. By rights, it should have been little more than a blip on the publishing industry`s marketing radar. Nonetheless, it has sold at least 5.5 million copies, staying on the bestseller lists for 100 weeks, and defying the laws of commerce if not physics.
Despite its commercial success, the book would seem about as far from film material as Joyce`s ”Finnegan`s Wake.” The obvious form would be an educational documentary series in the PBS mold, but here it is, and the result is anything but that.
Directed by Errol Morris, the offbeat ”detective-director” best known for ”The Thin Blue Line,” which presented evidence that saved a wrongly convicted murderer from death row, the final product is is a complex, symphonic pastiche of anecdotes and theory. Although it is a documentary, the film is a sometimes brooding, sometimes droll meditation on Hawking`s life and work.
This melding of biography and science wasn`t Hawking`s original design. Though he`s doggedly upbeat about the final outcome, there are hints of equivocation.
He`s asked, for instance, if he`s pleased with the mixture.
”It is difficult for me to judge,” he answers through the voice processor. ”My original idea was for a film that was entirely science. But I don`t think that would have attracted a large audience, which is what I want for the science…. I signed a contract for what I thought would be mainly a scientific film. It was … when we started shooting that I realized it would be half biography. But now I think that might be a good idea.”
And while Hawking appears to enjoy the added boost the film is giving to the celebrity he found with his book, he underscores a conviction that his personal notoriety is a means to serve the larger purpose of bringing the cutting edge of science to the people. Why?
”Science and technology have made major changes in the way we live in the last 50 years,” he says. ”And they will make even greater changes in the next 50. In a democracy, it is vital that the public have a general understanding of science so that they can make the decisions that need to be made.”
In making the film, director Morris saw two stories that were inextricably intertwined: First there was Hawking`s quest for knowledge of the universe. Second was the physicist`s personal struggle against a disease that ultimately energized his intellect. (Before the diagnosis, Hawking was a lazy student without much direction.)
”It struck me again and again, the close connection between those two stories,” says Morris, who calls the film ”the most difficult movie I`ve ever made.” ”To me, it`s like some real life Edgar Allen Poe story, a version of `The Premature Burial`-being essentially buried alive inside of one`s self. When he was 21 years old, he was given a death sentence with two- and-a-half years to live, and in the nearly 30 years since then, he has become increasingly incapacitated.
”And what is the central objective of his inquiries? Black holes. These collapsing stars, stars that collapse in on themselves, implode, become so incredibly dense that nothing can escape their gravitation field . . . . to me, there`s a very close metaphorical connection.”
It was most likely the metaphorical resonance that won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary of 1992 at the Sundance Film Festival, and Morris the festival`s documentary Filmmakers Trophy. In making the film, Morris threw out most of the standard rules of documentary filmmaking.
For starters, all of the interviews with Hawking`s friends, colleagues and family were shot on sound stages against backdrops of painstaking re-creations of Hawking`s office, home and other settings.
”I reversed the old documentary idea that you take your camera to your subject,” says Morris. ”I took my subjects to the camera crew. I think it gives the movie an enclosed feeling. It creates a world around Stephen Hawking. It`s his universe. It also creates for me a sense of timelessness.” In making the movie, Morris admits to a certain amount of subjectivity. For one thing, he agreed to omit the subject of Hawking`s recent breakup with his wife to set up housekeeping with his nurse. (Morris still held out hope that Jane Hawking would participate in the film, but she, in Morris` words,
”declined to come to the studio.”)
”I very much wanted to make a movie that Stephen Hawking would approve of, and might even like,” says Morris. ”And I`m very relieved that he actually does like the movie. The first thing he said to me after seeing the movie was he thanked me for making his mother a star.”
Such reverence is uncharacteristic of Morris, who usually takes a sardonic tilt toward his documentary subjects. Morris adds: ”He`s an amazing person, but he`s somebody I like very very much and whom I do consider a friend.”
Beforehand, there was a certain uneasiness on all sides. ”In the beginning, meeting Errol, I was a little afraid,” says producer Gordon Freedman. ”His other films all have a level of sarcasm. He pokes fun at life and I just wasn`t sure this would go over with Hawking. But in the process, I think Hawking seduced Errol and Errol seduced Hawking. The film has much more gravity than Errol`s other films.”
Signing Hawking to the project was a daunting task for producer Freedman, who spearheaded the project when he discovered that the two of them had the same literary agent. Along the way, he garnered the support of Steven Spielberg (who recommended Morris as director) and former NBC president Brandon Tartikoff.
”You`ve got to understand that to negotiate a deal with the man who holds Isaac Newton`s seat at Oxford is a very difficult job,” says Freedman, who started pushing for the film four years ago. ”To win him over, I spent a lot of money to bring him a very good Bordeaux wine, a `72 Medoc. (Hawking is an inveterate wine connoisseur.) He said `thank you very much` and then put like a `66 Bordeaux on the table. It was then that I knew I knew I was up against something.”
But once the deal was done, Hawking warmed to the process, says Freedman. ”I had promised him in the beginning that this would be like nothing else he had done. He`d had trouble with film crews before. He finally believed me when he rolled into the studio in London and saw the 50-man crew, saw his office reconstructed as a set, and saw a stand-in in a duplicate wheelchair. He got a big grin on his face.”
As it happened, Hawking befriended his stand-in and before anyone knew it, ”those guys had the wheelchairs out and were racing.” The stand-in won. Adds Freedman: ”Stephen is now driving that wheelchair.”
”To me, what is so compelling about Stephen Hawking is that he reminds us of our own fraility, of our own insignificance in the face of it all out there,” says Morris. ”But that spirit of inquiry, that quest to understand, gives a kind of nobility to life, to human enterprise.”
Meanwhile, during an interview, Hawking wrestles with questions big and small. Such as the question of his book`s popularity:
”Critics claim that people buy my book to impress their friends, but don`t actually read it. I don`t think this is true, or at least not any more than with other well-known books. I am often approached by people who say they have enjoyed the book . . . . (While they) seem to have read at least part of it, they may not have understood everything. If they had, they would be ready to start a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. But at least they can feel they are in touch with the big questions.”
Is his health stable?
”I think so. I seem to be pretty tough.”
Someone asks him about the existence of God.
”In my book, I was careful to leave it open whether or not I believed in God. It is a matter of what one means by the word `God.` One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of science. This would make the existence of God into a tautology, something that was self-evidently true.
”In my scientific work I have not found any evidence for a personal god. But the existence or non-existence of a personal god is not something that can be proved by science. If it could, the question would have been settled long ago. It is a matter of personal belief.”
His goals:
”A complete unified theory of the universe . . . but that wouldn`t leave much for other people.”
Hawking grins, and again, everyone laughs.
”I would be satisified if I could solve the problem I`m working on at the moment: What happens to black holes and what falls into them when they evaporate?”
