So he was just quite frankly inaccurate, because when he wrote it no one had been named Pope for such a long time that it was quite forgotten what a big story it was going to be. We don’t take a lot of liberties with it, but in order to adapt it to current common sense a lot of things just simply had to change.
CERN the world's largest particle physics laboratory also provides a key location for the story. Is your mental image of it different to reality?
Well, It’s just the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. It’s not unlike when you go to NASA in Cape Canaveral and Cape Kennedy and you just see a bunch of what looks like bad office buildings and weeds, but when you walk inside you see the orbiter, the space craft, which is actually hooked up to the boosters and it’s all ready to go.
That ends up being a very formidable human structure. When we saw the ATLAS accelerator the sheer size of it was daunting. I don’t know how complicated the particle accelerator needed to be, but it is certainly a lot more complicated than one might think.
And then you add to it, that you are three stories high or one hundred or forty metres underground you can’t help, but look back and say we’re powerful human beings. We are amazing entities if we can imagine this in the first place, and then build it.
I’d like to come back and help them press the button and bring it back online just to see, what’s going to happen.
The story of Angles and Demons provides some great insights to CERN and its scientific theories. Do you think there is a concern of security for the institute and their work?
The reality is that there's not any big security around CERN in general anyway because there’s nothing to steal, not even a secret, they can take away. If somebody was going to come into CERN and try to walk away with what CERN has developed here, they would still need 450 Billion dollars to go back and build a light speed particle collider.
That being said, if in the course of all of this we get to talk about what goes on here at CERN and realize that something great can come out of that I think the power of movies is substantial. Don’t discount how cool a movie can make something mundane look.
Is there a chance that we can watch a movie directed by Tom Hanks with starring Ron Howard in the future?
I don’t think Ron wants to be an actor. And I’m not sure I want to be a director. It’s hard work. As a director I still think I’m a student. I don’t know instinctually how to walk into the process of directing a movie, because you have to communicate so much more.
You have to be able to be a cheerleader and also a taskmaster. I don’t have to do that as an actor. But if I was to direct Ron Howard, I guarantee you, I would put him through a living hell every day. I would demand so much of him. We wouldn’t quit until he leaves the set crying. Weeping!
Angels & Demons is out now.
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