Documentary reveals how a troubled Bill Nye tries to save the world

AUSTIN, Texas—"Did you like the movie?"

Twelve seconds after I've introduced myself to Bill Nye, under the auspices of interviewing him, I find myself receiving the questions. He's TV's "The Science Guy," after all, and he has reason to ask that opening question: his entire life was just put under a documentarian's microscope. He had not seen Bill Nye: Science Guy until the night before (nor had pretty much anyone else, since it was the film's world premiere). Already, it's time for peer review.

I offer my own succinct statement—"I really liked it"—and Nye fills the following brief pause with all of the thoughts he's come up with in the past 12 hours. He appreciates how the film talked about the congenital condition on his father's side of the family; wishes the film offered more context for a story about his early career; is happy about new footage of one of his science-debate opponents mulling a change of heart. "That's surprising and cool!"

My chat with Nye felt far too brief, and the same went for his documentary. Both had something riveting in common: a tremendously human and vulnerable mission to advocate for science.

Reflecting on his father's impact

To be clear: the film isn't the same as Bill Nye Saves the World, the Netflix TV series debuting on April 21. Science Guy purports to tell Nye's life story, and its first mission is to make clear just why the guy is even worth his own documentary.

A throng of screaming young people shows up to tick this box within the first few minutes, all praising the TV show host and science educator. Some of them come on camera to blame his public-television series for their adult pursuit of scientific studies. Others, like a gang of four 18-year-olds in military fatigues, laugh when they admit they were just happy when the words "Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!" played on a VCR during a school day.

The documentary lingers on these positive moments—his opening greeting to a roaring college assembly, his wine-glass clinks with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, his meetings with modern YouTube science-show hosts—but only for so long. Filmmakers David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg pick and focus on a few narrative threads here, and they do an admirably good job weaving them together.

Nye proves generous in terms of personal access. Archival footage of his TV show's production process and old family movies of him and his parents anchor some very telling interviews about Nye's upbringing, and these tap a few surprisingly emotional veins. His original series' crew complains pretty tersely about a momentary betrayal when Nye chased another TV deal in 1991 (it ultimately fell through). His mother was a code-cracking genius during World War II, which inspired him in good ways, while he openly admits that he adopted the worst aspects of his father's darker side.

He admits some of his weaknesses while talking to a researcher who is more interested in the ataxia (a syndrome involving lack of muscle control) that runs on his father's side of the family. Shortly afterward, while in the backseat of a car, Nye looks out the window and openly regrets dodging the condition, which his two siblings suffer from. He doesn't deserve to have dodged that genetic bullet, he says, and he admits that his worries of passing ataxia on to children is why he doesn't have any of his own.

Later in the film, he says that his work as an advocate for science is in no small part a compensatory exercise.

Battling two forces of ignorance

All the while, Nye faces off against two particular forces of ignorance. Science Guy's cameras follow Nye as he visits the Creationist Museum and verbally spars with its creator, scientifically illiterate Ken Ham. We also see Nye follow this up with a visit to Ham's follow-up project, a theme park dedicated to Noah's Ark. The footage within both facilities is chilling, including one installation that attempts to refute the legitimacy of the Lucy fossils and a seemingly endless series of dioramas in which man and dinosaur frolic together in forests.

If that's not bad enough, the duo's conversation at the crowded Noah's Ark park is nothing short of frigid. Upon hearing one comment by Ham about the man's staff of "scientists," Nye swallows and pauses. "Your scientists, I want to be as respectful as possible, are incompetent." Later, Ham tries to scare a little girl by saying that Nye wants to liken humans to "just animals." Nye loudly objects to the word "just," declaring that humans are remarkable animals. "I like what he said better," the girl says as she points at Ham.

We only have so long to get through to kids, Nye says, gesturing to the Ham buildings' bonkers installations. Nye also grapples with accusations that joining Ham for public debates on scientific issues may have helped Ham raise money.

Talking heads appear throughout the film to represent a far more grave threat to science in Nye's eyes: those who would deny humanity's contributions to climate change. Fox News Channel figures largely in these parts, but while famous Fox faces like Sarah Palin pop up briefly to insult Nye's lack of a PhD, Science Guy puts a larger spotlight on Joe Bastardi, a bodybuilding meteorologist (yes, really) who frequently appears on Fox News to downplay humans' impact on climate change. (Conveniently, he also speaks at seminars hosted by oil and coal companies. When confronted about this, Bastardi tells the filmmakers that he couldn't be trying to profit from climate change scaremongering because of how average his cars are.)

