I got involved after Hemingway & Gellhorn, a project that I was going to do fell through some... As a result of the economic uncertainties of the world at that moment. And I... Mark [Levinson] sent me a copy of the film, saying, 'Do you want to work on this film?' Or rather, 'What do you think of this cut?' There was... he had an assembly of it done. And I thought, 'Well, it's good, and here's some suggestions.' And then, one thing led to another, and he suggested, 'Why don't you come to New York and work for a couple of months on the film before you get your next assignment?' And I was at loose ends, and, 'Okay, let's do it.'
I moved to New York, and started working on this film. I love science and physics, and my... the things I choose to read at night as I go to sleep are all mostly popularisations of science, or things along that line. So I already knew something about what was going on. So, on a certain level, I didn't have to be brought up to speed. Of course, there was a lot for me to learn, specifically, about what this actually was, and how best to tell it as a story. But I was not completely innocent about particle physics, coming into it.
And after working for a couple of months on the film, we began to hear drum beats from Geneva, kind of, jungle drum, so to speak, saying, 'Something's going to happen in July.' And the closer we got to that date, it became obvious that they were going to announce that they had discovered the Higgs. And this was fantastic news. On the other hand, it meant that we had to shoot that, obviously. And that information meant that we had to change how the film was going to end, because now we had a real ending for the film, rather than it just, kind of, petering out and saying: more work has to be done. We actually had a fantastic ending to the film.
