Hi, this is Ridley Scott here.
We're about to go through Martian, which is my latest film,
which we've just completed.
A film with Matt Damon and a very nice cast,
Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel, Kate Mara, Jeff Daniels.
I didn't develop the script, the script was developed by Fox.
A very good writer, Drew, who's an excellent writer,
who did a great adaptation, a faithful adaption, 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 56, and it was a bit late.
And 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 variations.
Faithful to the book, but, in fact, I think it got in the way.
So, I think, what it is now is clearer and better.
Hi, I'm Andy Weir.
Uh, and I'm Drew Goddard. Andy, tell them what you did.
ANDY WEIR: Oh. Yeah, right. I wrote the book that this movie is based on.
DREW GODDARD: It's important, yes. WEIR: It's important. It matters.
GODDARD: 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.
(ALL LAUGHING)
WEIR: Wait, what?
GODDARD: I guess, right? The scene that we start with.
RIDLEY SCOTT: 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 1,
for Exodus,
but now, we went back there to actually film,
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've 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, provided you're with the right people.
MARTINEZ: Oh, did Beck just insult me?
WATNEY: "Dr. Beck." And yes.
Happy to turn the radios off from here, Commander.
SCOTT: We built the... This is, for instance, a studio shot.
That was a studio shot, where he's kneeling.
That's in Budapest.
Well, they're doing their daily work,
which is fundamentally science, geology, biology.
In a funny kind of way, not dissimilar to archeologists,
where I guess that they'd block out the ground,
as if they were on an archeological site,
and where each portion of ground that each one tackles
is examined carefully and scientifically.
GODDARD: 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 in Alien.
"We have a crew sitting around, having breakfast in the morning.
"I don't wanna have another scene of a crew having breakfast.
"Can you please come up with something else?"
So, that's why we did this.
WEIR: Right, this was the last thing you wrote.
GODDARD: It was. WEIR: It was kind of the last change.
GODDARD: 'Cause it was very much what was in the book
and then Ridley said, "I don't wanna do another breakfast scene,"
- which is his right as the director. - WEIR: Yes. It is not a democracy.
GODDARD: (CHUCKLES) It is not. Nor should it be.
WEIR: Nor should it be.
What's the abort force?
WEIR: Oh, the abort force.
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 couldn't damage anything.
So, that was a concession I made to reality.
It was a man-versus-nature story,
and I wanted nature to get the first punch in.
So, this is one of the few areas
where we just kind of give the finger to real-world physics.
And everyone calls me out on it,
and I often get a lot of e-mails from people who think that I just didn't know.
So, what's interesting is, while they're working on this,
Ridley sent that question,
and he's like, uh, "According to the NASA guys, this wouldn't happen."
And I'm like, "Yep, it wouldn't."
(ALL LAUGHING)
So, that's why instead of, like, kilometers per hour,
- they had us change it to "abort force." - GODDARD: Right.
WEIR: The force of the wind is 8, 000 newtons, and that would be dangerous,
but no Martian sandstorm would have that kind of force.
GODDARD: And it really is the biggest buy of the movie.
And the truth is, we wouldn't have a movie if we didn't have a storm.
WEIR: Right. I could have come up with
some other method of stranding them there,
but it wouldn't have been as cool.
GODDARD: And cool always wins.
WEIR: Cool wins.
GODDARD: One of the behind-the-scenes champions of this film
in getting it made
was Jim Cameron, who,
because this is a Fox movie, and 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.
WEIR: Yep.
Before we lost telemetry, his decompression alarm went off.
SCOTT: Making the storm,
I think I'm becoming an expert in making storms in studios,
we did pretty well, actually,
and 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 the effects company MPC, who are great.
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 connect that with the sound, it's fantastic.
MARTINEZ: The MA V's at 11. 6 degrees.
One good gust and we're tipping.
SCOTT: 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 that's partly my job,
to make sure that all that kind of stuff falls into place, looking like the real thing.
It's made to see the Hermes from orbit...
