“Leo and I were probably on the phone dozens of times, just going through some of his difficult scenes,” says the doctor about the film’s star, who’s already a dedicated climate change activist. “There’s one scene in particular in the movie where he finally, really gets to speak his mind. We talked about this a lot, and I told him, ‘You really have to speak for scientists because we need to be heard, and we feel like we’re not being heard. So just let it all out.’ A few times he said to me, ‘Go for it.’ and I would just say everything I wanted to say. We really tried to pack that into that one moment in the movie.”
In fact, the difficulty DiCaprio’s character has in making dimwits like President Orlean or the vacant morning show hosts played by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry understand the danger of the situation also sadly mirrors real-life experiences endured by Dr. Mainzer and her colleagues.
“It’s really challenging sometimes to communicate science,” she says. “Part of it is a linguistics challenge, because we use terminology that means something very specific in mathematical terms and in science, yet in everyday life, it can mean something almost completely different.”
She continues, “But I also think we really want people to know and love and understand science because it’s so important to our day-to-day lives. Even if we don’t really think about it or don’t really recognize it, science is governing pretty much everything that happens all the time. It’s always at work. It determines how the world works. The physical laws of the universe are just that. So it’s important for all of us to understand how things work, because otherwise we can’t make good decisions.”
There is a long stretch of Don’t Look Up in which science denialism comes into the picture, with politicians and other influential people literally pretending that the comet is not going to hit the Earth. As funny as it is, it’s also frustrating in light of the ignorance and denial we continue to see about long-term problems like climate change and more recent ones, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with people still refusing to get vaccinated or take simple steps like wear masks.
“This has happened a number of times in my career,” says Dr. Mainzer about running into intellectual brick walls. “I know it’s happened to a lot of my colleagues, where you see examples of scientists just really being marginalized, either by conspiracy theories or by special interests… That’s really not good for anybody because as messy as the scientific process is, it is the best thing that we’ve got for basically being able to get the best answers.”