U.S.A , 84 minutes
Dir: Turk Pipkin
Winner, Audience Award – Tahoe /Reno International Film Festival
When assessing almost any aspect of our current human existence, one question remains impossible to turn away from: Is this the kind of world we want to leave for our children? Nobelity is the search for a path to a better future, with nine Nobel laureates as our guides. An entirely original look at the world’s most pressing problems through the eyes of nine of the world’s greatest minds, Nobelity follows filmmaker Turk Pipkin on a personal journey in search of answers about the kind of world our children and grandchildren will know.
Filmed across the U.S., and in France, England, India, and Africa, Nobelity combines the insights of nine distinguished Nobel Prize-winners with a first-person view of world problems and the children who are most challenged by them. Featured Nobel Laureates include Steven Weinberg, Jody Williams, Ahmed Zewail, Rick Smalley, Wangari Maathai, Sir Joseph Rotblat, Dr. Harold Varmus, Desmond Tutu and Amartya Sen.
Visit the Nobelity website for more information.
This film is part of Doc-Debut, a new regular series on Link TV highlighting unique and groundbreaking international documentary films. The series offers American audiences unprecedented perspectives on world events and culture, as seen through the eyes of individuals across the globe.
An Interview with Director Turk Pipkin
By Hannah Eaves
Could you talk a little bit about how you first met (Nobel Laureate) Steve Weinberg in Austin?
Turk Pipkin: I was already interested in making something like Nobelity. I hadn't solidified the idea yet but knew I wanted to go talk to some really smart people about what was going on in the world. I was really interested in Weinberg and was reading some of his books on string theory and cosmology and met him at a party at a friend's house. I started talking to him about particle physics and told him my understanding of string theory and he came back with a really famous quote in physics; he said, "Right? That's not even wrong."
He was more interested in talking to me about things other than particle physics. It was in talking to Weinberg and discovering how knowledgeable he is on so many different subjects that it occurred to me that Nobel laureates are not just a mix of chemists and physicists and doctors, they're people who have a lifelong passion for learning.
It would have been easy for you to have grouped the interviews by issue like "Environment," "Energy" or "Health." Why did you instead use broader terms like "Decisions," "Challenges" and "Persistence"?
It came together as I was filming; I didn't know who I was going to interview at the beginning. Structure in all filmmaking is difficult. I'm a really big fan of Fog of War, which I think has a brilliant structure, and McNamara talking about the lessons that he learned. I think some of it came from my appreciation for how well that worked. You really need to give people something to wrap each segment around and in this case, you know, with Wangari Maathai section, "Persistence," she really is the single most persistent person I've ever met in my life.
The first eight words, which are the majority of the film, talk about knowledge and reason - they all stand alone as things we need to do and accomplish. Desmond Tutu then stands on the other side of that. If you didn't agree with the moral imperative already, or the practicality, then he's there with the message of, if for no other reason, we're capable of love. I think the people in this country really do care and I think that they do have love for other people in the world, and it really is, to a certain extent, a matter of knowledge. I haven't been to a single screening of this film where people haven't been shocked to find out that two billion people on earth have been infected with tuberculosis.
Do you think that seeing the countries you visited in person would awaken Americans to the reality of humanitarian problems abroad?
You really don't see the developing world in the American media or even in global media for the most part, unless there is a disaster or a war. It's very unlikely that you're going to see footage from India or from Kenya. What we see is when something goes wrong. Under those circumstances, you don't see how much people are alike, how much these people are like us. It's easy to see how they're different from us.
I think that's why Amartya Sen is so great in the film. He has a sense of how diverse we are even though at the core we are all almost the same. I love when he says, "We are diversely diverse." When you see these kids on the street over there... I wasn't setting out to make a movie about wide-eyed hungry children and I don't think I showed too many kids that are hungry. There is no reason why there should be 12 million orphans in India.
You mentioned the division of the film between the first eight laureates and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Do you see a conflict between reason-based science and faith-based religion?
Oddly enough, the movie starts with an atheist, even though he's a Jew - Steve Weinberg is pure science. In fact, at one of our screenings at the world premiere at SXSW, Steve Weinberg and Ahmed Zewail were there with me and there was a standing ovation that lasted maybe ten minutes - that may have been just for these two gentlemen being there, but some of it was for the film. We were all pretty taken aback.
We had microphones in the audience and a young man came to the microphone and asked who would address the issue of the common ground between science and religion? I already knew what Weinberg was going to say and Ahmed wasn't going to touch it. Steve leaned over the microphone and he said, "You ask what the common ground is between science and religion? The answer is, there's not one. There is no common ground, they're completely separate." This guy in the audience, poor guy, was just devastated. He was not devaluing religion by saying that, he's just saying they're separate. Well, this country's founded on the basis that they're separate, so I think that looking for the common ground is where you make the mistake. It doesn't mean that religion doesn't have a value.
So there's this atheist at the beginning of the film and then one of the most widely respected Christians at the end and they essentially came to the same conclusions, despite the approach. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean you're not a moral person or that you don't have love. Even Tutu, when he talks about religion, is saying that God is not a Christian.
But he's also very unique in his attitude towards religion.
Yes, very much so. What he's saying is that God has a dream and his dream is that we'll wake up and find that we're all a family. It really doesn't matter if you believe in God or you don't believe in God. It's still the same dream. We are all one family and the motivation for dealing with problems that effect people all over the earth is that they are our brothers and sisters.
Sir Joseph Rotblat, who for me is the hardest material to watch, was such a beautiful man and passed away not that long after we filmed this interview. He felt that although the importance of abolishing nuclear weapons was foremost in his life's work, a mission that was given to him by Einstein, he would say: We can't disinvent nuclear weapons, even if the United States and the other nuclear powers would dismantle their weapons as most of us have agreed to do already. You can't disinvent the knowledge. That is why you have to work towards the ultimate goal, which is that you've got to abolish war.
People say: Oh, if you abolish war you have to have some kind of world government, that's like communism! But as Rotblat describes it, it's not world government. We already have a relationship between ourselves and our families, between ourselves and our communities, between ourselves and our nations. We have loyalties to all of these levels of mankind and he's just reminding us that we have to extend that loyalty to mankind as a whole. When you love your nation, it doesn't mean that you don't love your children.
This interview originally appeared on GreenCine. For the full interview click here.
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