SCOTT: I think NASA were very interested in
seeing, finally, what I would do with the suits and the technology that I used,
because we're talking near future here, maybe 15 years' time,
where there's a possibility that they will consider
trying to put a crew on Mars, but that's a hell of an order book.
It's a giant challenge, but that's why they're saying 20 years.
FEMALE AUTOMATED VOICE: Stability warning.
SCOTT: I talked to an astronaut who said... More or less said
that they'll start to think quite seriously about it in 15.
They're already thinking seriously about it,
they're already interviewing people that might go to Mars,
might wanna stay there.
So, that's kind of a rather scary proposition.
Some people will go there, live there and not come back.
I'll bet you'd get a lot of volunteers.
Not me. I'm a city boy.
MARTINEZ: Johanssen, let's go.
SCOTT: When you get tubes like that,
I thought all the particles whooshing up the tube might be useful,
but the tube is long to climb up, it's about 60 feet, so you gotta be fit.
So, by the time the storm drops away out of its punch,
you have fine black dust floating up the tube, which, I love that.
We just added that on the spot,
we did it literally, and then Richard, MPC, added more.
GODDARD: Tell us how you came up with this idea.
WEIR: Well, I was sitting around,
thinking about how a manned mission to Mars could work,
and I came up with what is the Ares 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.
GODDARD: At the time, though, you had a day job.
WEIR: Yeah, I was a computer programmer.
GODDARD: This was your first book?
WEIR: It was the first book I've ever had published.
My first two weren't that great.
(ALL LAUGHING)
GODDARD: That's how this tends to work. WEIR: Yes.
GODDARD: So, you're working a computer programming job,
and you're writing this, what, at night?
- I'm very interested in writers' process. - WEIR: Yeah.
Yeah.
GODDARD: So, you go to work all day and you come home every night?
And then I'd work on this at night, and I was posting it as a serial to my website.
It helps to not have a social life of any kind.
GODDARD: That is how we become writers, isn't it?
WEIR: That's how that happens. (LAUGHS)
SCOTT: 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 as the kind of magnificent control room.
GODDARD: Okay, so how long did it take you to write the book?
WEIR: It took me about three years.
I'd post a chapter maybe every two months or so.
And then sometimes I'd go months without touching it.
GODDARD: Okay.
WEIR: What really helped was 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,
'cause that's the hardest part about writing, is writing.
It's easy to come up with ideas. It's hard to write them down.
GODDARD: 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."
WEIR: (LAUGHING) Yeah.
GODDARD: Execution is what you're paying for. Everyone has good ideas.
WEIR: Yeah. GODDARD: It's not special.
I believe I read the book, I wanna say March of 2013.
WEIR: I talked to you right around the time Fox came for the film rights.
GODDARD: Right. And you were still negotiating
the book rights at the time, I wanna say?
WEIR: Yeah. The book deal and the movie deal came together four days apart,
so that was pretty surprising.
GODDARD: 'Cause I remember when I first read it,
- I just bought it for $1 on Amazon... - (WEIR CHUCKLES)
...'cause you were still just, essentially, giving it away.
SCOTT: And here we discover, in fact, Mark Watney is alive,
and, of course, is not literally the right time,
'cause when you actually think about it, you say,
"Well, wait a minute, he's been lying in the sand all that time."
No. It's a pre-lap to the announcement that Jeff Daniels just did.
He probably lasted, post storm,
maybe, if he's lucky in that suit, two hours.
The storm dies.
Daylight, he wakes up and they assume that he's dead.
And, of course, he's still tethered to the spike that went into his stomach,
pierced his suit, didn't kill him because the blood congealed,
and in so doing, saved his life and saved the pressure inside the suit,
so he could function.
Now, the wire, he has to cut the wire.
Astronauts, I discovered, have two things which are terribly important,
a handy tool kit at all times, with everything in it,
and a roll of gaffer tape, or in the film industry
we call it 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 the sequence where we see him save himself
by always having his trusty duct tape.
I'm getting to a point now that, in Alien,
I always had the CO2 in the door, so when they open up the door
and close the door, there's a blast of CO2, 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's spotted that yet.
