After seeing the brilliant documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control , I was poking around on Google and found this interview from The Onion's AV Club with its director Errol Morris. In this question, he talks about the making of the documentary complement to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time :
O: You've probably spent more time with Stephen Hawking than most outsiders. What are your impressions of him?
EM: I like Stephen Hawking very, very much. And admire him. You know, there's another interesting thing: There's a series running on PBS called Stephen Hawking's Universe. And I was talking last night to a friend of mine who's a professor of theoretical physics at Harvard. I met him in connection with the Hawking movie, and we've remained friends. He thought he was going to be on the installment last night, so I watched one of them, and it reminded me of how my movie was different from what people expected it to be. This was straight science pedagogy, using a lot of the same energy from my Hawking movie. It nevertheless became a kind of exercise in the ABCs of how the universe works. My movie was never about that. It was about Stephen Hawking's dream about his science, the story of his own biography—but not biography on a kind of factual level, but biography as dreamscape. Of how he himself views his own work, about his own personal or emotional connection to the universe. Which is what I felt about the book, too. I looked at the book as a romance novel, not as an exercise in science instruction. It made me like my movie more, looking at that thing. I'll tell you that much.