Bastardi also tries to challenge Nye to a public debate, but Nye revises his strategy after criticism over how his Ham debate turned out. The duo meets at Bastardi's house for dinner and wine, and the meteorologist's college-aged son shows up, absolutely giddy to meet his admitted childhood hero. The men argue over drinks, with Bastardi nastily shutting his son up at one point during an exchange about climate studies. The next day, at the scheduled debate at a college lecture (no live-streaming or network TV cameras this time, just the documentary crew), Bastardi doesn't show up—but his son does.

Liquid nitrogen coming out of marshmallows

What happens next in the film, with both Bastardi and his son, is a little too weird to spoil here, and Nye tells me he's still surprised by both halves of how that ended. (The filmmakers kept one part of the story secret until the movie premiered. "That was wacky," he said to Ars.)

Science Guy rounds out all of this content with a whopping dollop of hard science, particularly when he travels to Greenland to document the work being done to accurately measure carbon levels in the atmosphere. This footage of Nye helping researchers take ice-core measurements is pretty striking, though not as much as Nye's tour of an ice sheet falling apart as a giant river flows past it. That river's not supposed to be so big, we're told.

The film's biggest success may be how it finds the right balance of personal and scientific information, because you can't tell one side of Nye's life without the other. Still, Nye and I talk about a few things the film glossed over, particularly his young life in Seattle as both a Boeing engineer and an assistant at the city's esteemed Pacific Science Center. (We didn't have time to talk about his limited appearances on the Seattle sketch comedy show Almost Live!, however, but I did make a Speed Walker joke.)

Nye smiled upon remembering liquid-nitrogen demonstrations he did at the Pacific Science Center: "We’d chew marshmallows together, and steam would come out of my nose, oh!" Nye said. "That was really good. So much fun. I was a young guy. I wanted to do some good or something. I was a United Way big brother, and I volunteered at the Science Center on weekends. I really enjoyed that."

Then Nye looked up at me, still considering some comments made in the film about whether his Ham debate had ulterior motives.

"You know, performers like to perform. They got Steve Wilson [early director on Bill Nye the Science Guy] saying, 'Bill Nye always wanted to be famous.' What it is, is, you want to be influential. Call it famous, but you want to be influential."

Never forget the tent caterpillar catastrophe

The film never truly picks a side as to Nye's motives, beyond letting Nye give so much credit to Carl Sagan (whose footsteps he followed in becoming the Planetary Society's CEO). Nye's vulnerability, as shown in this film, really does make his work in scientific advocacy all the more compelling. And I feel even stronger about this after talking to the man—or, honestly, being talked to by the man. Once he gets started on a subject, it's hard to stop him, whether he talks about his work at the Planetary Society on solar sail projects ("it's romantic, sailing on sunlight!"), about upcoming events ("come out for the March for Science on April 22—that's Earth Day!"), or about Fox News' Nye criticisms ("'Bill Nye is ONLY a mechanical engineer.' Can’t read a graph, can’t understand physics. Knows nothing of fluid mechanics or heat transfer. Like, really?").

At one point, he notices the limited time we have to talk and laughs. "I’m so long-winded! It’s a curse. A curse."

More than any message, Nye emphasizes the importance of conversations about science between everyday people. Just talk about climate change with anybody, he insists. I saw Nye advise tons of people to do this: throughout the film; at the post-film Q&A with fans; and even during our own conversation. In my conversation, he actually clarified why he's advising that so much: to battle cognitive dissonance. "When you have a worldview, and you’re confronted with evidence that contradicts it, you gotta do something. You have dissonance, conflict in your mind. You either change your whole worldview, which is quite difficult the older you get, or you dismiss the evidence. Along with that, you dismiss the authority.

"We have to chip away at [climate change denial]," he continued. "It takes about two years for somebody who believes in astrology, believes in subluxations in chiropractic, believes in homeopathy, it takes about two years to overcome that. You have to hear it over and over again. You have to sit and mull it over."

The rest of his advice to the world at large: accept a truly globalized world ("I have a line of bow ties… that’s made in China… because that’s where they have silkworms!") and go all-in on energy policy that kicks fossil fuels to the curb. "We could power the entire US, and over 130 countries around the world, right now, renewably, if we decided to do it," Nye said. "The guy driving down a ski run, in a Land Rover... I just don’t drive that way very much. I seldom have the opportunity to drive down a mountain in a vehicle. It’s not how I drive. I can easily see a time when nobody knows how to drive."

The film is not yet set for a wide release. Visit its official site for more information.

Listing image by Erika Kapin