When you get a wonderful truss on like that,
to unclip that would take a lot longer,
so I had him just bash things, and the clip's automatically undone.
That's the beauty of filmmaking.
GODDARD: All right, so March of 2013, I get a phone call from Aditya Sood,
who is a 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, 'cause it's an e-book."
And I was like, "Well, that sounds just silly enough to excite me, so send it over."
And he sent it over, and I remember I read the very first sentence,
and the very first sentence says, "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, the humor is there. - (WEIR CHUCKLES)
The humor in the face of existential sadness is there,
- and the optimism. - WEIR: He's not completely.
GODDARD: He's not completely, but 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. - (WEIR CHUCKLES)
WEIR: Well, thanks. GODDARD: It just rockets.
And I'm always looking to say no to things.
(BOTH LAUGH)
WEIR: Well, just, nothing makes you happy.
GODDARD: It really does. WEIR: "No."
GODDARD: It really feels good to say no
in Hollywood for sure, and people get very confused.
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 I read it again.
I remember I read it three times before I even called Aditya back,
'cause I wanted to make sure that
it was as special as I thought it was, 'cause I'd been fooled before.
Sometimes you like something and then the next day you're like,
"Yeah, but I don't wanna devote two years of my life to this."
And so, you wanna be sure.
And I was talking to my wife and I said,
"This book is really special."
And she said, "Well, what do you love about it?"
And I sort of told her what it was about.
And it was my wife that said, "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 combination of optimism and intelligence, and humor
that I find very common in the scientific world.
WEIR: Well, thanks.
SCOTT: Everyone always laughs at this expletive.
I hadn't intended that, but everyone laughs,
and really, 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 astronaut,
which I think is part of the quality of these people and why they're chosen.
That they are there to contend and deal with anything that comes at them,
like a pilot, a test pilot, he's gotta just stay cool.
WEIR: And then we changed it to Sol 18 as the day that he got stranded.
In the book it's Sol 6, and I love the reason why.
GODDARD: Yeah, it was a Ridley thing.
WEIR: Well, and it's actually, once you see the scene, it does make sense.
- There's a scene later on where... - GODDARD: Yeah.
...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.
- GODDARD: 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. Many people have asked me the question,
"Why is it Sol 18 instead of Sol 6 in the book?"
And the answer is, so there could be more crap in that bucket.
All the Sols just have 12 added to them from the book.
GODDARD: Yep. And then we had to figure out the ramifications of the food.
WEIR: Right. We just said that they sent a larger margin of error.
GODDARD: Yes, 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."
WEIR: (LAUGHING) Yeah.
...which kept me alive, even though the crew must have thought I was dead.
SCOTT: The challenge in the script, I think people were afraid of it,
is that there's a lot of voice-over to tell the story, mainly because he's on his own.
So, I gotta have a guy either talking to himself or voice-over.
Both are dangerous.
So, you always got the practical side of things
and I figured this habitat,
which is 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 always thought that they would have in here
a bit like a black box in an aircraft.
If they all die, they wanna know the moment it went and why it happened.
So, to me, the GoPros became the black box of the thing.
So, I figured, how many are there? Thirty? Twenty? Twenty-five?
So, wherever he is, he can talk to a camera,
so he can do asides to a camera.
So, in effect, the GoPro becomes his buddy.
So, the cadence, it changes when you're talking to something or someone.
So, you've got reasons for the tonality to be a voice talking to another person,
and joking to another person,
straight voice-over
and straight reporting to a camera.
It gets difficult. The list gets small quickly.
WEIR: (CHUCKLES) Yeah. I like Commander Lewis.
In the grand scheme of things, she's kind of a secondary character, right?
Obviously, Watney's the main character,
but then you get to who is the deuteragonist, right,
who's the second most important character?
And it's probably Vincent.
But Lewis is very important, yeah.
GODDARD: But if he's two, she's 2A,
- I would argue. - WEIR: Right, yeah, yeah.
GODDARD: Because 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. Which I love. - WEIR: No romance, like, ever.
It should not even occur to the reader. She's his boss.
