Director Nathaniel Kahn probed the world of art sales in 2018’s The Price of Everything and the search for extraterrestrial life in 2021’s Emmy-winning Hunt for Planet B. His latest film, however, goes where no man has gone before: a million miles from Earth.
Deep Sky, a 40-minute Imax original documentary about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that opened yesterday, showcases the mind-blowing images captured by the $10-billion telescope, which started beaming pictures of stars, nebulae, galaxies, planets, and a massive black hole back to Earth in July 2022. It is surely the most expensive “camera” Kahn, or any filmmaker, has had the privilege to work with, and viewed on nearly 100-foot-tall screens, the footage becomes transporting.
Kahn, who also wrote and produced the film, spoke with Fast Company about what drew him to the project, what the telescope’s “non-optical” electromagnetic spectrum revealed, and why it gives him hope for life on Earth.
Why was the space telescope so fascinating for you?
It’s a modern-day cathedral. It took 10,000 people from 14 different countries working for more than two decades—one of the great construction projects of our era. And it was on the verge of being impossible. The cathedral analogy is apt in that when cathedrals were first built, no one knew if you could make a structure that tall and that thin that would have any light coming in at all, let alone these enormous windows. So much of science is presented as being geeky and dispassionate and rational, but at its core, it’s spiritual. These scientists reminded me of artists because they’re willing to sacrifice so much for this kind of impossible dream, this impossible goal.
As you show in Deep Sky, when the first image comes in from the telescope, it’s an emotional moment for the people involved—and for the viewer. Why is that? And did you also feel that?
Many times, these scientists don’t get to see the end of what they’re doing. When the first images came down, anybody who had anything to do with it felt this enormous relief, this awe, and then this confusion, because immediately there were things scientists were seeing that didn’t make sense. There was a sense that there’s so much in the world that we don’t understand. As the images started coming down, each was more beautiful than the next. We kept distilling the part about the [making of the] telescope to squeeze as many as we could into the film’s 40-minute window.
How does the telescope actually “see” all of this? You’re not just looking through a giant lens, right?
Right, it’s an infrared telescope. The electromagnetic spectrum is huge, and the visible part of it is very, very small. Gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, and infrared—and beyond that microwave and radio waves and all those things—are all there. We only see a tiny part. The infrared spectrum is actually even larger than the visible spectrum. The people at NASA who interpret this data have strict rules about assigning [visible] colors to specific infrared wavelengths. It’s a really, really good translation of what things would look like if we could see infrared—the blue things are more energetic than the red things, and the relative colors represent specific wavelengths. One of the most powerful aspects of the telescope is its ability to analyze the light that’s coming from the stars or planets, through spectroscopy, which allows us to actually “sniff” the atmospheres of alien worlds. Ten years ago, that was just a dream.
As a filmmaker, what does it mean to put this kind of footage on such a big screen?
You get the sense of the scale. We’re so used to watching things on little devices, with no sense of scale whatsoever. And so much of filmmaking is deciding, is it a closeup or a medium shot or a wide shot? You’re very much manipulating what the audience sees. But on the IMAX screen it’s completely different—there’s so much in the periphery, and people can look at different things. For me, this telescope and these images are a reminder that we are small people, and that one of our best qualities is our ability to wonder and to ask great questions. And I think it’s something we can all feel really good about—that we built this thing collectively. It’s a global telescope, and we’re all united by being citizens of the universe. And this is maybe a good time to think about that.
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