“There’s a Starman waiting in the sky.”
Academy Award-Nominated Filmmaker and Director, Robert Stone, held Q & A session at EMPAC to showcase and discuss his 2025 documentary, Starman.
TROY, N.Y. – “There’s a Starman waiting in the sky. He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.”
David Bowie’s 1972 single, “Starman” was included in Brett Morgen’s 2022 documentary film, Moonage Daydream, focusing on the life and music career of the iconic English musician. Quite fittingly, this single was also featured in Director Robert Stone’s 2025 documentary film, Starman.
Hudson Valley-based filmmaker and Academy Award-Nominated Director Robert Stone made an appearance at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) on Wednesday, April 29, to present a free screening of Starman.
Members of the audience were also treated to a one-on-one Q & A session with Stone and RPI’s Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, William Gibbons.
Starman centers around the 50-year career of legendary NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Chief Engineer for Planetary Exploration, science fiction writer, and futurist, Bert “Gentry” Lee.
About Bert “Gentry” Lee
Born March 29,1942 in New York City, NY, Lee, at a very young age, was a mathematical genius. At five-years-old, Lee recited and computed the batting averages of the baseball players on the Brooklyn Dodgers team. Although he wanted to become a baseball player in his youth, Lee became an accomplished scientist.
While his life at home and attending school were a challenge for the young Lee, reading books became his escape away from reality. While attending school, he met Bertha Casey, a teacher who tremendously changed his life and helped him open his doors to not be like everybody else.
In 1962, Lee finished his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas and completed his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned a Master of Science degree in 1964. Upon his graduation, he spent a year at the University of Glasgow in Scotland on a Marshall Fellowship.
In 1969, at just 25-years-old, Lee, alongside NASA scientist, Carl Sagan, worked together on the formation of the Viking Project. In 1975 and 1976, the scientists launched the space probes, Viking 1 and Viking 2, into space and landed them on the planet, Mars. Viking 1 became Lee’s first launch.
In 1980, Lee worked with Sagan to create the science documentary television series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, with Sagan being the presenter. These documentary shows first aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and soon became the most widely watched series in PBS history until The Civil War in 1990.
At 84-years-old, Lee is one of the remaining prominent figures who represented NASA and its scientific impacts during the 20th century. Stone was able to successfully include Lee’s scientific achievements, as well as including other scientific discoveries, science fiction pop culture, and theories about life existing on other planets in Starman within its varied time periods.
“By telling the story of Gentry Lee’s enduring passion for space exploration, Starman showcases the deep connections between scientific discovery and creative expression; it’s a remarkable film, and it was an honor to bring it to RPI” Gibbons said. “Among the many insights Starman offers us at this moment of history, I particularly appreciated its emphasis on communicating the value of scientific research to a broad audience. That’s something Robert accomplishes beautifully in the film, partly due to Gentry himself – he’s such a compelling guide that you’re immediately drawn into his story.”
About Robert Stone
Born in 1958 in England and raised in Princeton, New Jersey, Stone is a child of the space age. His entire childhood was spent anticipating the United States to go to the moon.
“As a child, I was captivated by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s cinematic masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was nine-years-old, totally changed my life” Stone said. “Less than a year later, I watched in awe as the first humans set foot upon another world. These early experiences shaped my worldview and inspired me to pursue a career as a filmmaker.”
Stone received his education from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City.
Stone has combined his interests in film, history, politics, and exploring the world that he grew up in into the documentary films and television shows that he’s made such as American Babylon (2000), Pandora’s Promise (2013), and the PBS miniseries, Chasing the Moon (2019).
From 2014-2019, Stone spent five years working on Chasing the Moon, a political and social history series focusing on the space race that helped put man on the moon. Several years ago, two producers who worked with Stone on Chasing the Moon asked him if he was interested in working on a film about another space program. Stone wasn’t interested in working on a science documentary. Instead, he wanted to make something different.
“I really did want to do something that was different, that would tie all the aspects of our fascination with space, because it’s all one thing. They’re all together, and I’ve never seen a documentary put them together” Stone said during the Q & A session. “I was excited about potentially making a movie about all of it but didn’t know how to do it, and then I met Gentry and that changed everything.”
The Making of Starman
Stone was introduced to Lee by the same two producers who worked on Chasing the Moon. In June 2022, Stone interviewed Lee for four days on a sound stage in Los Angeles, CA. Stone knew within 20 minutes of talking to him that he had his subject for Starman.
“So, after that, where do you have movies about people? Well then, I had a human story, the fact that he was the last living link to the two greatest minds of space exploration and later second half of the 20th century, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke directly to that, and within 20 minutes, he was talking about climate change, the environment, and science fiction” Stone said.