She's his commander.
If you cut it in half, and plant it and fertilize it,
in 40 days you would have a potato plant
with maybe six to eight potatoes on it.
So, you've already done compound interest on half a spud.
If you do that over the area of this floor, you've got a farm
that's gonna keep you alive.
And you can keep doing that.
So, potatoes and rice are the two biggest staples in the world.
Now I think rice is becoming even a bigger staple than...
No. Potatoes are now the biggest staple in the world,
even in Middle East and Far East.
Spud is the magic vegetable.
It's not that good for you, but we all love it, particularly fried.
So, he's now gotta live on spuds for the rest of his stay there,
where he's gonna become an expert on how you cook potatoes.
Here we are.
He 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 could take a sample of these things
over a period, and 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, if you grew your hair for a year,
that single strand of hair is an indication
of what you've been eating and what you've been taking.
Same with poo.
This is freeze dried.
Later that poo will be examined to see what's happening to your intestines,
with no gravity, to your calcium.
Are your bones going soft? Et cetera.
So, that would all be studied after, that's why they kept it.
Thank God.
The great thing about the way we put this together
is you still don't know quite what he's gonna do.
(PANTING)
(WIND WHISTLING)
He's about to reveal what he's gonna do and I think people,
when they watch the film, I think sometimes are thinking,
"Oh, no, how long are we gonna spend inside? Oh, we're not?"
"Oh, no. What's he gonna do now?"
And I think it's full of surprises.
That's why when you get to this, and he says, "Fuck you, Mars..."
Fuck you, Mars.
...it brings the house down. They love that cool.
And now he's plowing 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 he mixed it up, the audience gets used to that,
they think it's embarrassing as hell, but funny.
Isn't it funny how people are actually embarrassed about their own droppings?
And now you get a dollop of poo,
and then half a spud, cover it, 38 days later you're gonna have something.
Right?
Isn't God wonderful?
And there you have the garden. So, the trick is how you shoot this,
you gotta know what you're doing when you're shooting.
I prepped all this in my head beforehand.
I said, "Right, I don't want to see him doing...
"I'll do three and then cut out, and it's evolved."
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 74 days. The whole thing.
I like this because it's always like trying to challenge the audience,
and they're gonna go, "Oh, no.
"He's not gonna find Christ and talk to God, is he?"
It's not that at all.
It evolves quite wonderfully in the text
to having to go through his copilots' 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 a spacecraft, 'cause wood will burn.
You can't have stuff that burns. So, thank God for the pilot,
for Michael Peña, 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, by the way.
Those little pellets that he gets from the engine,
you mix them, you burn them, you heat them.
Eventually it creates humidity. The tent becomes the chimney
to make the atmosphere humid,
which will eventually carry water efficiently onto all those walls.
WEIR: It was you who came up with the idea of using GoPros,
for him to be expositioning to.
And I thought that was brilliant, because just like... In the book,
it's just his log. It's presumably a typed log.
- He's typing into it. - GODDARD: Right.
WEIR: But now we have this 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.
GODDARD: Exactly. And you wanted to feel...
The other challenge is, it's past tense when you're entering it into a log.
WEIR: Right.
GODDARD: And I wanted to feel the immediacy of it.
WEIR: This is now, yeah.
GODDARD: Yeah, we definitely took it seriously,
where we didn't ever wanna 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.
WEIR: (LAUGHING) And then this thing. He's smoking, like Wile E. Coyote.
GODDARD: It's great. WEIR: Yeah. (LAUGHING)
I just love it, it gets me every time.
SCOTT: It was really a great pleasure working with Matt,
who's a team player
and often he would just hang around on the set and see what was going on.
I love that, when they do that. They don't leave.
He was just curious to see me lining stuff up.
I think he'll definitely start directing as well, soon.
I think that's definitely in his plan.
Interesting side note, this is actually how the Jet Propulsion Lab was founded.
Five guys at Caltech were trying...
WEIR: Oh, yeah, when we showed this to the JPL guys...
So, the first time I saw it was in a viewing room at Fox.
