7 Questions with DEEP SKY Director Nathaniel Kahn

IMAX In Frame  ‌ ‌ ‌ Welcome to the story behind the story. This is IMAX In Frame   The Secret is in the Stars In conversation with director Nathaniel Kahn   ACADEMY AWARD® nominated documentarian Nathaniel Kahn is no stranger to space. His past work has included feature and short docs with titles like THE HUNT FOR PLANET B, TELESCOPE, and THE DARK SIDE OF THE SUN, all exploring our understanding of space.  He’s also a gifted storyteller of narratives grounded here on Earth. He garnered accolades for his documentary features MY ARCHITECT, (charting the legacy & secret double life of his father, architect Louis Kahn), and THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING, (about the rising valuation of pieces in the contemporary art market). With his latest, the Michelle Williams-narrated documentary DEEP SKY, he brings his skills to the expanse of the IMAX screen. Charting the global mission to build the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), it was an area Kahn was already familiar with, having followed the story for years, when the project was still in its infancy. DEEP SKY also has the unique distinction of being one of the first IMAX films to be released on the upcoming Apple Vision Pro via the IMAX app. Kahn sat down with us to talk about his journey with the Webb Telescope, mathematical Easter eggs, and storytelling for IMAX screens. 1. What particularly excited you about making this film for IMAX? I followed [JWST] for a number of years and documented the building of it. And honestly, there were times when I thought, Is this thing really going to work? And then to see the way it worked — to see these images coming down from the telescope. They’re absolutely stunning and transformational. So the question arises, how do you possibly present these images in a way that really captures them? Their vast scale, their unique beauty and their scientific importance… The scale of the universe is so huge, you know, it’s really hard to comprehend. But when you blow the images up to IMAX size you begin to get a sense of it, because it feels like you are in it. So IMAX is the perfect way, and I would argue the ideal way, to begin to comprehend the scale and beauty of what’s actually out there.   2. Did you change your approach to filming in making a movie for the IMAX screen?   So much of directing movies is choosing what you’re going to show the audience, whether it’s a close-up or a medium shot or a wide shot and how you put these things together. You’re making choices for them, and that’s a key part of movie language. But IMAX is different. I had to learn this, and I am still learning it. I’m completely a novice at this, but it felt a little more like working in the theatre in the sense that it’s a huge canvas, a huge screen, and you can create an experience for the audience where they can choose where to look. You can have wide shots that hold much longer on the screen, and that allow people to look around and explore the image on their own with their own sense of wonderment and curiosity. They are not just being shown something — they are in something.   [[ratio] Â]( 3. How did you approach the story?  To build a telescope like this is incredibly difficult. And we really wanted to represent this visually, and from a storytelling standpoint not just show the beautiful images coming back. So we made the film in two parts: The first part follows the building of the telescope, the ambition of the mission and the difficulties of it. The stress of it. The risks involved in it. This part culminates in the launch and deployment. And then the second part is the relief, in a sense. The relief that it worked, and the reward is those incredible images coming down. The images are actually the bulk of the movie, but because we’ve been through the struggle of making the telescope, we feel we’ve earned those images. You don’t just get them for free! I hope setting things up the way we did gives people a feeling of going along on the mission. They are participating in it, not just watching it. 4. What was the biggest challenge you faced bringing DEEP SKY to the screen? (Laughs)… Trying to fit the building of this telescope and the story of the universe into 40 minutes was really hard. Many of my documentary films are done in the verité style, where the story is revealed by the subjects in the film. But with something that was this big and complex, we realized it was essential to have a narrator. Michelle [Williams] brought the most incredible spirit to the movie. She was, from the start, the only actor I wanted to do this. She brings the whole story to life. 5. How did your work on your previous film THE HUNT FOR PLANET B inform DEEP SKY?  They’re completely different movies. And that’s what was exciting about it. THE HUNT FOR PLANET B was focused more on the search for life in the universe — one of the big dreams of the mission. DEEP SKY takes a much broader view and focuses on the cosmology too — the idea of really understanding our origins and the beginnings of the universe, as well as exploring the idea of the telescope as a time machine. The filmmaking approach is completely different too. IMAX allows you to slow things down and allow people to really luxuriate in the images, to look around the screen and discover things for themselves. It’s a bit more like creating for the live theater.   You were asking before about the challenges we faced as filmmakers. One of the hardest things was that there kept being new images that we would have to integrate, which kept us on our toes. But this was also a blessing. For instance, I was wondering how we could talk a little bit about our own solar system, and then suddenly all these amazing images were coming in of the outer planets. The first one was Neptune… Then suddenly we had a great image of Jupiter. Then Uranus, then Saturn. So one of the biggest challenges, and one of the biggest differences from PLANET B, is that DEEP SKY is really driven by the images coming down from the telescope; they became our guide for the story we ended up telling. 6. I understand there’s also a couple of Easter Eggs in the mix?  As we were finishing the online [edit], we dropped a new image in, an image that has a secret embedded in it — and I can’t wait for groups of students coming from schools to the IMAX theater to see if they can find it. The deal should be that if they see it once they get an automatic A on the next math test. And if they find it twice — it’s in there twice — if they can find it twice they should be, you know, excused from cleanup or hired by NASA (laughs). 7. What do you hope audiences take away from the film? A little bit of a sense for what’s really out there — this idea that this grand, beautiful, confounding, mysterious universe is actually out there. It’s not made up. It’s not CGI. It’s real. It exists. These vast spaces from whence we come are really out there and they’re yet to be explored, yet to be understood. This is an incredible origin-story that we’re all part of...   And it is a story that is unfolding. Will we ever understand the whole thing? I have no idea. But it’s there for the experiencing. I hope the film gives people a little sense of the wonder of astronomy, of the universe and our origins. If it sparks people’s interest in this unfolding story of where we come from and where we’re going, and if there is other life out there among the stars — if it sparks people’s interest in that, and urges them to continue to find out more about it, that would make me really happy. [DEEP SKY is now playing at select museum locations.]( It will premiere in commercial theatres later this year, and is coming soon to the IMAX app on Apple Vision Pro.   Each month, we’ll deliver a new exclusive piece of editorial to your inbox. 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