What’s your niche? How are you different from other academic consultants?
When you’re looking for an expert, you can’t just pick up the phone and dial a PhD. Anybody can get a PhD these days. They’re giving them away on the back of cereal boxes.

Then where does a producer or writer start?
You start with a philosophy.

And what is your philosophy at WickedSmaht?
The philosophy is, there’s a huge disconnect at present. There’s Hollywood, whose goal is tapping into the spirit of humanity and creating audiences from that. And they’re having to work with academia-- an industry that’s 99% committed to materialism and the denial of human spirit in any form.

Examples, please?
Look at the huge box office of films like The Matrix and The Passion of Christ. In those films, the ‘passion’ was already there with the screenwriters. From the start. But if you’re bringing in experts to help develop a script, how do you know that same passion will be there?

Does this philosophy work for both history-oriented projects and science-oriented projects?
There’s such an emphasis on historical accuracy. But there can be many readings of history. You want one that connects your characters of the past with people of today. It’s all hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics? There’s a fifty-dollar word.
You’ll hear ‘hermeneutics’ a lot with us. It simply means finding the human thread of permanence. What makes us people -- then, and now.

And modern universities don’t encourage this?
Modern universities are pushing a human view called ‘Evolutionary Psychology’. It promotes today’s society as new and improved. With nothing to learn from the past. Hollywood, thankfully, by it’s very nature, by doing historical films, works against this orthodoxy every time a camera rolls.

And science?
Nietzsche said, “Science is totally dependant on philosophy, though it easily forgets this.” I think we’re in a time when science is trying very hard to make us forget-- to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

So your company’s role is..?
We’d like very much to be that man behind the curtain. Science is a cultural activity. We can’t forget that. Again, box office bears it out: materialist, impersonal science and science-fiction doesn’t sell in Hollywood. There’s no humanity. Yet the consultants Hollywood producers pick up the phone and turn to most always are materialists.

Why‘s that?
Probability function. You pick up the phone, you call a university, chances are 99% you’ll reach a materialist.

So that’s the disconnect?
That’s the disconnect. And that’s why we’re here.