And they showed it to a bunch of top JPL guys,
and they were really happy about that scene,
where he's just like, "Oh, by the way, this is how JPL was founded."
GODDARD: Yeah. 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 also, it sort of felt the spirit of the movie to me.
You try to figure something out, you blow yourself up.
WEIR: Yeah. That is very JPL.
GODDARD: You try to figure it out. You plow forward, you know?
(WEIR LAUGHS)
WEIR: I like that, 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.
GODDARD: No.
WEIR: Just repairs, general repairs to the helmet, I guess.
SCOTT: What's he doing to that helmet? God only knows.
Does it look good? Yeah.
You gotta make stuff up as you go.
I always board everything to the ultimate detail, but by boarding it,
it makes me really think it through and you get really good ideas
when you just sit down by yourself, uninterrupted, and quietly work through it.
If you can board it, it makes it even better.
This is a very nice moment, actually.
Nice, really nice score here by Harry.
Well, hello there. Hello there.
Right, that's gonna save his ass.
Hey, there.
WEIR: Life on Mars.
GODDARD: Look, there were many fights, Andy, that you were not privy to.
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 I felt very strongly that we need to stay with Mark
as long as possible the way you do in the book,
because it really helps sell the isolation.
On the script it's about Page 20, which is late to get to these people.
WEIR: Mmm-hmm.
GODDARD: So, it was a challenge to sort of get through Congress, but we did.
(WEIR LAUGHING)
WEIR: It's pretty good.
GODDARD: This was another scene in the book that I loved,
that was really important to keep,
'cause I love that they're talking about the real bureaucratic side of science.
Which is, it's not about this idealism.
The idealism comes through.
But yet it's about people worrying about budgets and appearances.
I think I can get Congress to authorize a sixth.
SCOTT: Chiwetel.
Excellent, effortless, funny, funny guy. Nice.
I worked with him once before in American Gangster.
Where he played the younger brother, the one who wore the flashy suits.
And he just got it.
He's Nigerian, but kind of also very British.
I think he's probably... English public school. Good school.
And I think, I'm sure, probably almost certainly something like
the RADA, Royal Academy.
And he's prolific. He's always working.
That, of course, outside the windows at NASA, with all those rockets,
that's the garden of rockets in NASA that every twin rocket,
they made they stand up in this area. It's like a park of rockets.
...from normal weather activity within a year.
We can't wait a year. We got work to do.
SCOTT: You know, still people don't use multi-camera. I'm shocked.
I still find, every time I do a film, most of the actors come in
and are surprised that we're literally multi-camera on all of this.
We've four cameras on this right there.
So, I do it in 15 minutes as opposed to half a day.
That's what happens.
But you gotta know where you're putting your camera.
You know you're gonna cut it. You're gonna use it,
'cause a lot of people just point a camera and get a shot
and you'll never use it. It's grabbed, you know?
We wait a year, nobody gives a shit.
(MICROWAVE TIMER DINGS)
SCOTT: This girl's very interesting. She's playing Mindy.
Mackenzie Davis has actually right now got quite a successful TV show going.
I hadn't seen it. I just met her in a casting session.
I thought she was fabulous.
So, this is the one end of the room in the building in Budapest
and we went in there and fitted the screen.
All those screens are modules, which all clip together,
modular light sources, which actually are used...
They're kind of used in big rock concerts and things like that.
So, they can put any image on there that they want
'cause they're all interconnected and all married together,
so it was very successful.
And there's no mattes here.
What you see is what we had in the room.
We just photographed it.
And sometimes we had to diminish it, degrade it like this.
WEIR: Somebody's pointed out to me
that Mindy Park is the only character in the entire book
that undergoes any growth.
All the other characters, all the main characters, their personalities
are the same at the end as they are at the beginning.
- GODDARD: 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 them,
and stuff like that. (LAUGHS)
GODDARD: Her Joseph Campbell hero's journey is that she becomes a smart-ass?
WEIR: Yeah, a little bit. Well, and I liked it at the end.
We see that she's the guidance flight controller,
which is a pretty big promotion for her.
