Genius - Story of Albert Einstein
LOS ANGELES -- Genius, the television series about Albert Einsteins life is filled with a lot of what actor Geoffrey Rush calls Einstein zingers.
Theyre one-liners that he either said or wrote and, says executive producer Ken Biller, are really perceptive and quite funny.
Based on the biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, the 10-part drama shows what drove the scientists life and how he coped.
The young Einstein played in the series by Johnny Flynn was something of a bohemian artist, according to director Ron Howard. He has a maverick sensibility that sometimes gets him in trouble and creates one of the barriers.
Later, he found himself tilting against a society that didnt want to welcome his thoughts. In retrospect, you look at how close society came to not benefiting from Albert Einstein.
The National Geographic series goal was to show how much more there was to Einstein than math and physics.
Im like most people in that I sort of thought of the brilliant old guy sticking his tongue out and the theory of relativity, Howard says. What the book and series suggest is a complexity not only in the character but in the times in which he was living.
To make sure the younger Einstein meshed with the older one, Flynn and Rush (who plays him in later life) chatted on Skype and did workshops together.
We had the same dialect coach, Flynn says. That was a huge help because Geoffrey had worked with her before. She was a medium for us to communicate and get a sense of this person physically and vocally. We could combine our ideas and work together.
Rush says the two interviewed each other What would it be like to talk to your younger self? That opened up stuff that was not actually in the text but was a good exercise.
To get a sense of the real Einstein, Rush looked for films but didnt find much.
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Instead, he lit on those zingers and realized there was a deep-rooted Yiddish spirit or level of wit that he was obviously very good at. When you see some of the footage of when he first went to America or Britain, he got off the boat and, within seconds, hed have a group of newfound friends or reporters cackling pretty seriously. His optimism is very present in his humanitarian outlook.
Flynn says that humor was present in Einsteins youth, as well, despite the tragedies he went through, two World Wars among them. Thats not what you know of him as a layman. Thats not what I knew of him before embarking on the project. Thats whats been really cool. We find humor in tragic circumstances because thats the human spirit coming through.
Today, Howard adds, similar obstacles exist, threatening to squelch creativity and human possibility.
Failure, producer Brian Grazer says, is a big part of Einsteins journey. The driving mystery of Einsteins life and the failure he encountered kids will find quite relatable. Theyll be able to access that and it will ultimately become kind of an aspirational piece.
Rush, looking at definitions of genius, found a quote from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that fit Einstein: Genius hits a target no one else can see.
He had a personality that was very anti-authoritarian, Rush says. Hed given up his German citizenship as a very young man because he didnt believe in a militaristic state. He always saw the better side of humanity but then had to confront the development of atomic weaponry as a way of defeating someone from Germany. If they had it in their hands, it would be devastating to their enemy.
"Genius" airs April 25 on the National Geographic channel.
Source: http://siouxcityjournal.com/entertainment/television/genius-shows-complicated-side-of-albert-einstein/article_5619ca50-68ad-5fda-b51c-3b75ac19f001.html
