A co-director of "Bill Nye: Science Guy" discussed the film Wednesday with the 26th annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival from a tugboat in the Pacific Ocean.
Jason Sussberg was also a producer on the film, which was shown Wednesday afternoon at the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa, while he was off the coast of San Francisco, Calif. David Alvarado was the film's other co-director.
Mid-America Science Museum sponsored the showing. Jim Miller, the museum's marketing director, said he was excited by the number of films with scientific topics in this year's festival.
"Bill Nye is a personal hero of mine," Miller said. "I got to see him at UCA. I will always follow his career.
"The mission of the Mid-America Science Museum is to really just promote science education. Bill Nye has been the spokesperson for science since I was a child. His importance is beyond me. I was dumbfounded to be able to see him and meet him."
Sussberg said his crew completed a film in 2014 and looked to follow it up with another project based on science. Alvarado and Sussberg met as graduate film students at Stanford University and bonded over a mutual interest in science and technology.
The film touched on how Nye was removed from the public eye for many years. He returned to national prominence several years ago when Alvarado and Sussberg began to plan for a new project.
"We reached out to him and asked him if he wanted to have a documentary made about him," Sussberg said via an internet video call. "He met with us, actually in San Francisco, about three years ago this month."
The film not only explored the making of the "Bill Nye the Science" guy television show, which launched him to international fame, but also his personal life. Viewers meet Nye's brother and sister in the film who both have ataxia.
"He had tons of reservations," Sussberg said. "He did not want to focus on his personal life and he did not want focus on the two members of his family and their condition of ataxia.
"We basically decided it is not worth making this unless we can show the whole story and everything about it. We convinced him that people would like him more if he was vulnerable. Now that he has seen the movie half a dozen times or so, he agrees that having a relative human portrait was the way to go."
A total of 16,850 supporters contributed $859,425 on Kickstarter to make the film the most funded documentary ever on the crowdfunding site. Filmmakers followed Nye for two years as he traveled to conferences, science events, speaking engagements and a bevy of public appearances.
"He really is that genuine science lover that you see on screen," Sussberg said. "That is not an act. He is not an actor. That is who he is as a person."
The film follows Nye as he works to counter a growing anti-science sentiment and convince deniers of the scientific principles of climate change and evolution. Viewers also see work on Nye's pet project, a solar sail. The documentary made its world premiere at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in March.
Nye became chief executive officer of The Planetary Society in 2010 and set out to complete the mission of his mentor, Carl Sagan, and successfully deploy a solar sail. Sagan founded the organization in 1980 with Louis Friedman and Bruce Murray.
The Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios attempted to launch a solar sail, Cosmos 1, in 2005, from a Russian submarine, but a malfunction prevented the sail from reaching its intended orbit. The film captures Nye as he watched LightSail 1, a citizen-funded project, successfully launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in 2015 on a three-and-a-half week mission to test the CubeSat's critical functions and deploy a 32-square-meter solar sail. The Planetary Society plans to launch LightSail 2 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to attempt the first controlled solar sail flight in Earth orbit as early as the spring.
Local on 10/13/2017