Ron Howard and Brian Grazer Talk 'Genius' | National Geographic

I'm Ron. I'm Brian, and we're here to talk to you about National Geographic's first scripted show on genius. We're focusing on Albert Einstein: 10 episodes that encompass his entire life.

We, as contemporary people in this contemporary civilization that we're living in, know of the icon Albert Einstein, but we don't really think he failed at things. When I was your age, I knew everything, but I was wrong. As we are all coping and trying to survive and trying to aspire to something, we are failing at things often. If you're taking any risk, you get to see—that's what he did.

Could you be so close with my heart? This is all about human interest. This is about getting underneath how the genius worked—what did and didn't allow, or nearly prevent, the genius to emerge. Stand up for Germany. The story itself is propelled by a mystery, and I think that people would just access into it and then find all these other dimensions.

This is what we found going back to Apollo 13 or A Beautiful Mind and many other movies where we've made case studies out of complex characters: the more detail, the better. Audiences are far smarter and far more fascinated by really detailed, thoughtful elements in stories than we ever probably realized when we began our careers. This is one of the things we've discovered, and we're trying to apply it to Albert Einstein.