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Derrickson at the premiere

Is it fair to call you a post-modern filmmaker? Emily Rose questioned the rationalist, modernist assumptions that some people have about things, and in this film, there's a very interesting line where John Cleese says to Jennifer Connelly, "Don't persuade him with your reason, but with yourself." And there is sort of a setting of reason to the side, in favor of something else, call it experience or what have you. Is there a thread there, running through your films, that you can comment on?

Derrickson: I think so, and I went way out of my way to legitimize science in this movie. That line came from the lips of a theoretical physicist, and the math equation that they're doing on the board is a real equation, it's one of the math questions that a real theoretical physicist would want an answer to if they were to meet an intelligent being from outer space. The science in this movie is legitimate science, and yet I love the idea that this brilliant scientist [Cleese as Professor Barnhardt] recognizes the limits of science when it comes to persuasion, to understanding, to meaning.

And having made his argument to Klaatu—a very rational argument, that only on the brink do we find the will to change, only on the precipice do we evolve—[Barnhardt] saw the impact that that had. But he realized that for Klaatu to reverse his decision, it's going to have to come from an understanding of what it means to be human, and what it really means to be human cannot be contained or defined by science alone—and that's the commission that he's giving her in that moment. And there is something post-modern about that, most definitely, and it is how I feel.

Read a CT Movies interview with Derrickson from 2005 here.

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