Interesting timing, this…
Yesterday we read some words from Sir Ridley Scott about the role Guy Pearce plays in the upcoming sci-fi epic PROMETHEUS. Turns out Pearce is playing Peter Weyland, head of the nefarious corporation Weyland-Yutani and owner of the titular ship. Yep, the original company man.
Well, today brings a little speech from Mr. Weyland from the year 2023. At a fictional TED conference (TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”; it’s a real conference that participated in this viral video), Weyland introduces himself to a gigantic crowd and talks a little about where he believes technology is headed… and what it’s like to be a god.
The site this video originates from also offers a bit of info on Weyland:
Sir Peter Weyland was born in Mumbai, India at the turn of the Millennium. The progeny of two brilliant parents; His mother, an Oxford Educated Professor of Comparative Mythology, his father, a self-taught software Engineer, it was clear from an early age that Sir Peter’s capabilities would only be eclipsed by his ambition to realize them. By the age of fourteen, he had already registered a dozen patents in a wide range of fields from biotech to robotics, but it would be his dynamic break-throughs in generating synthetic atmosphere above the polar ice cap that gained him worldwide recognition and spawned an empire.
In less than a decade, Weyland Corporation became a worldwide leader in emerging technologies and launched the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth. “There are other worlds than this one,” Sir Peter boldly declared, “And if there is no air to breathe, we will simply have to make it.
In addition to the video, you can read an interview with Damon Lindelof, who conceived the viral vid with Ridley Scott, right HERE . Here’s a sample of what Lindelof had to say about writing the speech:
“In really, really good science fiction the line between the science and the fiction is blurry. When I started attending TED, that line got even blurrier — I started hearing about ideas that were, in my own imagination, more far out than some of the science fiction I was seeing.
Prometheus takes place in the future, but it’s a movie about ideas, and I just felt like it would be really cool to have one of the characters from the movie give a TEDTalk. Obviously, since the movie is set in the distant future, it would have to be a little more contemporary. But wouldn’t it be cool if it was a TED talk from a decade in the future? And what is a TEDTalk going to look like in 10 years? And what would this guy have to say?”
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