SCOTT: Kristen Wiig, delightful to work with.
Really smashing actress,
and one of the funniest people that I've ever come across.
Had us in stitches most of the time.
It was a very good team.
WEIR: I can't think of anyone in the universe, throughout all time,
more suited to play Annie Montrose than Kristen Wiig.
And she plays it pretty tame from what I would have thought,
'cause I expected her to really go off
GODDARD: Kristen's a phenomenal actress,
and I think that she got the spirit of this movie.
WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: And I think she was, frankly, excited
to play something other than the comic relief
WEIR: Other than silly. GODDARD: Yeah.
(WEIR CHUCKLES)
GODDARD: That being said, there's some amazing outtakes.
"Turns out he's alive and we left him on Mars. Our bad.
"Sincerely, NASA."
Do you realize the shitstorm that is about to hit us?
WEIR: Yeah, that line also usually gets a pretty good laugh,
like, "Our bad. Sincerely, NASA."
SCOTT: Boy, the audiences like Kristen Wiig.
In all, it's a very nice balanced cast of, really, three universes.
There's NASA, JPL... Four universes.
JPL, the spaceship, and Mars.
So, I think the nice thing about arguing is that we've tested
the highest I've ever tested in my entire career.
On five screenings we were always in the 90s,
which is that 87% 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 it you could possibly want.
Humor, drama,
visual, spectacular,
and some great actors.
There's a running gag about Captain Lewis'
cheesy disco collection
that she takes with her wherever she goes.
And all he's left with to entertain was this disco collection
and some videotapes of some old American '70s TV shows.
One of them is Happy Days.
That actually plays up kind of big time in the story.
No GPS on Mars.
Even though there's 11 satellites at the moment circling Mars,
all giving off different information, there will 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 maps.
GODDARD: Okay, so you write this, at what point do you quit your job?
WEIR: After the book had made the bestseller list, basically.
So, I never took a financial risk. It wasn't until I was certain
that the royalties could support me that I quit my day job.
GODDARD: Yeah, I remember you were still working your day job
And I'd already done an extensive recce with a chopper,
so I would finally have to pre-choose before I started shooting the actual rocks
I was gonna stick the habitat in front of You've gotta 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, tight, in 360 pan,
so they always have the information.
And so, once I'd invested in that, I knew I was fine.
This is all real. There's nothing, nothing added in here at all,
except a silly flag. It's all real.
I think Lawrence shot here with these dunes.
WEIR: And that is, by the way, pretty much exactly what the RTG looks like
- that's on the back of Curiosity. - GODDARD: Yep.
SCOTT: This is one of the funniest reactions in the film because all he's got
to entertain him and keep him happy
is Captain Lewis' disco music.
So, this is why he said this is the least disco music he can find
from Captain Lewis' collection, and they love it
when he starts to do his little thing. He actually quite enjoys it.
GODDARD: So, the disco's in the book. WEIR: (LAUGHS) The disco is a big thing.
GODDARD: And it's one of the things I loved immediately.
How did that come about?
WEIR: So much of the book takes place on Mars.
You spend so long on Mars
and he's got all this high technology and stuff around him.
I didn't want the reader to lose
track of the fact that this is supposed to be happening kind of close to now.
GODDARD: Yes.
WEIR: It's a slight future. It takes place in 2035.
GODDARD: There aren't flying cars. WEIR: 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 reminding the audience.
SCOTT: I wanted to hang that rocket on the roof right behind him, but they said,
But then the dressing of all these characters is great.
Chiwetel's a bit of a, not dandy, just extremely well dressed.
Yes, sir.
Mark drove two hours straightaway from the Hab...
SCOTT: Interesting to note. I was told that at NASA,
because they're involved with rocketry,
which involves human beings
and human control pilots,
there's a dress code, suits and ties.
And JPL, that only makes robotics,
the kind of slightly cooler, you know, nerd,
in flip-flops and long hair, right?
And so, but when there's a problem, they get together very much.
Very supportive. Very good agency.
It's all about the safety of the pilots and everything else.
I've worked with Benny Wong three times, actually.
