This week I had the great honor to interview the director Roland Emmerich and the writer John Orloff on their bold new movie “Anomalous”. The film blows the lid off Sir Isaac Newton’s so-called theory of gravity. I managed to catch up with them as they were floating in mid-air, somewhere over midtown Manhattan.
“You’d be surprised how many people think that just because a bunch of scientists say there is such a thing as gravity,” Orloff explained, “then it’s got to be true. We realized at some point that this deference to so-called experts is absurd, and we decided to tell the real story. Right Roland?”
Emmerich jumped in excitedly. “Exactly. You see, Newton was part of a group at Cambridge University pushing this theory that what goes up must come down. We side with a group at Oxford (sometimes called the Oxfordians), who realized that this supposed ‘theory’ was utter nonsense.”
“Did you know,” Orloff interjected, “that Newton was a notorious alchemist and theologian? A theologian. How could a man with that sort of background ever be taken seriously as a scientist?”
“There is a rumor,” I said, “that the two of you had originally thought of making a movie suggesting that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. Can you speak to that?”
Emmerich snorted and shook his head. “Do you think we’re complete idiots? The evidence that Shakespeare is the author of his own work is so overwhelming, anyone trying to claim otherwise would be laughed right out of Hollywood.”
At this point in the interview, the rope that had been tethering Mr Orloff and Mr. Emmerich to the ground somehow came unknotted, and the two filmmakers began to drift gradually upward into the sky. “It’s ok,” Mr. Orloff called down to me as they floated away, “Somebody will come by with a helicopter to get us back down.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell them about Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Bernoulli was a liar”.