This was what Mark [Levinson] did for his bread and butter, and he was developing other films along the way. He wrote and directed an independent film in the late 1990s, I believe, about Russian émigrés from Soviet Russia. And in the mid 2000s, 2005, 2006, he moved to New York from San Francisco, and met a physicist, David Kaplan, who was planning to make a film about the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the atom smasher, that was planned to be 14... to have 14 times more energy than the previous atom smasher. And it was going to turn on in 2008, and he was anxious to make a film, just to document what was going to happen.
Because it had been so long since the last powerful atom smasher had been built, that there was a drought of data. Physicists were making theories on the basis of no new data, because everyone was waiting for this machine to turn on, and it had been decades since the last one. And so, no matter what happens, when this machine turned on, even if they didn't discover anything, the fact that they didn't discover anything at this high energy would be a significant fact for physicists.
So it turned out that nobody was planning on making a film, a documentary about this, and so David began raising money independently, and he contacted... He became friends with Mark. And one thing led to another, Mark wound up directing this film. It was the first documentary that he had directed, and it occupied six years of his life. Starting shooting in 2008, and, well, finished at the end of 2013, and the film was finally released in 2014.
