Looking for Life on Mars
Terri Randall’s hope when she makes films about space exploration—like Chasing Pluto, for example, or Death Dive to Saturn—is that viewers share scientists’ excitement. That rush of success and discovery. “Look at this moment, and look at his eyes, and look at what he’s so excited to do, and work on for so many years, and take so many risks to answer big questions,” Randall says. “That’s what I hope happens when people watch the film, that they get some of that.”
Randall’s latest try at immersing her audience in that experience is the PBS/NOVA documentary Looking for Life on Mars, which was nominated for best long-form film in the “Science in Nature” category at the 2021 Jackson Wild film festival. She followed the scientists and engineers who, during a pandemic, managed to build, launch, and land Perseverance, an SUV-sized, plutonium-powered rover on the Red Planet’s surface. The aim is to carry out a wealth of scientific explorations and technical experiments to lay the groundwork for actually returning pieces of Mars to Earth in the future.
Everything I learnt made me feel more connected to Mars as a real place that possibly in the past was quite different.
Caleb Scharf, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University, caught up with the filmmaker (and writer, director, and producer) to hear how Randall thought about creating this latest film—as well as her upcoming one, on the launch of the James Webb Telescope, in December 2021. It was an interesting role reversal: Scharf is the sort of scientist Randall usually interviews herself. The astrobiologist was keen to understand