And he has not a lot to do and not a lot to say as a copilot in Prometheus 1.
And then I gave him a nice part as a financial genius
in The Counselor where he went to meet Cameron
at the end and fundamentally advised her
how to take her money out and where to put it.
Unfortunately by the end, the scenes are great,
but we didn't need them,
and so this is the third time, he got lucky.
And I like him so much I've popped him in here
and I think he comes off really well.
GODDARD: One of the things I really liked is the differentiation in the book
between JPL and NASA and how they're separate,
but yet there's some overlap.
But would you call it a rivalry between the two at times?
WEIR: There is a bit, yeah. GODDARD: Yeah.
And capturing that was sort of delightful.
WEIR: (CHUCKLES) You know what, I've been told by NASA and JPL people
that the most unrealistic part of the book is the high degree of cooperation
shown between NASA and JPL.
GODDARD: Yeah, that makes sense.
WEIR: These are real potato plants that they grew.
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 scenes.
GODDARD: It also doubled as craft service.
WEIR: Oh, did it? GODDARD: No.
WEIR: (LAUGHING) You sucked me in on that one.
Smart-ass.
SCOTT: Well, people said, "Did you do any research on the Roman Empire
"when you did Gladiator?" I said, "Nope."
I looked at a few pictures, started drawing.
And the art department did a lot of work.
I look at that, wow, those skies are good. And that big volcano in the background.
Uh, Janty does all her research, so I get all that,
pounded with research I get.
This is that... Oh, my God, okay.
But I'll then jump, I'll say, "I want Commodus' armor to be white."
"White?"
So, you go white because I've seen a statue of Commodus in white marble.
I thought, "Gotta be in white. Look great."
I make the broad strokes and then they've gotta make it.
Tough.
GODDARD: One of the things I'm fascinated by is seeing people at work
who care about each other in the off-hours.
The camaraderie that develops when you work with people for a long period of time.
And I think these two really captured that.
WEIR: Vincent and Mindy?
GODDARD: Yeah, Vincent and Mindy sort of had that ease.
It felt very real to me, and part of that, this is a credit to the two of them,
because they're so comfortable together.
It's all right. It's all right. Can I borrow this?
SCOTT: It's funny here because she'd know exactly where he was
to within probably a millimeter. He said, "Where is he?"
She knows this map so well that she'll go, "Right there."
And he knows then right there.
And then he drew on the chart. He gets an idea.
"I know where he's going."
Here he is. And we did a lot of driving around then.
By the time we edited it down... I wanted to just get there
and find out what he's looking for, 'cause we don't know what he's looking for.
And I assume he'd been driving around circles on this.
I fortunately found a place in Budapest,
which is a small world trade fair from the '80s
and it was empty, so it worked.
We cleaned it up and it worked great for me.
It felt kind of, I don't know, Pasadena, in a way.
Intercut with him looking for, what is he looking for?
And I figured when it was dropped, there were probably like four chutes
and the whole object would be in a large package with a large rubber ball,
so then the chutes release,
'cause you gotta release them and let it drop.
Otherwise the chutes might drop on it and entangle it and fuck it up.
And suddenly it can't move 'cause it's tangled in parachute, right?
That's why they drop them. The last bit they gotta drop.
And they gotta hope it drops the right way up.
I'm sure they waited so it bounces and rolls, but it's incredibly inexact.
There's been one thing been sending them signal for 30 years.
Incredible. And it all works off solar.
I made the store room
like this shitty and almost funky
because I'd seen how the object
that they're about to reveal was stored at JPL.
I don't always like to repeat this,
but it was rammed in a garage, full of rubbish,
Coca-Cola cans and some cigarette ends,
on its side and that was it.
I don't know what that equipment's worth in terms of just sheer...
The effort, because once the twin is done, it's discarded.
But you think it'd be in a science museum or something.
There it is. He says, "Pathfinder, Pathfinder."
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 them. People all wanna tell them everything.
That's exactly what the Pathfinder is like.
We copied it. Very good model makers on this.
