The Martian (2015) - Extended Edition [Audio]

Hi, this is Riddle Scott here. We're about to go through Martian, which is my latest film, which we've just completed. The film with Matt Damon and uh very nice cast, Jessica Chastain, Chutal, Kate Mara, Jeff Daniels. I didn't develop the script. The script was developed by Fox. Uh a very good writer, Drew was an excellent writer who did a great adaptation, a faithful adaptation of the book. And in the book and therefore in the screenplay, the reveal of going when you see the story

the beginning of the book doesn't really work in the film the way it is in the book. So the middle of the film is where we suddenly rejoin the crew after about page fifty six and it was a bit late. I always felt why not treat it in a linear fashion, see what happens. See him get left behind.

go to the earth and say Mark Watney is dead and then resume, come back and then the film evolves. And that's the way we did it. But we were all over the place with those, you know, variations. Uh faithful to the book, but in fact I think it got in the way. So I think what it is now I think is clearer and better.

Hi, I'm Andy Weir. Uh and I'm Drew Goddard. Andy, tell him what you did. Oh yeah, right. I wrote the book that this uh movie is based on. It's important. It's important. It matters. Uh and I was the screenwriter and executive producer. I was just thinking we could start talking about how much I love the book and how my job was to protect the book at all costs and the very first thing we see in the movie was not in the book. So I'm depressed about that. I guess.

So here we are in Wadi Rum, which is in Jordan. Wadi Rum, for those who really were paying attention to David Lean movies, was in Lawrence of Arabia. And I'll never forget those shots from Lawrence and consequently I've been back there three times for plates for Prometheus One for Excellence. But now we went back there to actually film uh rather than just plates for Martian

So we'd done all our studio shooting in Budapest in rather magnificent new stages. So half the stuff you see right here, right now is a mix of The stage work in relation to very good green screen and wadi rum. So you got to a point now where you can't actually tell the difference. That's how much I believe in green screen and visual effects, providing you with the right people. We built the habit. This is for instance a studio show. That was a studio show where he's kneeling. That's in Budapest.

Well they're doing their daily work. is fundamentally science, geology, biology. In a funny kind of way, not dissimilar to archaeologists, where I guess that they'd block out the ground as if they were on an archaeological site and where each portion of ground that each one tackles is examined carefully and scientifically. This is funny. The reason that we moved this scene outside.

rather than in the breakfast table as you had it. Ridley said, I've already shot this scene. It's an alien. We have a crew sitting around having breakfast in the morning. I don't want to have another scene of a crew having breakfast. Can you please come up with something else? So that's why we did this. Right. This was like the last thing you wrote. It was.

And then Ridley said I don't want to do another breakfast scene. Which is his right as the director. It is not a democracy. It is not, nor should it be. Oh the abort for So in real life, a Martian sandstorm doesn't have the power to do any damage to anything. The atmosphere of Mars is so thin that even with 150 kilometer an hour winds, it it couldn't damage anything.

So that was like a concession I made to reality. It was a man versus nature story and I wanted nature to get the first punch and so this is one of the few areas where we just kind of like give the finger to real world physics. And everyone calls me out on it and I I often get a lot of emails from people who think that like I just didn't know.

So what's interesting is is while they were working on this, uh Wrigley sent that question, he's like, Uh according to the NASA guys, you this wouldn't happen and I'm like, Yep, it wouldn't but So that's why they had it change it to instead of like oh kilometers per hour, they had us change it to abort force. Right. Like the force of the wind is like, you know, eight thousand newtons and that that would be dangerous but No Martian Sandstorm would have that kind of force.

It it really is the biggest buy of the movie. Yeah. And the truth is we wouldn't have a movie if we didn't have a storm. Right. I mean I could have come up with some other method of stranding him there, but it wouldn't have been as cool. And cool always wins. Cool wins. sort of behind the scenes champions of this film and getting it made. Вас Дім Кэрон ку

because this is a Fox movie and he has a they're v he's very friendly with the Fox people. They sent him the script just to get his opinion on whether or not they should make the movie and he was over the moon and very enthusiastic. But his one note was this storm could never happen and it was funny that he picked up on it right away.

Making the storm I think I'm becoming an expert in making storms in studios. We did pretty well actually and uh had a pretty good rehearsal on Prometheus where I had to do a storm, but I think this is even more successful. It's assisted by some layers of digital particles by uh the effects company, MPC, who are great. I I love to work with MPC, I work with them all the time.

By doing that we thickened everything, we could place the focus and have particles literally moving sharply in foreground and so it becomes very effective on the big screen. And of course you s connect that with the sound is fantastic. Six degrees. As usual, all the technology looks like it works. But in fact it doesn't. But good actors look like they can make it work. And uh that's partly my job to make sure that all that kind of stuff falls into place, looking like the real thing.

I think NASA were very interested in um Seeing finally what I would do with the suits and the technology that are used, because we're talking near future here, maybe fifteen years time. where there's a possibility that they will consider trying to put a crew on mass, but that's a hell of an order book. It's a giant challenge. But that's why they're saying twenty years.

I talked to an astronaut who said that's more or less said that they'll start to think quite seriously about at fifteen. They're already thinking seriously about it, they're already interviewing people that might go to Mars and might want to stay there. So that's a kind of it kind of rather scary proposition. Some people will go there, live there, not come back. I I bet you get a lot of you know volunteers. Not me, I'm a city boy.

When you get tubes like that. I thought all the particles Whooshing up the tube might be useful. The tube is long to climb up to about 60 feet so you're going to be fit. So by the time the storm drops away out of its punch... Yeah, fine black dust floating up the tube which I love that. Just add that on the on the spot. We did it literally, and then Richard MPC added more. Tell us how you came up with this idea.

Well, I was uh sitting around thinking about how a manned mission to Mars could work. and I came up with what is the Aries mission and then I started coming up with all the things that could go wrong, trying to figure out how to make sure that the mission plan wouldn't kill people.

And I realized that all these things that could go wrong might make for a good story, so I created the unfortunate Mark Watney. At the time though, you had a day job. Yeah, I was a computer programmer. This was your first book? It was the first book I've ever had published. My first two weren't weren't that great.

So you're working a computer programming job and you're writing this what at night? I'm very I'm very interested in writers process. Yes. So you go to work all day and you come home every night. And I'd work on this at night and I was posting as a serial to my website. It helps to not have a social life of any kind. That is how we become writers. And that's how that happens. I really couldn't have shot in Budapest had I not found this very modern building there.

They call the whale, and we just took it over and we put everything into this like it's the main new office of the modern NASA, including what you'll see fairly shortly is the kind of magnificent control room. Okay, so how long did it take you to write the book?

Took me about three years uh on an I mean, I'd post a chapter maybe every two months or so and then sometimes I'd go months without touching it. Okay. What really helped was uh encouraging feedback from my regular readers. I had a small mailing list of people.

They would give me feedback and a lot of encouragement and that just helped motivate me. Because that's the hardest part about writing is writing. It's easy to come up with ideas. It's hard to write'em down. I it's funny I say it all the time. One of the things that happens in Hollywood is you hear a lot of We've got a great idea but the script's not very good. And I always say the script is what you pay for. Like execution is what you're paying for. Everyone has good ideas. It's not special.

I believe I read the book I want to say March of twenty thirteen. I talked to you right around the time Fox came for the uh film rights. Right. And you were still negotiating the book rights at the time? Yeah, the book the book deal and the movie deal came together four days apart. So that was pretty surprising.

Here we discover that in fact Mark Watney is alive and of course it's not literally the right time'cause when you actually think about it you say, Well wait a minute, you mean he's been lying in the sand all the time? No.

It's a prelap to the announcement that Jeff Daniels just did. He probably laughs at post Storm maybe if he's lucky in that suit two hours. Storm dies daylight he wakes up And of course he's still telling to the spike that went into his stomach, pierced his suit, didn't kill him because the blood congealed in in so doing saved his wife and saved the the pressure inside the suit so he could function. Now he's the Y has to cut the wire.

Astronauts I discovered have two things which are terribly important a handy toolkit at all times with everything in it and a roll of gaffer tape, or we in America filmers should be called gaffer tape. In America they call it duct tape. Duct tape is a very strong canvas. kind of tape which will stick to anything under any conditions, including wet on wet. And this stuff will save your goddamn life, will seal your aircraft, will actually seal your helmet if you crack it from the outside world.

And we in fact have a sequence where we see him save himself by having always having his trusty duct tape. I'm getting to a point now that uh in Erlin I always had the CO two in the door so when they opened up the door and closed the door there was a blast of CO two, which of course is to me the cleanser. If you bring any biology in, it's dead. And so I stuck that on the doorway just for fun, really. No one spotted.

When you get a wonderful truss on like that, you can't. It to unclip that would take a lot longer. So I had him just bash things and clips automatically undone. That's the beauty of filmmaking. Thank you. All right, so March of twenty thirteen I get a phone call from Aditya Sood, who is uh producer on the movie, and he says look. I'm gonna send you something it's special. I think you're really gonna like it. And I say, Okay, what's it about? And he said it's about a guy stuck by himself on Mars.

And I said, Why haven't I heard of this? He's like, Well, because it's an ebook. And I was like, Well that sounds just silly enough to excite me. So send it over. And uh he sent it over and I remember I read the very first sentence and the very first sentence is I'm pretty much fucked.

I remember laughing out loud right when I read that. And now that I look back and I've had time to think about the book and think about all the things I love about the book, everything that I love is pretty much in those first four words. It's not I'm fucked It's I'm pretty much fucked. So there's the humor is there, the you know, humor in the face of

existential sadness is there and the optimism by having but you know it's also realistically I'm probably fucked. And so I remember thinking, okay, this is good right away. I read the whole book like I would imagine most people read it in one sitting'cause it really moves Andy. I mean it just really Well thanks. It just rockets.

And I'm always looking to say no to things'cause I just nothing makes you happier. It really does. It really feels good to say no uh in Hollywood for sure and people get very confused and it's fun to watch them be confused. But I read it. And then I went to bed and then I woke up the next day and was still thinking about it and I read it again. And then uh and then I read it again. I remember I read it three times before I even called Odithia back.'Cause I wanted to make sure that

I r you know, that it was as special as I thought it was.'Cause I've been fooled before. You know, sometimes you'll like something and then the next day you'll like, Yeah, but I don't want to devote two years of my life to this. And so you r you want to be sure And it was my wife. I was talking to my wife and I said I this book is really special.

And she said, Well what what do you love about it? And I said, you know, I s I sort of told her what it was about and it was my wife that said, you know, it's it's about your hometown. And I didn't put that together'cause I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. surrounded by scientists and one of the many things I loved about the book is that you really captured scientists the way that to my ear scientists sounded that I'd never seen before. And it's this sort of combination of

Optimism and intelligence and humor that I find very common in the scientific world. Well thanks. Everyone always laughs at this expletive. I hadn't intended that, but everyone laughs and Really either I think it's a form of release that the tension lets them off the hook. And so they realize, Oh great, I can laugh a little bit in this movie which you can,'cause he's the kind of unshakable, you know, astronaut, which I think is part of the quality of these people and why they're chosen.

