If you liked The Martian and/or love Elon Musk, then National Geographic has a show for you. Half documentary and half dramatization, Mars is a six-part miniseries about colonizing the red planet, and it debuts on November 14 at 9pm Eastern.

The series relies on interviews with hotshots like astronaut Scott Kelly, NASA chief Charles Bolden, science spokesperson Neil deGrasse Tyson, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to paint a picture of what the journey to Mars could look like and how we might get there. Although many of those details haven't been settled in real life, the series makes educated guesses about humanity's interplanetary future.

Executive producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer previously worked together on Apollo 13, A Brilliant Mind, and From Earth to the Moon. We caught up with them to chat about why Mars captured their attention, and how it felt to make a documentary about the future instead of the past. An edited transcript follows.