After interviewing Lee, Stone returned to New York with 11 hours of Gentry Lee footage.
“Gentry is never boring for a moment. I’ve never done an interview like this where just everything was good” Stone said.
It took Stone a lot of time to make Starman work as a movie and found the process of gathering the archival images and footage, reviewing and selecting portions of the 11-hour Gentry interview footage, and piecing the documentary together to be “very difficult.” Stone even joked with his researchers for Starman that “we have a longer list of archives than we do archive shots of the moon.”
“It took me literally a year of getting out every day, and going to work, and turning this, just to cut the dialogue, and block out the scenes, and what are the things, what is the story here? Because he’s a storyteller; everything is a story, which has a beginning, a middle and an end, so I had to completely turn the whole thing inside out” Stone explained. “But thankfully, he loves the film; he says this is the best compliment I can get for this.”
“He says that he feels it perfectly captures who he is, which is important to him, as it’s his legacy. He’s 84 years old now. He feels like it perfectly captures him” Stone added.
Starman, the Review
“With Gentry as our guide, we were able to weave a tale that combines our collective fascination with space with a moving first-person narrative about the scientific quest for knowledge” Stone said in his Director’s Note. “In crafting Starman, I found a kindred spirit in Gentry Lee, whose life’s work has centered around these scientific explorations and speculative inquiries.”
From the theater chair, watching Gentry Lee discuss his life story, his scientific and personal achievements, and how important science and the environment mean to him in Starman was interesting. Lee, at the time the filming began, was 82-years-old, and for him to remember and recount his successful work experience as a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Chief Engineer was amazing.
From watching the film from beginning to end, the viewer can observe how Lee and Stone’s interests in science fiction, whether life forms exist on other planets, the cultural phoneme of UFOs, to science pop culture in books and film parallel alongside each another.
Starman begins with Lee talking about his first interest in life, baseball, and his passion for following the Brooklyn Dodgers. Although he enjoys baseball, he’s also interested in science, science fiction, and curiosity on if there’s life on Mars.
The documentary not only centers around Lee’s life and career, it also bounces around to other significant moments and occurrences from as far back as the Big Bang Theory, the formation of Earth, extinction of dinosaurs due to climate change, Viking 1 and Viking 2 landing on Mars, to the creation of the Voyager Gold Record and the co-creation of the COSMOS show.
The documentary also shows clips of science fiction films and TV shows, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek, Armageddon, When Worlds Collide, and 2001: A Space Odessey. Lee also discusses his experience of meeting Arthur C. Clarke at NASA and co-writing a science fiction book together.
Lee, also a passionate environmentalist, discussed his passion for nature and his moving adventures going to Park City yearly to observe how natural and beautiful that the land is on earth. The film later ends with Lee at Dover Stadium watching a Los Angeles Dodgers Major League game.
“So, Gentry was just, I think he’s the best science communicator in the world right now; I really do. And in that, because he has this childlike enthusiasm about all of this that he’s preserved” Stone said.” As he says to preserve that kind of childlike sense of wonder, that allows him to communicate the enthusiasm of what he’s doing to a wider audience.”
To Lee, as he summed it up at the end of Starman, “We live in paradise and we don’t even know it.” Starman paid homage to Lee’s life, space exploration, and the joys of science beautifully.
What’s Next for Robert Stone, Gentry Lee, and Starman?
For Starman, Stone used artificial intelligence (AI) to create a first-of-its-kind, international vocalization of Gentry Lee speaking in Spanish. In the Spanish version, Lee is speaking with his own voice in perfectly fluent Spanish, all lip synced and filmed in 4K.
Two weeks prior to arriving in Troy, Stone premiered the Spanish version of Starman in Mexico City, Mexico and the patrons, Stone said, accepted it as a Spanish language movie.
In addition to an English and Spanish version, Stone also created a Chinese version.
“I’m gonna do more and we want to take it around the world, so that’s part of what we’re doing” Stone said.
“Chatting with Robert and the audience afterward at the Q & A was a privilege. Our community was treated to an insider perspective on how the project came together and where it’s going – and of course the RPI community came to the table with exactly the kinds of thoughtful questions we’d expect” Gibbons said.
“It was a wonderful experience for me to present Starman to such an engaged and enthusiastic audience. The questions were thoughtful and provocative” Stone concluded. “I left feeling like the film had made a lasting impression. I’m looking forward to a return engagement to RPI with my next film, which was discussed in our Q &A.”
Starman can be watched and rented on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Google Play. More information about the film can be viewed online at Starman Movie.
Thanks for alerting me to this project by really piquing my interest, Amy!