They are there to contend and deal with anything that comes at them. Like a pilot, test pilot, he's got to just stay cool. And then we changed it to Saul eighteen is the day that he got uh stranded. In the book it's Saul six, and I love the reason why. Yeah, it was a Ridley thing. Well and it's actually like once once you see the scene, it does make sense.

There's a scene later on where he's where he's stirring the crap from the crew, adding water to turn it into fertilizer, and Ridley wanted there to be a good sized bucket of crap that he's stirring to be kind of a gross scene. Yep. And it's funny and it works really well. And he's like, well, six days of crap production from six people would not generate enough. That is why. So there could be more crap in that bucket. All the souls just have twelve added to them from the book.

And then we had to sort of figure out the ramifications of the food. Right. We just said that they sent a larger margin of error. That's right. That was the simple fix. It's fun. As a screenwriter, it's fun to get notes from your director that are essentially add more feces to the movie. challenge in the script, I think people were afraid of it, is that there's a lot of voiceover to tell the story. Mainly because he's on his own. So I've got to have a guy either talking to himself or voice over.

Both are dangerous. So you always got the practical I figured this habitat which is, you know, a place livable with six people or the rover which is livable with four people. And that's about it really. That's all he's got. and so I almost thought A bit like a black box in an aircraft, if they all die, they want to know why the moment they it went and why it happened.

So to me the GoPros became the black box of the thing. So I figured, you know, how many are there? Thirty, twenty, twenty-five. So wherever he is he can talk to a camera, so he can do a size to a camera. So in effect the GoPro becomes his buddy. So the cadence uh changes when you're talking to something or someone. So you've got reasons for the tonality to be voice talking to another person and joking another person.

straight voice over and straight reporting to camera. So when he sits in front of his desk he's doing ships log. Everywhere else GoPro when he's ruminating then that's voiceover. So there were three opportunities for different intonation and I think that helped a lot. Consequently a lot of the film is quite amusing. I think d sometimes downright funny, particularly given his perilous situation.

People don't always read scripts with a view to later saying, Oh my god, that's funny. I didn't realize it was going to be so funny. It's in the text. If you know what you're looking for, it's in the text of the book. Having now met Andy, the writer who's a real pistol. I mean, he's funny and, you know, charming and witty and Matt's perfect. In a funny kind of way is the ultimate cool, calm, understated kind of guy, which works perfectly for this. I'm not gonna die

You know, not that he needs us to praise him, but w we need to talk about how good Matt Damon is. Quite honestly. It's such a complicated role. The character in the book i it's all there. But finding a person that can do this is difficult'cause you need intelligence and you need, you know, someone that can do the humor and you need someone that you can watch be alone on a planet. It gets difficult. The the list gets small quickly. Yeah.

I like Commander Lewis. She's uh in the grand scheme of things, she's kind of a secondary character, right? Obviously, Watney is the main character. But then you get to like who is the dude or agonist, right? Who's the second most important character? And it's probably Vintage And so but Lewis is very important.

One of the things I loved about the book is that you essentially have the most important emotional relationship between two people is between Mark and Lewis and it's not romantic. No romance, like ever. It should not even occur to the reader. She's his boss. She's his commander. She's like, if anything, she's like almost in a maternal role. Yep. Here's the big discovery. Thinks about that, gives that a long look, hmm, and realizes that actually he has something. If he remembers.

Nasser had given them as a thoughtful present for Thanksgiving turkey and spuds. Now not many people know, but a potato actually is a seed. If you cut it in half and plant And fertilize it in 40 days, you'll have a potato plant with maybe six to eight potatoes on it. So you've already done compound. But if you do that over the area of this floor, you got a farm that's gonna keep you alive and you can keep doing that. So potatoes and rice are the m two biggest staples in the world.

Now I think rice has become even a bigger staple than no, potatoes are now the biggest staple in the world, even in Middle East and For East. Spud is the magic vegetable. It's not that good for you, but we all love it, particularly forest. So he's now got to live in Spuds for the rest of his stay there, where he's going to become an expert on how you cook potatoes. Here we are. Goes outside, and there are capsules lying in what they call the organic waste, human waste.

Each visit has been sealed in a plastic container with your date and your name on it. So that later if NASA wanted to, they can take a sample of these things over, period. It's a bit like taking samples of your hair.

Your hair is a perfect graph of what you've been taking, what you've been eating, what drugs you've been taking. It's in there like a graph in one hair, you know that? So over a year you if you h you grew your hair for a year you could that single strand of hair isn't an indication of what you've been eating, what you've been taking. Same with Pooh. Pooh will be later this is freeze dried. Later the poo will be examined.

yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r great thing about the way we put this together is you still don't know quite what he's gonna do. Yeah. Yeah. He's about to reveal what he's gonna do and I think people

When they watch the film I think sometimes I think, oh no, how long are we gonna spend inside? Oh we're not Oh no. What's he gonna do now? I and I think it's full of surprises. That's why when you get to this and he says fuck you mug And now he's ploughing the field. So the music, of course, should echo that sentiment. And that enormous thing that he's doing, he's growing food for himself using the droppings of his fellow crewmates.

And once she makes it up b the audience get used to that. I think it's embarrassingly embarrassing as hell but funny. Isn't it funny how people are actually embarrassed about their own droppings, right? And now you get a dollar puppoon and then half a spud, cover it. Thirty eight days later you're gonna have something. Isn't God wonderful?

And there you have the garden. So the trick is how you shoot is you got no what you're doing when you're shooting. I prepped all this in my head before and you I say, right, I don't wanna see'em you know, doing and I'll do three and then cut out and it's a evolu To show the watering how that works, I just jump up wide and do a stop motion shot to see how the water's getting darker and darker. But people can tie themselves in knots doing that. We did this in seventy four days, the whole thing.

I like this because it's always like trying to challenge the audience, and they're gonna go, oh no, you're not gonna find Christ and talk to God at all. It's not that at all. It evolves quite wonderfully in the text to having to go through his co pilot's things to find a very private thing which is a cross. Which he wasn't allowed to have on board'cause it's wood. You can't have wood on on a spacecraft'cause wood will burn. You can't have stuff that burn. So thank God for the pilot for

Michael Pena, the cross is carved up and used for kindling. When the people realize what he's doing, they love it. All that science and chemistry works. Those little pellets that gets from the engine, you mix'em, you burn them, you heat'em, eventually create humidity, the tent becomes the chimney to make the atmosphere humid, which will eventually carry water efficiently onto all those walls. uh for him to be expositioning to. And I thought that was brilliant because

Just like in the in the book it's just his log. I mean it's presumably a typed log he's typing into it. But now We have this like completely video based log and he's talking to the GoPros to document things, which means now we get to see him doing things and explaining stuff rather than being this kind of omniscient

Voice over. Exactly. And you wanted to feel d the other challenge is it's it's past tense when you're entering it into a log. Right. And we wanted to feel uh I wanted to feel the immediacy of it. This is now, yeah. Yeah, we we definitely took it seriously where we didn't ever want to have narration for the sake of narration. It all wanted to play like he was recording it as a log and if sometime it bled over yeah, that was just part of the log. And it sort of functions like narration.

But we never wanted to feel like we're just explaining things to the audience. And then this thing he's smoking like wily. It was really a great pleasure working with Matt. a team player and often you would just hang around on the set to see what was going on. I love that when they do that. They don't leave, he's just curious to see me line stuff up. I think he'll definitely start

Oh yeah, when we showed this to the JPL guys. So the first time I saw it was in uh uh viewing room at Fox and uh they brought they showed it to a bunch of like top JPL guys and they were really happy about that scene where they're where they're just like Where he's just like, Oh by the way, this is how JPL was founded. Yeah, it's uh and that came from me just going to JPL and talking to people and it was one of those bits of information that I found fascinating. And I also sorta

It felt the spirit of the movie to me. Mm-hmm. You know, you you try to figure something out, you blow yourself up. Yeah, that that is very important. You keep you know, you plow forward, you know? I like that that uh seeing the water inundate the soil, that's pretty cool. I'm not sure what he was doing here. It was never really clear to me. Just repairs, general repairs to the helmet, I guess. What's he doing to that helmet? Got Omninoche. Does it look good? Yeah.

You gotta make stuff up as you go. I mean I always board everything to the ultimate detail, but by boarding it makes me really think it through. And you get really good ideas when you just sit down by yourself uninterrupted. quietly work through it. If you can board it makes it even better. Love this is a very nice nice moment actually. Nice, really nice score here by Harry. Well hello there. Hello there. Right there's gonna save his dance. Hey there.

One o look, there was there were many fights, Andy, that you were not privy to. Uh huh. And they were all about protecting the book. One of them was We need to cut to earth much sooner. That happened throughout in the script process and then in the editorial process. And you know, I felt very strongly that we need to stay with Mark as long as possible the way you do it in the book'cause it really helps sell the isolation.

On the script it's about page twenty, which is late to get to to get to these people. So mm it was a challenge to sort of get through Congress, but we did. That's pretty good. This was another scene in the book that I loved that it was really important to keep'cause I love that they're talking about the real bureaucratic side of science. Yeah which is w it it's not about this idealism. The idealism comes through but yet it's about people worrying about budgets and appearances.

Twitter. Excellent. Effortless. Funny. Funny guy. Nice. I worked there once before an American gangster, where you're playing the younger brother, the one who wore the flag. He just got it. He's v he's Nigeria but kind of also very British. I think he's probably English public school, good school. And uh think I'm sure And he's prolific.

That of course outside the window is in Nassau with all those rockets. That's the garden of rockets in Nassa. Every twin rocket they made they stand up in this area, just like a park of rockets. You know, still people don't use multicamera. I'm shocked.

I still find every time I do a film Mae llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r llawer o'r

You gotta know where you're putting your camera and you know you're gonna cut it. You're gonna use it. Because a lot of people just bung a camera down, get a shot and you never use it. It's grabbed, you know. We wait a year and nobody gives a shit. This girl's very interesting. She's playing Mindy Mackenzie Davis who's actually right now got quite a successful TV show going. I hadn't seen it, I just met her in a casting set, I thought she was fine with it.

So this is the one end of the room in the building. in Budapest and we went in then and fitted the screen. All those screens are modules. So they can put any image on there what that they want'cause they're all interconnected and all married together. So it was very successful. We're literally phot there's no there's no mat here. We l what you see is what we uh had in the room. We just photographed it. And sometimes we had to diminish it, uh degraded.

Somebody's pointed out to me that Mindy Park is the only character in the entire book that undergoes any growth. Hm. Like all the other characters, all the main characters are their personalities are the same at the end as they are at the beginning. Yes. But Mindy starts off like really shy and intimidated by all these powerful NASA people she's interacting with.

But by the end of the book she's just being a smart ass to him and stuff like that. Her Joseph Campbell hero's journey is that she becomes a smart ass? Yeah, a little bit. Well and then and I liked it at the end we see that she's the guidance flight controller, which is Yeah. It was a very good tea. I can't think of anyone in the universe throughout all time more suited to play any mantros than Kristen Wick.

