Stephen Hawking (40 page)

Morris had been aware of Hawking's work since his student days, when he had studied philosophy of science at Princeton and had attended lectures given by the eminent American physicist John Wheeler, who had first applied the term “black hole” in an astronomical context. David Hickman has suggested that Morris was also interested in the project because, at a certain level, he saw parallels between Randall Adams, the protagonist in
The Thin Blue Line
, and Stephen Hawking. Adams was trapped in a situation that was entirely out of his control, caught up in a web of events over which he had little influence. In the same way Hawking, trapped in a crippled body, is physically ensnared but has mentally transcended this barrier to achieve greatness. Morris is inherently fascinated by such themes and uses them as a jumping-off point for his iconoclastic movies.

By the end of 1989, with Spielberg's involvement, NBC in America had become interested. The president of the Entertainment Division of the network was a great admirer of
The Thin Blue Line
and was sold on the idea almost immediately. NBC eventually became the film's major financial contributor. With the interest of two networks under his belt, Freedman then decided to try Japanese television. The idea of a TV special about Hawking backed by Spielberg was very appealing to the Japanese, and Tokyo Broadcasting took very little convincing.
The project now had the funding it needed. Between the three networks, the producers had a budget of three million dollars. They could effectively make the film they wanted.

Errol Morris's approach was to build the film around a series of interviews, recording much more footage than is used in the final version. Cutting this interview material to perhaps half its original length, he then began to construct visual images around what remained. In the first stage of the project, researchers drew up a list of Hawking's friends, family, and colleagues from around the world who they thought might be interested in taking part in the project. However, they were soon surprised to discover that there were many people who did not want to be in the film.

Hickman believes there is some resistance to media people in Cambridge. Like Peter Guzzardi, he felt that some of Hawking's students—as well as more senior colleagues—resented the idea of serious scientific work being oversimplified. He also detected that, despite the runaway success of
A Brief History of Time
, there was a definite closing of ranks in certain quarters at the suggestion of a commercial film being made around Hawking's ideas.

“Cambridge University is a very tight community,” he said. “There are numerous rivalries, jealousies, animosities. Despite the fact that the interviews were totally unscripted (they could talk about what they had for breakfast if they wanted), there was an undoubted feeling that we were a
News of the World
on screen.”

Fortunately for the producers, however, there were plenty more interested participants than those suffering from delusions that they were being coerced into something slightly unsavory.

In January 1990, sound stages at Elstree Studios were block-booked for two weeks. The first people to move in were the set designers. Morris had the idea that he would give the designer the name of an interviewee and a rough idea of his or her relationship with Hawking, and the designer would then go away and create individual sets for each interviewee to be filmed in. Sometimes the set had absolutely no relevance to the subject; for other interviews it matched the topic of the interview.

As the interviews were unscripted, Morris would often say to the interviewee, “Look, I don't really know how to start this interview. Why don't you just tell me some stories?” He has what he calls the two-minute rule: “If you give people two minutes, they'll show you how crazy they are.”

For
A Brief History of Time
they conducted over thirty interviews in thirteen days at Elstree, using thirty-three different sets. Interviewees included Dennis Sciama, Dr. Robert Berman, Isobel Hawking, friends from school and undergraduate days, and co-workers at the DAMTP such as Gary Gibbons. However, star billing was reserved for Stephen Hawking himself.

The most important set at Elstree during the fortnight of filming was a reconstruction of Hawking's office at the DAMTP. No effort was spared in re-creating the room in intimate detail. Even Hawking was bemused by Morris's attention to minutiae.

“I'm surprised they went to all that trouble because most people wouldn't have known if it had been different,”
⁴
he said.

Morris had wondered about Hawking's fascination with Marilyn Monroe. Hawking smiled and explained that he
had very much enjoyed
Some Like It Hot
, and ever since then, his family and friends had insisted on buying him Marilyn merchandise at every opportunity: posters from Lucy and his secretary, a Marilyn bag from Timothy, and a towel from Jane. “I suppose you could say she was a model of the Universe,”
⁵
he had joked.

Morris had also decided to have built a reproduction of Hawking's wheelchair, accurate to the last detail of the license plate, for when he could not make a shoot. Using “macro-filming” techniques, he could get extreme close-ups of the chromework and leather, filling the screen as an image to accompany an interview on voice-over. According to Hickman, Hawking's childhood home at 14 Hillside Road was filmed almost brick by brick.

Hawking himself was shot against a blue screen so that his image could be projected onto any backdrop the director chose. The original intention was to have Hawking narrate relevant parts of the film using his voice synthesizer. However, it soon became clear that the harshness of the voice was irritating after a while when used as a voice-over. Consequently, Morris decided against the idea, and the viewer hears Hawking's voice only when he is actually talking to the camera. The use of blue-screen filming gives the director enormous flexibility. “I can place Stephen Hawking where he belongs, in a mental landscape rather than a real one,”
⁶
Morris has said.

What the viewer does not see, however, are astronauts falling into black holes or other such science-documentary clichés. As Hickman points out, “No one has seen a black hole—they are theoretical objects as far as we know. The subject matter of this film lies in the realms of the imagination.”