And she plays it pretty tame from what I would have uh thought I mean,'cause I expected her to really go off. Kristen's a phenomenal actress and I think that she got that she got the spirit of this movie. Yeah. And I think she was frankly excited to play something other than other than the comic release. Yeah. That being said, there's some amazing outtakes for that astronaut we killed and Yeah, that line also usually gets a pretty good laugh. Like our bad sensor.

For the audiences like Christmas. In all it's a very nice balanced cast of really three universities. NASA, JPL, four universes, JPL, the spaceship, and Mars. So I think one's the nice thing about arguing saying we've tested the highest I've ever tested in my entire career. On fire screen if we b we're always in the nineties, which is well then eighty seven percent definitely recommend, which is you can't go higher than that. That's fantastic.

And I think part of it is that you've got every possible thing here in here you could possibly want. Humour, drama, visual, spectacular and some great actors. There's a running gag about Lewis's Captain Lewis's cheesy disco color. That she takes with her wherever she goes, and all he's left with to to entertain him is this Discord collection and some video tapes of some old American 70s TV shows. And one of them is Happy Days. No GPS.

on Mars. Even though there's uh eleven satellites at the moment circling Mars, all giving off different information, there's no there would be no GPS. So you're into dead reckoning. And when you're on the ground you're into dead reckoning It's almost like back to the old days of sailing ships and mass.

Okay, so you write this. At what point do you quit your job? After the book had made the bestseller list. Okay. So I never took a financial risk. It wasn't until I was certain that the royalties could support me that I had quit my day job. Science the shit out of this, I think it should be pointed out. Like everybody tells me, like, oh Andy, that's just the greatest line. You're just such a genius for this.

Drew wrote that line. That line is not in the book. And it's a great line, and I hate the fact that I didn't think of it. And so uh So yeah, that's how I feel about the other ninety nine percent of the lines in the movie, so if I got one through. It's a great line. Thank you. Thank you. Almost went down. Okay, so success. Why didn't you rum? People were a bit nervous at the time because ISIS were peaking at that particular moment politically.

And of course we're eight hundred miles from the Syrian border and I reminded them that actually in Budapest we were three hundred kilometers from the Russian And they said, Oh my God, already I said, Yeah I said, Yeah, eight hundred twelve you come on, you're fine. And so we went there, there was absolutely no problem whatsoever and we were very well looked after and I'd already done a extensive recce with chopper, so I'd finally have to pre chew before I start shooting.

The actual rocks, I was going to stick the habitat in front of you, got to make that decision. So I made that decision and then it was then captured photographically in every way possible by MPC on different sizes and lenses. Probably with all the lenses I'm liable to use, wide to tight. in three sixty pounds so th they always have the information and so once I invest in that I know it's fine. In good hands. This is all real. There's nothing nothing added in here at all except our f silly flow.

I think Lawrence shot here with his dune. And that is, by the way, pretty much exactly what the RTG looks like that's on the back of curiosity. one of the funniest reactions of the film because he's all he's got to take him to entertain him, keep him happy, is Captain Lewis's disco music. So this is what you said this least disco music and find from Captain Bruce's collection and uh they love it when he starts to do his little thing. Yeah actually quite.

So the disco's in the book. The discount of the things I loved immediately. How how did that come about? So much of the book takes place on Mars. I mean I you spend so long on Mars and he's dealing he's got all this high technology and stuff around him. I didn't want the uh reader to lose track of the fact that this is supposed to be happening kind of close to now. Yes. I it's a slight future. It takes place in twenty thirty five.

There aren't flying cars. Yeah, right. He mentions like Wikipedia and he uses Sharpie pens and there's a bunch of products that he uses that we use every day. And so it's just I wanted to keep keep reminding the audience. I want to hang that rocket on the roof right behind him, but they said please don't do that'cause every time we it's about two hundred shots here. So we've got to put the rocket in two hundred times. Do you really need it?

'Cause that's actually when you walk in him at the beginning, you look up, that's the same roof. So I I had mercy My answer is eh. Look, I'm gonna make people forget there's a very strong possibility that Mark Watney could die because that is what you were paying me for. And unfortunately I need this job because currently I am paying alimony to two dead beat ex-husbands because somehow gender equality has bitten me square in the ass. Hard to believe. I left them.

And don't say bring him home alive, it reminds the world he might die. Janti does a great costume job on everybody. Everything the spacesuit of course is wonderful. But then the dressing of these all these characters is great. Tuattell's a bit of a not dandy, just extremely well dressed. Interesting to note, I was told that NASA, because they are involved with rocketry, which involves human beings and human control.

And JPL that only makes robotics the kind of slightly cooler, you know, nerd and flip flops and long hair. So and but when a pro there's a problem they get together. Very much. Very supportive. Very good agency. It's all about the safety of the pilot. I worked with Benny Wong three times. And he was not a lot to do, not a lot to say as a co-pilot in Prometheus I and then I gave him a nice part as a financial genius.

the councillor where he went to meet Cameron at the end and found him at the advisor how to take her money out where to put it. And unfortunately at the end we didn't need the scenes are great but we didn't need him. So this is the third time we got lucky and I I like him so much I popped him in here and he I think he comes off really well.

One of the things I really liked, um, is the differentiation in the book between JPL and NASA and how they're separate but yet share very there's some overlap. But would you call it a rivalry between the two? There is And capturing that was sort of delightful. Yeah, that makes sense. And they had a potato farm in the stage next

to the big stage just to have potato plants in varying stages of growth for these uh for these scenes. It also doubled his craft service. Oh did it? No. Oh you sucked me in on that one. Well, people said, Did you do any research on the Roman Empire when you did gladiate? I said, no. I looked at a few pictures, started drawing.

And you know the art department do a lot of work. I look at that, wow, those skies are good there. That big uh volcano in the background. Uh Janty does all her research, so I get all that pounded. This is that, that's oh my god, okay. But all I'll then jump on say I want commodus armor to be white. White? So you go white because I'd seen a statue of Commerce in white marble. I thought gotta be in white. And uh that's I make the broad strokes and then they've got to make it. Tough.

One of the things I I'm fascinated by is seeing people at work who care about each other. when you work with people for a long period of time. And I think these two really captured that. Vincent and Mindy? Yeah, Vincent and Mindy sort of had that ease. It felt very real to me and part of that is a credit to the the two of them because they're they just They're so comfortable together. It's alright, it's alright. Where is he? She knows his map so well she'll go right there.

Then right there. And then he can join the two up. He gets an idea. I know where it I know where he's going. Here he is. And we did a lot of driving run then, you know, by the time you edit it down you could honest get there and find out what he's looking for because we don't know what he's looking for. Assuming been driving on so I fortunately found a place in Budapest which was a small world trade fair from the eighties.

It and it was empty, so it it worked cleaned it up and worked great for me. For kind of I don't know, Pasadena in a way. Intercut with him looking from what is he looking? And I figured when it was dropped there were probably like four shoes And the whole object being a large package with large rubber balls, so then the chutes release.

Rydyn ni'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud i'n ei wneud I'm sure they wait it so it it bounces and rolls but it's incredibly inexact. There's been one thing been selling them signals for thirty years. And it's all works out solo.

I'd made the storeroom like this shitty and almost funky because I'd seen how the uh object that they're about to reveal was stored. JPL I don't almost like to repeat this, but it was rammed in a garage full of rubbish, Coca-Cola cans, and some cigarettes. On its side and that was it. I don't know what that equipment was worth in terms of just sheer. The effort because once the the twin is done it's discarded. But you think of it then in a war in a science museum or something. There it is.

We still don't know what it'll do. That's the nice thing about the film, it's always a mystery. Don't tell'em. People won't want to tell'em everything. That's exactly what the Pathfinder's like. We copied it. Very good model makers in this. They really made b a beautiful replica of Pathfinder. I mean it's like that is exactly what Pathfinder looks like. I mean they they did a great job.

Yeah, our production designer, Arthur Max, he just can't say enough good things about him. He is just off the charts talented. Mm-hmm. So um there's a little bit of wind in the background on Mars. You can see it going on. And so all this stuff's fluttering around. Later on he like you know puts this kind of thin plastic covering over the hole where the airlock was.

And I'm like, Oh, i it just doesn't feel right'cause I know that like Mars is like practically no atmosphere and so it's like this and the wind even blows it inward. And while I'm watching it I'm like, Oh, that's not right and then I and then I said to myself, I'm like, Well, you know what? I started this. Like I'm the one who started it with the conceit that a windstorm could like cause all the damage. So in this kind of universe

Martian winds can blow things around. Yep. And that's just how it is. Way to go, Andy. It's your fault. It's my fault. At first when you told me oh we're gonna put a crane on the back of the rover I was like, well that's stupid. Yeah. It simplifies so many scenes. I see now. I mean It's a Ridley thing. I I sort of fought it'cause I really like the sort of you know throughout the movie I like the idea that this is a very threadbare movie and you're really seeing how hard it is.

But I think Ridley said there's a certain point where that just gets tedious in screen time. I think he was probably right. He demonstrates that he has the crane when he's picking up the RTG. He didn't really need it for that, right? But now that you know he has it, it does it it just smoothly goes by. This is how he picks up the pro

In the book there's a whole dirt like building the pyramids like the ancient Egyptians did to so he could figure out how to get it up there. That was in the first draft. And uh I think Ridley said I don't want to build a pyramid. You received the guy? Yeah. I just thought we'd all rather look at a black screen instead of a vibrant red planet. Excuse me? That term's our finest con tech we all appreciate is cerbic width.

So we're now learning the fundamentals of communication of an impossibly long shot where he Everything w has to assume what he's doing. They're all informed enough and clever enough to work out what the hell he's trying to do. So he puts in the basics, are you receiving me? Yes or no? And then you realise that this is going to be an incredibly long discussion because the tricky thing here is when satellite goes over, there's only one still frame.

Something like every seven seconds. So you can easily miss things and once you miss that trajectory you then gotta wait twenty two hours for the thing to come back around again. Or was it seventeen? I can't remember where. So they have to then the next step is they have to devise a method of ASCII mathematically.

or trigonometry combined with the alphabet, which enables them to work out a code system where they can actually talk to each other in sophisticated but simple form. That's the best way I can think of putting it It's called ASCII, A S C I S. I mean he's obviously a scientist and he's obviously really smart. So he knows about ASCII and figures that w A ASCII is kind of old fashioned but still used.

And um so he remembers that and goes into the boxes of the crew and uh s fundamentally n finds one of them has an ASCII chuck. One of my favorite memories from the narrow pre production of this film. is a group of us in a conference room showing Ridley how an ASCII table worked and then drawing it. understand nor did I. You had to explain it to me and then I had to explain it to Ridley. Uh the sort of communication would work f via ASCII. And uh it it was just fun. It's just fun to see

People do that and then see it work so well on screen. So in a second here, you're gonna see on Johansson's laptop uh leather goddesses of Phobo. Right there. And that was added by you. By me. No, I love I played it as a kid. Well he also he also was the designer on uh uh the the infocom a lot of the old infocom games. All the infocom games. Like uh Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Which is how I knew it'cause I played those games. You know. And Leather Goddesses of Oboe s was a little racy. Yeah. So that was it it felt very taboo. It it's ki it's kind of weird some of the stuff they found in Johansson's uh stuff, including like kind of Viking anime drawings that I'm like, all right. They spiced up her interest a lot.

I always like watching that with the the audience'cause three people laugh whenever leather leather goddesses of homos comes up. But those three people are my people. Those are my people. I look around and go, These are mine. Yeah, yeah, right, can't get. It was only like way later after um

You know, I've been writing it for I w it was only l long after I released the book that I realized, oh yeah, the uh Pathfinder's camera also has a y axis, like it can rotate up and down. And so there could have been like so much more information. There could have been like maybe two or three levels of signs that it could have pointed up, down, middle. Y you know what I mean? Like Yeah, it would have been challenging though,'cause where does he put the Marker to point to. Okay, yeah. All right.

Let's reshoot. Let's reshoot. Let's go let's get rid of the on the phone. Wake up. I'm glad at how much you guys abbreviated this. It's like one of my least favorite parts of the book. If I had it to do over again. I just I really overdid it and put too much description into this part. Because I'm a computer geek and so I'm like, ooh, I know stuff about this and I can I can really explain it in incredible detail. And I was like

And it really suffered in my opinion in the audiobook. It's the only part of the audiobook that isn't great because there's just these long streams of letters that are these abbreviated things and the narrator had to just read them out. Oh interesting. R C Bray is his name, the narrator. It's funny, we shot those scenes too. Those were but it's all voiceover there to sort of bridge us across it. Well I I love that you guys like abbreviated it because

There's a lot of stuff that I think I I think is great. Uh like the the general decision you guys made, which which is Basically like okay, we're gonna be scientifically accurate, but we're not gonna stop and explain everything like the book does. It's like so anybody who wants to double check our math on their own is gonna find out it's correct. But

I gotta tell you it was such a such a relief knowing that we always had that. You know when I read it I kept saying, Look, Andy did all the hard stuff. He did all the hard parts. All we have to do is now just Tell this story and rock it forward. You know, that's all we had to do. I also really appreciate you guys maintaining the communication latency. That is as far as I can tell, that is the hardest thing for uh Hollywood to do. It's really hard.

I guess it does sort of go against the nature of cinema. Yeah.'Cause you cut between one place to another. And there's no in your mind Right. It doesn't quite make sense. This one bit right here where he doesn't get an immediate response. And so he's like, Are you receiving? I'm like, well technically he would have been waiting like twenty minutes. All right, let's no prize it. No prize it. He waited twenty minutes, then we're going to be able to do that. And so he's like, Hey. That's right.

Yeah. We he we shot those twenty minutes, but it was boring. Yeah, right. Take twenty. Yep. Gosh, can we get some space please? This is a big deal'cause they have a discussion early on saying, Well, no one knows he's alive, um When are we gonna tell the public? The what are we gonna tell the press? This is the first time it's starting to reveal itself that he's alive and now he's literally talking.

And so he now is asking the big question to the crew what what what was the crew's reaction when they realised that I was alive and I also have to now admit him that actually they don't know. So he goes ballistic. And in so doing insults NASA, the United States, and probably the President of the United States. It actually turns out to be quite funny. Okay, he says they don't know I'm alive. What the F word? F word in German form, F word again is wrong with you.

It's gonna be a bad reaction. Now he has to explain to the President of the United States what the insult was and why. It is funny. Thank God. Um We had a really obscure word in there that he called bureaucratic feltcher can't be in this film because the word is very unpleasant. Um I just had to explain to the President of the United States what a bureaucratic felt. I got away with two fucks because they were not a little bit more than a little bit.

we earned it because I think the film tonely is so well clever. and educational and entertaining and how on earth could they object to that? That became our argument, discussion, because they're both cases they were very It needed some kind of expletive to make it more amusing.

Ah, here we are, Hermes. Yeah, and here's the first full shot. Here is m the screw up that I feel the worst about and is entirely on me. What's but which is and it was just too late by the time you caught it and I feel terrible, which is Don't call it the Hermes, just call it Hermes. Hermes, yeah. And by the time that you pointed that out and you said

It's like Serenity Drew. Right. They never call it the Serenity and my heart dropped because I realized oh I've screwed this up throughout the whole thing. And at that point we are so far down the hole that we couldn't change it. As long as it's consistent. I know. Right. Which we we made sure we are consistent, but I it still hurts me'cause I want to be like serenity. That while workers

Pretty pedantic and slow, but all the actors were very good at it. And it's surprisingly Jessica Chestina was very good, excellent handling herself. I think because she was a ballet dancist. There's something about balance. I wanted a room that moved to give us gravity on the ship. Everything out of this wheel is without gravity. So the wheel, by putting the wheel in, they're spinning, I think quite simply at about at the distance from the axis.

I think it's about forty feet radius, so You'd have an eighty foot wheel. But the outer rim would be running at five miles an hour, which would give you gravity to enable you to walk around. We'll see a very good demonstration of that in a minute. Where she's goes upside down looking at somebody outside who's the right way up when you go from his point of view, she's the right way up and he's upside down. So it's explaining the gravitational areas. It's kind of fun.

It's a very dramatic moment where they're told that Mark Watney is alive and he's been alive since they've been back to going to Earth. They've been traveling two months now, so they've been alive for two months. Lewis particularly is saying I left him behind. I'm I was in charge, I left him behind. They're all assuming full well that this man will die, there's no way they're gonna be able to go back from In the trailer they show the Hermes and the gravity wheel and stuff.

And so I did the math and I I estimated the radius of the gravity wheel because you can see Johansson looking out a window at one point. And so I said, Okay, well Kate Mara is like this height and so this many and it did a freeze frame. So I got the uh the radius of it and then I paid attention to its rotation rate and I worked out they would they would only have about point two G's. Okay. But you know what? That's close. Because realistically what they would want is for it to be point four.

So it's really not that far off. Uh because you'd want.4 G's because that's Mars's gravity. So you'd want the astronauts to be prepped for Mars. Right. So it's close. So you're saying we're geniuses? You're geniuses. Oh. Fantastic news. He is amused by the fact that now they're all talking to him. All the botanists are trying to tell him how to do it and he said listen, I'm the best botanist on this planet.

Right? And he's irritated by the fact of being told what to do. So it's it's all getting honestly more and more amusing. It's quite funny. Matt's proved to be very funny. Well I I had the potato foam'cause it's so cold'cause it was uh Christmas, January, February and I had to have potatoes and di different f growth levels.

And of course we allowed for it a field of them that big and then another one about six inches and then the the so three levels and three heights of growth. Of course I grew it all and only ever used it once. But it worked very well because he was had a series of big rooms lined with plastic and if you stuck your head the door it was almost like you had a marijuana fire. was the lights, uh daylight lights on certain times they're twelve hours, twelve twelve hours off, shining down these plants.

Now he's gonna th she's asking for a still. So I'm using a camera. I don't know why we can't get a still. He said, Well To catch them at the right moment, I don't know, seventeen minutes, blah blah blah. It's hard to capture it. Well it she said, I can't understand why not. So Matt then gives her a still of the fence. And she said, What is this, the fans?

And uh that was how you pay off the phones where you see but I think when you're watching it that you're wondering why on earth we're using the fonts. A because the show is beloved. Therefore you want to take something up that ran that long maybe so you can watch it again and again. But that this is the reason for the farm. And that's assuming nothing goes wrong.

You guys will never see this, but a lot of the shooting I shoot without the plastic visor I call the blister because you see all the camera crew in the bloody blister. And s some time to get away with on the side views you you can get away with but To put a blister in is quite expensive. And put a blisters in throughout the film is thousands of blisters. So it's a it really has becomes very expensive. Or hundreds of blisters.

This is interesting where you now see the full value and use of his um tape that he always carries with him. If he didn't have this tape he'd die. What you see he does right now would save his life. So he's cracked his visor in star shape. He is leaking like a with nineteen holes in it. He's got about a minute. Oxygen level critical. Plus w that whatever atmosphere's left in the in his probably none in the uh airlock.

Of course you have fun with the sound on this'cause as he covers it up the sound that will actually work. That will actually seal you in and save your f save your ass. Oxygen level five percent. So was it so he saves himself here clearly. And this is where you get a big reaction. Well he's now gonna decide what to do next. I is he gonna die? Is he gonna give up?

And astronauts don't give up, so he's gonna discover he's lost all his crop. Everything. Everything's gone. So all he's got left is what he grew were in drawers and in drawers full of potatoes. That's another thing that where I think it's it's superior to the book where In the book this is a a huge complicated problem because he's he's in the airlock but he doesn't have a functional spacesuit. So he needs to kinda roll the airlock

to get close enough to the rover to do a mad dash or close enough to the hab to do a mad dash. And he has to do all this weird stuff. And I think this is this is a really good simplification. And the frost on the ground is a great way of showing like why the plants are dead. Yep. It's hard to show like oh there's no atmosphere. It's practically a vacuum. It's hard to show that. Yep. But showing'em just frozen and and then brittle like this, where you're practical.

It's like, yes, that is a dead plant. Desolation. For you screenwriting fans, this is the midpoint. This is the midpoint. This is the the the all is lost portion of Act Two. It is. Yeah, and it's funny'cause I It's I don't need everything to hew to a three X structure, but for a for a movie like this you feel more comfortable when it does in the book very much you have a very strong sense of structure, which made our lives much easier. Do you tend to think that way or is it just

You tell the story and it just happens to fall into a beginning, middle and end. I I think I've just been really heavily influenced by T V and movies, so I probably do it without thinking about it. But yeah. Well my my current the current book I'm working on now, I I'm I'm struggling with pacing. Yeah. So uh it's hard. It is hard. Yeah.

And it was actually I guess his his kind of pseudo freak out was during the during the in in the book was the airlock blow. Yeah. Yeah, so it's it's it's right around this point. So has he got an airlock door in the back of the rover? I don't know. There's a handle. Alright, let's pretend yes. Okay. Um then why does it be a little bit more? This is a tough one to no prize. Yes. We'll come up with it. Let me think on this one.

Crops are dead. Complete loss of pressure boiled off most of the water. I think it's pretty cool that you guys never bothered to um I don't think you you ever say you you never explain what a salt is. But it's so clear from context that you don't have to. It look, it was in a book. You d you never explain in the book, do you? Yeah, that's that was an oversight. No, but i I loved it. I remember thinking right away

And'cause it it takes you a little while to figure it out. Mm-hmm. But when you do there's a real sense of oh uh this is exciting that I'm learning i not by being told that's actually happening. And I thought that that was sort of our mission statement with the whole movie. Like we we try not to stop and explain too much. And i occasionally we need to but It's what I loved about the book, like you talk up to the reader, not down to the reader.