With a three-million-dollar budget, Hickman, Freedman, and Morris could call on the very best people in the business to handle design, lighting, cinematography, sound production, and other essential technical support. The background staff responsible for transforming Morris's ideas into a viable product had impeccable credentials; between them they had worked on over a dozen major Hollywood films, including
Edward Scissorhands
,
Batman II
,
American Gigolo
, and
Wild at Heart
. The American composer Philip Glass was commissioned to write the film score, his polyrhythmic electronic music acting as a perfect complement to Morris's visual acrobatics.

Hickman says that the film is really about God and time and not so much about scientific investigation or Hawking's disabilities:

We are far more interested in the concepts Stephen has tried to portray in his book than in producing a straight science documentary asking questions like “What is the future of cosmology?” The most exciting thing about cosmology is the fact that it interfaces metaphysics and conventional science. It's very interesting that Stephen has attracted a lot of attention over the religious aspects of his work, as well as the fact that he is close to a number of physicists with deep theological concerns, such as Don Page.

On the days when Hawking was called upon for shooting, he traveled to Elstree with his team of nurses and aides in the specially converted VW van he acquired soon after receiving
the cash award that came with the Wolf Prize. On the set, a reverent hush regularly descended on the crew and technicians. Hawking, despite his disabilities, commands a powerful presence that surprises most people on their first meeting. Seated in his wheelchair, he would spend hours under the studio lights, silently observing the frenzy of activity around him as the camera zoomed in for a close-up, or makeup people dabbed rouge on his cheeks between takes.

The filming of
A Brief History of Time
was completed in spring 1990, but Morris's filmmaking technique is labor-intensive during the editing stage of a project. This took up the rest of 1990 and the early part of 1991, and the film was finally to hit cinemas in America and Europe in the spring of 1992. The intention was to show the movie in selected theaters for a short period and then for it to be networked internationally by the broadcasters who financed the project, NBC in the States, Tokyo Broadcasting in Japan, and Channel 4 in the U.K. It was then sold to other broadcasters around the world and destined ultimately to appear in the stores as a video.

While the movie project was in the editing stage, during the summer of 1990, the seemingly unthinkable happened. Shock-horror headlines appeared in a number of national newspapers announcing the sad fact that Stephen and Jane Hawking had separated after twenty-five years of marriage.

In fact, the two of them had been growing apart for a number of years. As Hawking's career reached new heights of fame and success, the awards and medals piling up along with
honors from all parts of the world, Jane had felt increasingly isolated. She had begun to accompany Stephen on foreign trips far less frequently, and as she no longer had the responsibility of nursing her husband, she had started to turn her attention toward her own interests—her work, her garden, her books, and an increasingly active involvement in one of the best choirs in Cambridge.

The academic community in Cambridge was shocked by the news. For as long as anyone could remember, Stephen had taken great pains to promote the role Jane had played in his life and, despite their disagreements, to outsiders their marriage was a model of security. For weeks, friends and colleagues were plagued by newspaper reporters who had staked out the Hawkings' home on West Road in an attempt to get a scoop and dig the dirt on the marriage breakup. Hawking was a world-famous figure, and in the minds of the Sunday rag editors there was the macabre twist of Stephen's disability to mix into a front-page splash.

Thankfully, the gutter press never succeeded in finding the angle they wanted. In Cambridge the scientific community closed ranks, and family friends, if they knew any details about why the couple had parted, were saying nothing. Gradually, however, stories began to emerge. There were rumors of extramarital relations developing over a number of years long before their marriage had reached a crisis point; but those who knew the couple well regarded as far more significant tales of increased tensions between Stephen and Jane over the old religious arguments. Their disagreements had been swept under the carpet for many years, but with the writing of
A Brief History of Time
, it appears that the wounds had been reopened.

Through his work, Hawking's early agnosticism had become more overtly atheistic, and with his no-boundary theory he had effectively dispensed with the notion of God altogether. Yet, ironically, Jane's deeply held religious convictions had been one of the strengths that had enabled her to cope so well with the burden imposed by Stephen's increasing disability. However, the couple had lived with religious disunity for most of their married life, so that issue on its own was certainly insufficient reason to separate.

As reported in a number of newspaper articles, the break came when Stephen left Jane to move into a flat to live with the nurse who had looked after him for a number of years, Elaine Mason. According to reports, as Stephen and Jane had drifted apart, he and Elaine had grown closer. For a number of years it was Elaine rather than Jane who had accompanied him on his foreign travels and with whom he spent much of his working life. The situation was complicated by the fact that Elaine was married to David Mason, the computer engineer who had adapted Hawking's computer so that it could be fitted to his wheelchair. The couple had two children, and in fact David Mason and Hawking had met at the gates of the primary school that both Timothy and the Mason boys had attended. It was through this initial contact, and Hawking's request for a chair-mounted computer, that Mason had been able to start his own computer business and Elaine Mason had later become one of Stephen's team of nurses.

Jane had cared for her husband for over twenty-five years, sacrificing many of her own personal hopes and ambitions along the way; but as fame and international success had begun to take over his life, and their paths diverged, it appeared
that they no longer needed each other. Some commentators have tried to place the blame on Stephen, but many others believe that such views are wide of the mark. In any marriage breakup,
blame
is not a word to use lightly. Certainly, Jane has devoted most of her life to Stephen, almost single-handedly taking care of him when he was a little-known physicist struggling to overcome disability and develop his career. However, things change; many married couples grow apart from each other. A number of friends feel that Stephen should not be blamed for leaving the woman who had done so much for him. It is an insult to Jane's dedication and commitment for others to place the past like a yoke around his neck.