Powered by a nuclear reactor and has huge solar panels. So one wonders why a nuclear powered ship which has enough power for the uh ion drive needs uh solar panels. But I've got a no price. Okay, let me try to win one two. Oh okay. No I've got I've got I've I've got an answer, but let's see what you got. How about it's uh redundancy? It's uh what if the nuclear reactor breaks? You wanna have s you wanna have a backup?

Right. Is that possible? It looks cool, is always the good winner. But here's my no prize entry. Um those are not solar panels, they are thermal panels to dump the heat generated by the reactor. Okay. Cool. It needs a lot more thermal panels than a typical Because there's a lot of heat. Great. I love it. Mars is fine. Blew up the hab, but unfortunately all of Commander Lewis's disorders.

This is very nice here. This uh is a touching scene. Now the crew know that he's alive. They're now able to are allowed to communicate with Botney. And so the crew is very laconic. laid back and funny and with each other. It's a charming conversation where Michael Penya, as the pilot is elected, draw the short story, as he says, and they talk a lot of this gallows humour.

what his position is, and the crew all are feeling very vulnerable. And as Mark Watney's feeling very vulnerable, it's a lovely scene. That kind of helps and inspires me. Such great people, normal people, he decides to keep going. So now I wonder what the hell he's gonna do. And what he does right now would work. All he could do is seal out.

that room so he can reheat it, etc., and start all over. His one peril will be if a storm comes and blows a hole in that thing. But he's double p treble plasticed it. Plastic and gaffet tape. I also get a lot of questions about the Gravity. Not the movie, but the the force of gravity on Mars. Yep. Now I think it's an interesting thing. I don't know if it was you or Ridley. It seems more like Ridley. But basically in the scenes when he's outside

Or when he's like not in a protected environment like here. There's a slight I think a slight slowdown of the film or something like that, so it it feels like the gravity's a little less. And that was uh kind of the compromise I think. I don't think there's a single movie that takes place on Mars that actually shows people at Mars gravity. It's r it's really hard to show. It's not like we weren't conscious of it.

You gotta put people on wires or do a lot of visual effects and it's incredibly prohibitively expensive. Yeah. If you wanna do it. I just like saying, What, it's the conceit, okay? This is a movie. No, it's true. We were definitely conscious of it. We we were trying to justify it any way we could, but the truth is

If we wanted to show it we couldn't make the movie. And even if you could, it would just look weird. Yes. It would just it would feel weird. It would look weird. Everything would be kinda not right. It's the way if you hear a gun put a real gun shot. Yeah. You know, you can't keep being stolen. So here he is trying to keep himself busy. and concentrating on survival. But he can't forget the storms that occur every night, hoping that that door doesn't blow up because if it does, he's done.

And this cannon potato seal is lovely because he kinda breaks down a little bit in the middle of it, I thought. where sound helps in the silence. You play up the sound, the fear here. The habitat was being battered, probably stormed about hundred and eighty kilometres an hour. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud yn ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud.

And he's been trying to work out the mathematics of where they are, what the reality is. And it's quite funny but this thing that occurs was an accident. I like things to uh not be too planned. I know what I want the scene to be like, I know the geometry, and then I'll rehearse immediately. This is the first take.

I always do want to take a minute so there bam. That's a real fall. Gets up, oh I'm okay, goes into the kitchen, and um this is all one take. Almost and what you rehearse it, you kill it. it always film, first take first film it. For the most part you're probably gonna get eighty percent. You do understand I'm your boss, right? Okay, let's ask the two hundred million dollar I'm sorry, five hundred. Is that a five? At least.

Okay, back JPL talking to NASA. In all their rooms they are communicating by Skype is wonderful'cause Skype now stops endless flights and stuff like that. When flying becomes no more fun anymore, it doesn't, right? Must you go on on holiday. I hate If I can avoid it I do. I use Skype wherever I can. It's so in my visual effects in France I'm doing to London. I'm spotting three D visual effects on a desk in France. and you know visual effects Refining their colour grading.

But you gotta have really good grades. So I use the guys here, Stephan is like and I know what I want, so it's like up down, up down, left right, boom, an So this morning we do a hundred and twenty visual effects in forty five minutes. But instead of three of these And you know, and they're not from scratch, they mean Garagey coming to that point.

This is a meatloaf. So here's today's allotment, which of course I've supplemented with a potato, which I'm beginning to hate with the fiery passion of a thousand sons. And now they've asked me Point is Stretch the This is Adleb at the end of the I like his line Adleb. It has been seven days since I ran out of ketchup. So now he's dipping his spot in Vikun. I'm dipping this in Vikun so no one can stop me. And Does it and then says it has been s seven days since I ran out of

That's Matt, by the way. That's a mad ad lib. It's great. We still haven't received the old satellite adjustments. Well, I asked for those two weeks ago. What's Rich doing? We're scared to go in there. Rich, what the hell are you doing? I need you to get me some supercomputer time. When did you last sleep? It's important, Mike. I'll do it.

This clip is in the trailer. And so I love how you can pause it and see the um all the uh mission patches up on the wall. Yep. And they just smoothly transition from real ones to made up ones. It's just like Yeah, M A V is is one of'em up on the wall. I was really sad that the uh the actual launch status check Like like the Apollo thirteen scene, wasn't in there. It's one of those things that just got cut down.

And we're getting into the section of where the cuts get more and more painful. Like this is it's in this back half that you we started to have to make the tough decisions'cause at a certain point the movie would just be five hours long. Right. You know? I thought this was pretty clever. The uh iris launch

There just wasn't really enough budget to to d to show the the ship. So I think it's clever to show everything from the MCC's point of view and then it can just be kind of grainy and actu is actually file footage. Is that I don't know. It's a it's a Ridley question, but it was definitely we don't do a lot of objective point of view, you know, in the movie. It's occasionally there, but in general you're you're with characters.

There's a lot of conversations about when they should be celebrating. I remember that. The guy who who did the electric car and Musk, our um design of our uh MAV evacuation vehicle is at Musk's phone. And he designed when we looked at it, we kind of thought it was pretty cool. It's kind of more streamlined than you expect.

And it but his is reusable. It will take off, dock, get rid of, come back, land and sit there as an asset, as opposed to being spun off into space and there's god knows how much resource just waste. You gotta reuse But you know, these these aircraft are very strong and UK seven forty seven is thirty years old. Sh with all the stresses that goes through it's unbelievable.

So this is where they fail. So this is the fundamentally a kind of death sentence on on Mark Whitney. They're getting what he describes as a an irregular pattern. Yeah. And in the book on the takeoff the some of the cargo had shaken loose and created an inbound sending the the rocket into a kind of spiral. Now they have a problem. So now we bring in new players, which is China. Actually that was a question I asked to the real NASA mission controllers.

They have a shift and they have to be at their station all the time. I'm like how d how do you go to the bathroom? And it's like well, they can spell each other a bit. Okay. For the most part the other controllers, the ones other than Flight and Capcom So Flay is the equivalent of Mitch. Right. And Capcom is the person who actually talks to the astronaut.

Other than those two, it's okay for the others if for anyone else to just go run down the hall and take five minutes to go to the bathroom or whatever. But they eat at their desks and stuff like that. So the MCC is actually like littered with food and stuff all the time. It's actually pretty pretty kind of grimy. But the uh Capcom and Flight actually spell each other. Oh interest. So like when Capcom has to go to the bathroom or whatever, take a quick break, then Flight acts as Capcom.

And when flight has to go then Capcom will spell What happens when they both have to go at the same time? They don't. Oh. They they have to like one or the other. Oh, and another thing, there are still periods where ISS goes through LOS. So there are parts of its orbit where they are actually not able to communicate. You you wouldn't think that. Right. Right. Why? I don't know, but it just has to do with the where it's like over the middle of the Pacific Ocean and stuff like that.

So then they can take breaks during LOS because there's nothing to do. Aaron Ross Powell Do you think that those breaks are real or they're just making them up so that they can go to the R. We've got LOS here. Now we go to China. China are a new player in this. That was the opera house in

I just put the Chinese letter forms above the door and it looks like Beijing to me. And that could be the Yangtze over the back there. So that would work great as well. That was just down the road from that. I got it all in one spot. And two very good Chinese actors. This woman is the biggest television actress. Very important television. The scene is kinda

nice because it is the Chinese working out how they can actually help the United States. So I thought a bit of globalization of help here is actually not corny, it's good idea. So they decide to help. You know it's interesting everyone thinks Teddy's such a cold hearted jerk, but his reaction to being given the information that they will help tells me that he's gone. what it takes, he really cares about what is gonna happen but he can't afford to show it. Right here, there.

So this is interesting, the China angle. I'm glad that that uh made it into the movie. And I think the studio is really happy because of course This means this makes it easier to market in China. I think people people think that we added this after the fact to try to get some sort of, you know.

financial relief, but it's n it's not true. It's in the book. And the it's one of the things I loved about it'cause it felt like what would happen. Right? I mean you know this better than I do. Yeah, right. Well they're the next space program, right? Mm-hmm. I and I love that it's in I love that it's in Chinese and and dubbed uh rather subtitled and stuff like that. One thing it is kind of Yeah, is um they in the book the Chinese come to the rescue pretty much because

They do it in exchange for getting an astronaut on on an Aries mission. It's a it's a tit for tat. But in this they changed it to they just kinda did it to be nice. You still see him, but it's not really clear that he's a Chinese astronaut. But we now have the two writers here and we can tell you he's a Chinese astronaut. Yeah, and and you see them there because I love that. I love the sort of horse trading with that. For sure.

And uh yeah, and I think it was because um they I I'm I'm not sure the um I don't know if if any of that's true or not. But I know that scene was much longer. Mm-hmm. It was just much longer. And at a certain point, scenes get shorter. The scene was written as form of explanation and I suddenly realized to explain it is complicated so it's better to show it. And so I had him do this on the spot.

So it's a demonstration. And I was kinda worried it was a bit comedic, but actually I think it works out nice. Yeah, a lot of underplayed humor is always the best. Said uh excuse me, who are you? Um Teddy, head of NASA. Oh. Okay. That's a great interplay. In the book it was much more technical and it was a series of different scenes and different places and stuff.

But this is just this awesome scene where Drew had to explain how this stuff works, which is actually pretty complicated, and also they had asked him to add more Donald Glover. Yep. Right. And so just like two birds with one stone have Donald Glover come in and explain it with cool props and

Yeah, and it it was one of those times where you get notes and it makes the movie better. You know, it's nice when you it doesn't make you want to pull your hair out. This was just the studio saying, you know, can we can we explain this how about if you put Donald Glover in that scene? And I said, Oh my god that's a good idea. I like it which is uh get out.

I love Jeff Daniels so much. Yeah, and then the fastidious that's also in the book is that Teddy is very fastidious. He's always like straightening things. And so uh when I met Jeff at the premiere, I complimented him on that. He's like, Yeah, I had a thing I did with my ring. He's always like he kind of screws with his ring. This was an art gallery and we just moved around concrete walls. Those are walls aren't real.

I just had one big giant space, so we made walls on casters. I like to work that way, just move them round, change the size of the room, redress the room. So this room is also Jotel's office. The other side is Teddy's office, just shift walls. It's good because you can reuse the walls. where um they have to do it. They're gonna do it with the Chinese Chinese will waste a ship, but they will use their launch and take the Chinese food supply. God damn count. Yeah. Yeah.

So he's been doing EVAs throughout the day, but there's a pattern to them. Here, watch this. So he goes 300 meters and then stops. And then he goes another 300 and stops. Nobody's giving him any instructions? I mean JPL didn't schedule something? No, he's at the rover. Oh. Okay, so we just got this. Chem analysis sample batch 1A7C. Commander Lewis, it's your compositing experiments. He's finishing the mission. Wow. We've got Your work is in good hands.

Hey Beck, I do not understand hemolithotrophic defense. At all. Just working on it, working my way through it. Hey uh Johansen. I know you don't like it when I touch the chem cam, but... I'm touching the chem cam. A lot. Vogel, your core samples in very good hands. Actually, I think I found a new cataloging system for the core samples. I've actually titled it Das Core Samples out of respect for the father And finally, Martinez, um I'm still not sure what it is that you do. Um honest to God.

That's it. Anyway, I'm trying to keep everything documented, organized. I know it's not my strong suit. I do want everything to make sense. Actually, you could teach all this in a class someday. Um, you know, the good stuff like how to make a bathtub. RTG, uh how to cook a potato about 6,000 different ways. The Mark Watney sold us. This is where they get the first communication from Rich Purnell. I'm using one of these pods as this is the room for the gymnasium. Cool that isn't that right.

And you know, I tried the camera on the floor, of course, you don't see it move. So you have to pull out the walls and put the camera outside the room, so then the room is moving like that. So I've got w fifteen second swing. I didn't make the whole wheel, I just made a pendulum to go, ready, action, cut. So then you run out, you've got to be there, actually 11 seconds to walk through the first long time.

So each one on that wheel is four spokes. Each spoke is probably half as down to this room, the ladder. A bit like those. bodies of those propellers that you get in in the farm the wind farm. That kind of technology. But all of your outer room's gotta move at five miles an hour and you're walking. It's shocking, isn't it? This is a little bit of cinema OS stuff going on here where we have the uh if it's a pure text file, it wouldn't be animated like this, right? View as text does this.

Maybe they have an additional program that makes it more exciting on their'cause they know astronauts get bored. Yeah, right. I also like how when you view as text it just has cycles randomly through letters until I have I like how there's even a little bit of angle where Lewis is standing and stuff. It I mean I'm guessing that this was all just done with Batman cam, right? Just tilt the cam the set swung.

Oh Yeah, the set actually rotated, not fully, but it it it was uh definitely uh swivel. So they would swivel as he ro as he walked. And then the lights would also swivel. It was a complicated endeavor. That's cool. So this is where she's saying, What do you want to do? This is the plan. But let's not mince words, this is about mutiny. You'll never be used again, they will never allow you to appear again, no matter what your motives are, and they say, Great, I've had enough for one lifetime.

and let's go and let's go let's go back and i'll do another nine months to my life in space to go back Very strong, Jessica here as the captain who's very cool, never loses her coup, never gets angry, never loses her temper, completely bowed. Actors like this you don't really meet them. I meet with them, I g I know what they can do. And we just chat. I I like I just like to get to know them. You know, it's a shared process and um

I take one each one individually and spend time with each one individually. We talk about the characters, who they are, then I know they're gonna go away and really think about that and they'll bring things to the table as well. Thinking I think this, I think that, and I say that's cool. When they've really feel that they've been thinking really about what they're gonna do, and every one of these believes me, is so pro they know they thought a great deal about who they are. Yeah.

The one thing I add to that as I cast very carefully, I'll know who did what before. And that said, I can still start using first-time people, but then you've got to read them. He's very good. I s watched him in a film uh German f uh Scandin film called Headhunter. It's about casting. Thought he was very interesting. He was the lead of Headhunter. Yes. Yes.

So for those who don't know, steely eyed missile man is a great compliment in NASA culture where it is rarely rarely handed out. Uh they will you y if you solve a very difficult problem Along that ladder is there. I don't know. I would like to know. If you screw up, you're like a tin eyed rock man. Yeah, but uh so during the launch of Apollo twelve, the Saturn V, as they were launching, got struck by lightning twice. Actually just like two shots one after another.

from a Saturn V rocket is ionized and it and it's basically acts like a lightning rod. Really? So it's actually not that uncommon and they accounted for it. They have like a lightning rod on the ship and stuff. But uh the Saturn V during its ascent, uh th this is Apollo twelve, got struck by lightning twice and their computer systems just went completely haywire.

Just all of their systems were just like just like fritzing out, all of the war caution and warning lights came on and stuff like that. All the indicators popped off and and said like, oh, everything has broken. And this one guy, and I wish I could remember his name. We could look it up some other day, but um at NASA said like, Oh, I think I've seen this problem before. It'll happen when there's like an overcharge in this one system. He says, switch SEC to off.

And no one in mission control knew what the hell he was talking about. No one knew what he meant. So but they just said, like, okay Capcom, tell'em, switch SEC to R So Capcom sent it up and like out of the three astronauts aboard, only one of them knew what that meant. The lunar module pilot Alan Bean went, Wait, I think I know what that is and it's this one switch off on the panel SEC has two modes and he switched it to aux and it completely took care of all the problems.

That's amazing. And so that guy at Mission Control was, you know, you are a steely eyed missile man. Is he the only person that has been in it? No, there there have been others. Okay, but they they give it out sparingly. Yes, they give well, it's not an official thing, but it's like Yeah.

It's funny. He said the best thing I've got the entire attention of that system and it's scientific body. And all they've come up with so far is drill holes in the roof of your vehicle, hit it hit it with a rock and jump on it. And this guy went through faster than I thought. I thought he'd taken his armpits out. Same guy stunt, stunt, here we go. Bang. Oh, oh. Um back trainer. This is the thanks. Didn't know. The deal is sealed here. That worked well, didn't it, for Yangtze?

This montage I think is is actually my favorite part of the movie. Yeah. I just feel like it all comes together. It's like we have a plan. Yeah, you sort of see the spirit. I you know, I love the idea of drilling holes in the rover on one end and showing you like

It just feels like science to me. Like we're all figuring it out. That's what science is. It's a little rough, but they're they're doing it. Mm-hmm. And then you mix that with the emotional component of people saying goodbye to their families. Mm-hmm. I just feel like the themes of the movie and the book are all on display here. And you just can't go wrong with Bowie. You just can't go wrong with Bowie. No. Oh also I love this ad lib.

He didn't do cheese. Delights me. So uh Bruce after they take the picture, he go he looks to his compatriot and goes, He didn't do cheese. He didn't do cheese. He didn't do cheese. It really makes me laugh every time. This is his lung. He's attaching a lung to enable him to have a larger atmosphere and inside his vehicle so he could drive longer. I in the movie it's the only time you ever see that Lewis truly does love disco. It's always been something just inflicted on Mark.

Well and also at the very, very end, in her house. Yes. You can see they have like framed disco albums and stuff like that. He drives for four hours, then he runs out. So he then has to hibernate for thirteen hours. Best thing to do is go to your suit and sleep. While the solar energy is recharging and the whole thing's being charged again to drive for another four hours. So the journey is.

End us being three thousand two hundred kilometers of twenty-five miles an hour. Doing twenty-five of a train like that you've got to be careful that you don't turn it over Snap something. Like the uh Jiangquang Launch Complex. Do you know what they used for it? It's obviously very different than the M C set.

Right. So well if they redressed the MCC set, they did a great job of it. I mean And this is another uh you know sneaky we got away with a launch without having to put the special effects into it. It's so easy to say, do we really need this? I said, well, yeah. We'll do your space for. So this is where you see you get the upside-down effect of gravity change. Look, she's upside down, she's the right way up, and then vice versa.

I like this a little bit of a little bit of Beck and Johansson. Just a little touch. Just uh I was a little sad that the uh kind of romance plot between uh Johansson and Beck It didn't go away, right?'Cause they do have that little kiss thing. in the climax scene and then at the end you see him with the baby. So it's clear that that happened but

There were a couple of years. Right. You know, like'cause that's the one where she tells him to s they can share the bunk. Right. That's the one where they sort of Tip the hat at it and we shot it. It just comes at the section of the movie where it was time to get to it. And it it's also too bad because Martinez is a smart ass and he's funny and stuff. And it and that's like he goes, Yeah, million mile high club or whatever and that's too bad that was gone. Yes, he's very thin now.

He has a a body double, right? Um in the crack. Mark yeah, well a Mark Watney double. Yes. So there was one was Mark Watney, one X was his stunt man, and then one XX was body double. And I'm like, aha, they got a butt double or something like that. But it was it wasn't, it was like the super thin emaciated guy double. Yep. Yep. I've been thinking about laws on Mars.

There's an international treaty saying no country can lay claim to anything that's not on Earth. And by another treaty, if you're not in any country's territory, maritime law applies. So Mars is international law. Now NASA is an American non military organization. It owns the HAP. But the second I walk outside, I'm an international. How did you figure this out? Do you remember? I don't know. I I don't know. It was just a random thought. Well you wr look, you wrote this over

Four years? Uh about three years, yeah. How did you know did you have a good plan Uh or do you just sort of write and go chapter to chapter and let it roll? Uh I just yeah, I just went chapter to chapter. I knew how I wanted it to end. Okay. But I didn't know exactly how I'd get there. I just kinda went one uh one scene at a time. I one problem at a time usually.

And I love this thing, I don't know if it was you or Ridley where he loses his helmet behind. It's like, Oh yeah, I'll eat it. It's so great. Yeah, that's a big moment in the in the book when he's leaving the hab. Yep. Which has been like his savior for Well, actually, because you've got so much of the existing disco pop, which works really well. on a very humorous level, then we've gone pretty majestic and pretty uh orchestral. Nice, beautiful.

In the book he had two rovers, and he cannibalizes one of them to turn it into the thing that carries all the stuff for the second one. Uh this was much more simplified. And a lot of people didn't notice that one of the rovers got destroyed by the MAV launch right at the beginning. You can see it it's just getting baked by the blast. And we talked about it more in the first cut. It was much more about Rover One and Rover Two and what we were doing and we found it was just confusing. Mm-hmm.

Here's another thing that was'cause in the book this speech happens much earlier and when we shot it th this whole section was earlier and we moved it in editing because it just felt like This is where we wanted to get more existential. Isn't it during his trip to Skeparelli? Is it this part? Or is it his it is oh it might have been during his trip to Pathfinder? Okay, okay. Was the trip to Pathfinder?

But this look, this is where the biggest cuts happen, I think, between script uh between book and script. And this is the right place to cut them too. for him to do his trip. And they do do a beautiful job with the score and and just the visuals of of selling the idea that it takes a long time. But the thing that makes me saddest that we couldn't do and this is on me a hundred percent.

'cause I couldn't quite figure out how to write it, is the Dust Storm. Like it's really hard and I love it in the book. But there's two problems. One It illustrates the difference between the f the wrong physics dust storm and the right physics one. There's that yeah. It's also just on a pure practical level. Daytime dust storms like that are difficult to shoot. And at the time I was thinking I was gonna direct it.

And I couldn't figure out how we were gonna make it look convincing. So if you'd known it was gonna be Ridley's problem. Maybe but but but there was a third there was a third problem, which is He would not be talking about the problem at that time because he would be trying to save his life.

Like it it's the book problem where mm you're relating something that happened after the fact. Are you talking about the thing where he drops off the sensors? Yes, and that he gets cut off from NASA. Yeah. He got cut off f earlier. No, yeah, but I mean'cause he's cut off, he can't talk to anyone. Right. Right. So he can't Oh and you didn't want to cut him off from NASA. Well we didn't. And so the problem is

And we could have done that to justify it. But the real problem was he'd be trying to save himself. He wouldn't be articulating as it was happening. And if you didn't articulate it, it was hard to sell exactly what was happening to the audience. It was a it was a it was a triply challenging thing.

You could have articulated it because it it that was a process that took him days, but it would have required you to cut him off from NASA. But there was one period where They're all hoping you you know this better than I do, where Nas is watching hoping to God that he's gonna figure it out in a very short time.

Right. Right. There's one period where if he doesn't get it solved in that time, he's in trouble. Right. Yeah. W th which would be the part we would want to do. That's the part that's hard to verbalize. Right. You know? Uh I I think you were right to cut it. I mean, honestly, I think I wish we could have figured it out, but I uh I c I could not. Couldn't quite crack how to do it.

Yeah, this is done to a nice uh really beautiful piece of score by Harry Gregson Williams. But oh the score right through this is really kind of majestic. and touching and uh when he's growing his crops there's a kind of nobility to the music and it's very nice. The gravity, the grav the gravitas comes from the music, which is somehow a nice counterpoint. There's a great American composer that I like and we talked about called Copeland. So high play.

But very emotional, but somehow uh inspiring. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think Benny's gonna be really amazed how well this worked out. Poor bugger locked on the other side of the studio doing this again and again and then we suddenly put it into JPL and I think he suddenly started to twig. But I think he comes off really well. And I I suddenly realised I ha to have the two notes. Wasn't planned. I said I want the two nuts because

Said well one once a studio and one's a rough car, I want'em. So we brought him in and it helps enormously. Just you the I don't know how I didn't think that I would have to have two nose concerts, but they'd fortunately made him. One was a good one and one was cardboard. I said, I don't give a shit. That's the cardboard one. They'd probably make up a cardboard mock up first. Now the stuff the corn they put in the shoe door and everything is like oh with the grandson

And this is I love the scene, it's kinda really f funny. And everything you say here is feasible. You really don't need anything on the front'cause there's no air to keep in or keep out. You said there is zero. You're a vacuum. Should I go on the No. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it could be the first one. I can't wait for the actors to see it actually because I think that is six hundred kilometers across. That's real. That is actually Chevrolet Crater. Six hundred kilometers across.

But then you know you look at the Atlantic from the air and you've three thousand. Okay, this is my favorite story of collaboration between you and I because so essentially I needed to write a scene that explained to the audience what's about to happen. Like we really wanted to set up this scene is basically

what is act three. We're going to explain to you Act Three and we wanna make it clear because we wouldn't have any more time from this point on to explain anything. Right. So we want to talk about it. So I I write the scene and then I call Andy and I'm like, Let me talk you through it and you immediately made fun of me for being wrong about physicists using the word fast and my brain whenever that happens goes

Oh, I love that so much, let's put it in the movie. You know, like that's what happened here. And I remember this phone call between you and me as you're like, No, that will never work, true physicist uh wouldn't use that word. I thought, oh let's just put that in a bit. Let's just do it. Love this soliloquy. Right two turn. Let's do this. And then I think we save the last for the best, which was um my favourite band, Abba.

I'm sure they're gonna be surprised. I mean they're formidable and they they're all really sensible. Smart, great. They knew what they were doing. I love his cynicism here. Well I like I like how it sounds too let's go. Little joke at the end which Yeah, I think it's worth it.'Cause it'd be covered in dust. Can you imagine getting there the electricity doesn't work?

I've always meant to ask him about this, whether it was something decided on the day or if it he had this plan, but the idea that the dust covered up the buttons is so great. It's like leaving his helmet behind on the table and then walk out. He couldn't do that and open the door and be dead.

Have you ever been in a foreign country, stopped on the side of the road, had a picnic, driven off and you're on the wrong side of the road? Have you ever done that? You forget and the people are flashing in and you think, fuck yeah, you're on the wrong side of the road. Film set every day. But there's always some trick there sort of saying, Well why are we doing what are you doing this for? I got over that years ago. It no longer happens. It hasn't happened for a while.

But uh y went as a director you've gotta learn to say back off, you know. Uh or n never even let it in. The key is never to let it in. That is to say you can't be a total prick about everything and and say I know best but As a director, really, you should know best. That's your job. It's a bit like a conductor, honestly, should know best. Right? When he taps the lecturin, he really should know what he's doing. If you gotta start asking questions, you shouldn't be doing the job.

Your your father, mother, uh to all things. And that's the joke. If you don't like it, don't do it. Try it again or stop whining. Yeah, you're right, I hadn't thought of it, but that uh That bit where uh where I mean until you pointed it out just now, that bit where he's in the rover Um and and that's like the last chance you really have for exposition from his point of view. So we're sort of begin act three right here, we're off to the races.

How many times you kill Watney? The important thing is that I got all scenarios in orbit. That's the important thing. He's ready. Okay. Here's the plan. Martinez flies the MAV, Johansson sisops the ascent, back Vogel. I want you guys in airlock too, with the outer door open before the MAV even locks. Once we hit intercept, it's Beck's job to go get Watney.

He may be in bad shape when I get him. The stripped down MAV will get up to 12 Gs during the launch. He could be knocked unconscious, may even have internal bleeding. Well, it's a good thing you're a doctor. They all know, but no one's saying it, that he could die, they could drop them all. But they're here to make this work. Can you imagine a team like this who've had no real What be how long have you been now flying? I I f two and a half years, two two years.

They're actually and they're still getting on and that that's half the qualification. The psychology of an astronaut has to be an ultimately reasonable But very decisive person. You can't have any ultra personality you don't want. I mean this is pretty much exactly like the book. And it was rough for me in the book to have these astronauts explaining things to each other that they would all know. But I mean the audience has to know and there's just no one for them to be explaining this to, so

I also I do actually buy that it's such a complicated thing they want to go over. Let's go through this. Let's go through this and make sure We're not missing something. It feels real to me. Yeah. But it always makes me feel a little uh uh well, not so much that scene, but in general when I have to do like exposition Well it it is I you know, th when you think about this movie, the sheer amount of exposition we don't do is amazing to me that we got away with. I mean

It's what you do in the book. I think clearly your disdain for it comes through in the book. Like we barely talk about these people's lives before you know, we barely talk about so much stuff that in most movies they would always talk about ad nauseum and it's sort of it delights me how much of the story is told through action.

It's like the characters are not very deep, right? I mean, what do we know about Lewis? She likes disco. Yeah, but you know what? She's a good commander. But I also think the emotion of it is strong and that's what gets us through, you know? Like it's not about When I was a kid I lost a my a toy astronaut. Now I have to find a real astronaut crap like that. It's like no I define my character through what I do rather than what I say. Right. Which is really hard in Hollywood to trust.

This gentleman is actually CNN and actually one of the more former CNN newscasters in in Europe. German and uh very good. I asked him to ke come in to do that interview and then we he was so good we just used him as studio for the uh the we did all that the studio gates. The gates of NASA are the gates of the studio. And you know, we put math and everything inside it.

I always thought the the gates were kind of, you know, blingy. I thought why not answer? Let people go, nah, nah, see you've got you're not listening to that. Just gotta go no, that's gonna be the studio gates. The mirror brings him to a point of reality looks awful. This is not vanity, it's I think it's like the Last Supper, frankly. Does he think this is gonna work? I think he doesn't even allow it in that it's not gonna work.

It's like being a sportsman here. You cannot afford to ever consider that you're gonna lose. I thought that's a good cut to very thin arms, isn't it? It's great. To put one of these suits on takes two people about an hour and a half. So what we did is we simplified rigged it. Just film magically filming just do that. Hide it on a couple of clams, tear yourself off.

Yeah, that was the only time I ever felt like I had kind of um poetic prose. I've still got a lot to learn about the skills of writing, like the prose. I I'm not I'm not I've I've st still got a lot to learn But where it said, you know, they came from Times Square to Tiananmen Square to Trafalgar Square. T's and squares. T's and squares, yeah. T squares. Communications five by five. We are ready for pre-flight checklist, command.

Mission control. This is Hermes actual. We will proceed on schedule. We have T minus two minutes, ten seconds to launch. By the mark. About two minutes, Wadley. How you doing down there? I'm good. I'm anxious to get up to you. That's really nice. It's lovely and it that was that was Matt Damon's instinct. That was just to really save that emotion until the first time he talks to Lewis, which I thought was so inspired. This this is interesting here. It's a very nice reaction here.

Afterwards he said, I don't know what happened he said, I just heard those voices and I got really upset. So that was real funny, that It's funny how when they're acting but they're right into it. They're right into the character and the scene. When he and I always like to have playback as much as I can into his earphones. Love that CGI. I love a good rocket launch. Yep.

The lights sort of winking on the take, so I just lost the light. But we just used that shot. I like the one where it's going on and off. And then everything goes to according to plan, of course, and there's no complications as, you know, the audience wouldn't expect anything to go wrong here. Velocity seven forty one meters per second altitude thirteen fifty meters. That's too low.

We did the music at Abbey Road and and Harry's been mixing down us in a on a desk upstairs where he mixes all his tracks together. I think it's gonna be pretty wonderful. Booster separation complete. He's well below target altitude. How how far below? Checking? What name? Do you read? He's probably playing. There's a nut that wakes him up being clicky click click. had a good communication link. I know you're talking about separation. All this is fairly what'll happen. This is all in order.

As he starts to undo everything and open up the windows and take off the roof in his speed, he just left the bolts fall to the floor. What he forgets is when you go into orbit. All the bolts are gonna lift off, so they're gonna click across his helmet and go around him. So all the they're in now is fantastic. There's about three hundred bolts all floating around him. Slowly bouncing off his helmet, click, click, click. So the problems just keep occurring.

To close the gap, you'll have to use fuel. How much fuel do you need to f to get us back? I can use about twenty percent of what we've got. So okay, burn the burn the jets, that brings them in at sixty eight kilometers. Then the closing speed is still way too fast which is I think about f forty kilomet no, it's about I forget what the timing is, but it's it's too fast to try and catch it.

So they've first of all they gotta use the jets here to close up the gap. That's easy, but you're using up fuel.'Cause you're gonna need this fuel for docking when you get back to work. right now they haven't gone into a slowdown which'll cost you fuel and to get back up to speed will cost you fuel. So you you're going full ball here. They could be doing twenty thousand miles an hour here. But so is he So it's almost even even. It's r it's relative. I was shooting a racing car.

Well, I think that's a good thing four f three feet from the nose. We're both doing a hundred and forty. But it was ever like that I could tap on the body and just get the back off two inches the driver. So it even even sounds ridiculous. But two good drivers you just trust

And it it feels like you're zero. You you're not you're not correct for the intercept range, but we've got a problem with intercept velocity. How big a problem? Forty two meters a second. This is nuts and bolts bouncing off his helmet. Commander I have an idea. Go ahead, Mark. Well I could find something sharp in here and poke a hole in the glove of my

But you forget about shit like that. He's not gonna pick up every bolt. He's just gonna go And somebody said, Would gee, wouldn't you be worried about it piercing the helmet said, No,'cause it's all travelling at the same speed as yeah. Every washer and nutton bolt that was on the floor is now floating. Here it comes. She said, This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna explode the the front of the ship, just flow us down.

Then fundamentally she's saying to the German astronauts, Can you make a bomb? Yes I can make a bomb. But of course making a bomb on board a ship is insane. And what she's gonna do is evacuate all the atmosphere in all the chambers except the bridge. where they are and that'll be sealed. The evacuation of all the interior pressure coming from the nose on its trajectory will slow it down. 'Cause it in space, the smallest little wispy engine will drive you quickly to where you want to make.

Mae'n ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r One of the uh great unsung heroes of of the Martian is our editor Pietro Scalia, uh who is so talented and so much of this final set piece is just Pietro's Tour de Force. One of my favorite Pietro stories. P Pietro looks like Geppetto. Very tightly wound Italian man in one of our um test screenings.

they do these focus groups and at the end a person who really liked the movie said if they said, Do you have anything that you would change? And they said, Well, you've got all the scenes in the right order. Um, they just need to be edited better, which was totally not true at all. But I started laughing in the background and I say it to Pietro all the time.

And uh he'd be like, I know'cause Pietro takes this very seriously. It's like you don't need to tell me, I know, I'm I need more time and I said Pietro, they they just mean that the movie's still rough. It's okay. Two thousand one I went and looked up one afternoon in the Strand in London. It had only been out a week. So I went and saw a seventy mil print in the Strand all by myself.

With a packet of cigarettes, because I could smoke in the theatre then, and absolutely watched 2001 round twice. I was stunned. And that's when I decided that, ah, I wanna do science fiction one day'cause up to that moment I always thought science fiction was, you know, a bit too romantic, not really worked out, not really real. Th there were some good ones.

Did yes still still. Um things like that. But never that real the reality of it and the logic of it w and the lo I think it's the first time a computer was ever really considered. in film it is over which threw up details which were fantastic and Hal was a character, I thought that was just genius. So I I I always try to think if I can. Like Stan, but he was fucking clever. And he did not want to go to travel, he would not fly. By the time he did 2001, he would not fly.

So to go take the cutting copy of 2000 when he got a ship, went a a bought a liner, was cutting it, got a train across the United States, and and delivered it here and showed it to Bob Daly and Co. Cause he would not fly. I think he knew too much about flying, was convinced he was gonna go down. the the elements of how a bomber goes into interlock and you can't unlock the brain. Once you interlock that brain into what it's gonna do, you can't change it. In case the pilot changes mind.

On bombing Moscow or whatever, he can't do that. And they they thought'cause then I think some special department came to him and said, How do you know that that? He said, What do you mean? So well that's what we do He said, Well, kinda logical, isn't it? So he'd he'd worked it all out but it's actually what they do. Pretty good. She's good. This worked well.

Yeah, getting into the suit is not this easy and they don't have clamps. But we had to do something because she had to get in the suit by herself. So we just worked it out and rigged it. It was pretty, pretty easy. Once these wires are gone she literally just floats in all this is fairly seamless. On two thousand one they had to invent this process which still was on wires. We are still on wires today. The wise one is sophisticated as these.

So he'd be very often looking up from below studio floor up to the gantry and be dropping a guy down towards him on wires so he couldn't see the wire'cause he couldn't take out the wires, so he couldn't follow. His stars go seventy millimeter or holes in the cyclorama. That's why there's only like twelve a shot. Decompression like the

I like that. I like how that just you know. Boy the amount of conversations we had to have about the difference between acceleration and deceleration and how it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah. But boy A lot of back and forth about that. What's the relative velocity? Twelve meters per second. Copy. कर दो कर दो Done. Yup, the music is playing a vacuum. You don't overplay it at this point, you save it.

Because the vacuum is impressive enough. Now she's gone as far as she can go. On that tether, that's the limit. Like th two or three hundred meters is a long way. And he knows he's not gonna make it. So he's insisting. I'm gonna cut hold my glove and I'm gonna employ the science that you did and he goes out of control. He's out of control now until he decides to close his hands.

Has his hand and has to wait up. What am I gonna do? What he reports. He says, okay, here I come. Bang. That would do it. That's what happened. But you'd spin it a little bit out of control. So she's gonna go and meet him. So here's a big change. Yeah. We debated a lot and I remember'cause most of our process we would all debate

and argue for a long time before I'd even bring it to you'cause there was a lot of stuff that would have made you insane that I just didn't want to bother you with'cause I knew that it it would never come to that point. But I remember thinking, okay We should have Lewis go catch Marquette and it just felt like the emotional story's right. And I was expecting you to say no, that's crazy. That your first instinct was no no, that's what you should do. Yeah, it it works and also because

It's Jessica Chastain. Yes. Right. A and it also feels like it is the emotional culmination of the story between those two people. Right. Between Mark and and Lewis. She feels even though it's not her fault, she feels responsible for him being stranded, so she's the one who actually rescues him. She's the space captain commander hero. And I think he has that fondness for her as well. So it works both ways. Yeah. And like he's yeah, she's his commander, you know? Yeah.

But you're doing all the summer wires with green screen. Laboriously slow. And you think, my God, it's too slow, but then you put it all together, you just gotta try and stay with the plan. Then you could end the movie shortly after this but I always like the fact of bringing the Chinese into it that the deal would be that when they went back in four years, they would take a Chinese astronaut.

We saved that for the closing title, which I think kinda works very well. The danger was it would mess up this part, but I don't think so. I think I think people uh what I've seen that people have enjoyed the film so much that I think the more the merrier, the more the better. So in effect you could say that's it. Right, and that's what they do. They chuck things around, s hug each other, leap about, burst into tears.

Gotta have the cheering scene. Gotta have the cheering scene. Gotta have the screen. We would see us all a tomorrow board. And then we actually did it, which made me feel um Like a terrible person. You guys had to do reshoots on this. And I had to say, you guys realize Andy put this in the book as though he was making fun of it, as though this is what Hollywood would do. And then here we are doing it. Well, you know what? This is a movie, not a book. Yeah. All right.

And so all the actors, they brought'em all back in except Sebastian Stan, who who they couldn't schedule to the magic of editing. Yeah, the magic of editing. I was resisting'cause I didn't want to do one more why I shoot my mind. Oh right then. So we did this this is what this is the payoff right here. That's it. Yeah he said, Whoa, he said, give me a break. I haven't had a shower for a year. Which is nice.

Ah yes. You want to talk about day one? Not really. Oh you don't want to talk about day one? No, I do. I mean part of it Yeah the the ending was complicated. It's funny'cause when I first read the book too, the book went through m at least one different ending. Yes. It had to be different, you know? Yeah. In the in the the version I read he was back on earth.

And swearing at a child. I tried to get him to swear at a child, but but I think by the d I the new version had not come out when I was done with the first draft of the screenplay, and I think I sort of liked it. I I liked the idea of seeing him back on Earth.

So that we started there and then the other part of it was I think we just wanted to see what happened to these people. Mm-hmm. You know, it was that instinct. There's so much talk about Aries five in the book. Right. Pardon me just wanted to see it. It just felt like It's not just about Mark Watney. Let's see all of these people. Right. I really like it. The machine rolls on and stuff. So the uh the day one thing I was talking about earlier, dear viewer.

For the four of you who've listened this far into things, um is that earlier that day one title came up. Right as they showed Earth. Right. And the heavy, heavy implication of that is that this is his first day back on Earth. Correct. It's clearly not. Which is not what it was intended to be. It was intended to be the day one of the next launch.

Right. And so uh it's cool that they they waited a bit. It was one of those editing things where we tried it a couple of different ways. Um I think we landed on the best version of it for sure. Absolutely. Does not cooperate. At some point, everything's gonna go south on you. Everything's gonna go south, and you're gonna say, This is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math.

And I guess there was a completely different version of this on a different set in a different place with the other thing. I don't even remember why. It was more of a let's try something else and we tried something else and it didn't work. Your own personal private title placard. And there's me. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Here we are, Annie's first press conference. She keeps her job, that's good.

Well she didn't screw up. No, she did good. Turns out everyone get the job except Mitch. Except Mitch? Which feels right to me. Yeah. I didn't know you were an E P. Yeah. I'm here all this time I've been respecting you. I know. Well that's over. This is how we had to tell you to show you. There's the Chinese astronaut. There he is. By the way. Pietro, I love you so much. I really love Pietro. He is one of the great editors of our time.

Now when I saw this scene I thought, Oh, couldn't they get him and those actors at the same time and they had to cut no, that was deliberate. Yeah. He's just he's got kind of a social thing. It uh like a lot of us introverts, he just likes to hang back. And lift off as the crew of the Ares 5 begin the next chapter. So there's the disco albums in the background.

Man, these mission controllers cheer in the middle of the long time. Here's the thing. We talked about this ad nauseum and Ridley's point was always have you actually seen how much they cheer during a lunch? They cheer everything all the time. Yeah. And I said That's crazy, Ridley. It's good. And he showed me and I went, Oh, okay. Yeah, they really do. They love to cheer. There we are, Beck and Johansen. Happy day. Yep, now she's promoted to guidance.

Benedict is so good. Yeah. Our cast. I cannot believe this cast. That's really it. It's really good. Disco. And at the risk of sounding like a kiss ass, Ridley I love you. Yeah. I mean this movie is what it is because of Ridley and I'll kiss a little ass on that too. Yeah. He really made this movie transcend. Yep. And this was not an easy movie to make, without question, and there's a reason he is one of the great geniuses of cinema. Bye. And then perfect ending credit uses.

Or uh I will survive. Or life on Mars. All right, well uh thank you for listening. For those of you who made it through this far. We it was delightful to be on this journey with you, dear listener. Yes. And uh well this is uh Andy Weir. This is Drew Goddard. This is the Martian. Thank you. Signing off. Signing off. You uh you'll be watching a video by now, you've probably seen the film. You'd be watching this on your TV screens, hopefully you've got a good one.

to enjoy the quality of the film. I'm very proud of the visual effects in this. I'm very proud of the film and everything about it. It's uh great fun and it's kind of it teaches you something about human behaviour and uh never give up. Bye.