WEIR: They really made a beautiful replica of Pathfinder.
That is exactly what Pathfinder looks like.
(LAUGHING) They did a great job of it.
GODDARD: Yeah, our production designer, Arthur Max,
you just can't say enough good things about him.
He is just off-the-charts talented.
WEIR: So, 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 puts this kind of thin plastic covering
over the hole where the airlock was.
And I'm like, "Oh, it just doesn't feel right," 'cause I know that
Mars has practically no atmosphere.
- And the wind even blows it inward. - GODDARD: Yep.
WEIR: And while I'm watching it, I'm like, "That's not right."
And then I said to myself, "Well, you know what, I started this."
Like, I'm the one who started it with a conceit that a windstorm
could cause all the damage.
So, in this kind of universe, Martian winds can blow things around.
- GODDARD: Yep. - (WEIR LAUGHS)
- And that's just how it is. - GODDARD: Way to go, Andy. It's your fault.
WEIR: Yeah. It's my fault. I made this happen.
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."
- GODDARD: Yep. - It simplifies so many scenes, I see now.
GODDARD: It's a Ridley thing. I sort of fought it,
'cause throughout the movie, I liked 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.
WEIR: It solved two things.
One, it demonstrates that he has the crane
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 realize that this is gonna be an incredibly long discussion
because the tricky thing here is when a 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 22 hours for the thing to come back around again.
Or was it 17? I can't remember which.
So, after then, the next step is you have to devise
a method of ASCII mathematics
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-l-l.
He's obviously a scientist and he's obviously really smart,
so he knows about ASCII and figures... ASCII's kind old-fashioned but still used.
And so, he remembers that
and goes into the boxes of the crew,
and finds one of them has an ASCII chart.
GODDARD: One of my favorite memories from the pre-production of this film
is a group of us in a conference room showing Ridley how an ASCII table works
and then we move the tables aside and draw it on the sand
just so he could figure out how to shoot this sequence.
WEIR: That's cool.
GODDARD: 'Cause he didn't sort of understand. Nor did I.
You had to explain it to me and then I had to explain it to Ridley,
how the communication would work via ASCII.
And it was just fun. It's just fun to see people do that,
and then see it work so well on screen.
WEIR: So, in a second here, you're gonna see on Johanssen's laptop
a Leather Goddesses of Phobos.
...copies of Zork I I and Leather Goddesses of Phobos...
- Right there. And that was added by you. - By me.
WEIR: 'Cause I didn't put that reference in the book.
GODDARD: No, I played it as kid, so...
WEIR: Yeah. Well, he also was the designer on a lot of the old Infocom games.
- GODDARD: All the Infocom games. - Like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
- and stuff like that. - Which is how I knew it,
'cause I played those games.
And Leather Goddesses of Phobos was a little racy.
- WEIR: Yeah. - So, it felt very taboo.
WEIR: Yeah, it's kind of weird, some of the stuff they found in Johanssen's stuff,
including that kind of Viking anime drawings.
And I'm like, "All right."
They spiced up her interests a little bit.
GODDARD: We spiced her up a little bit.
I always like watching that with the audience,
'cause three people laugh
whenever Leather Goddesses of Phobos comes up.
But those three people are my people.
- WEIR: "Those are my people." - I look around and go, "These are mine."
WEIR: It was only way later,
after I'd been writing it for, well...
It was only long after I released the book that I realized,
"Yeah, the Pathfinder's camera also has a Y-axis."
Like, it can rotate up and down. And so, there could have been
so much more information. There could have been
maybe two or three levels of signs. That it could have pointed up, down, middle,
you know what I mean?
GODDARD: Yeah. It would have been challenging,
though, 'cause where does he put the marker to point to?
He'd have to build a geodesic dome around it.
WEIR: Well, each stick would have like three signs on it, you know?
GODDARD: Okay, yeah, all right. Let's reshoot.
WEIR: Let's reshoot.
Let's get Ridley on the phone.
Vincent.
Vincent, wake up.
(GROANS)
WEIR: I'm glad at how much you guys abbreviated this.
It's 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 'cause I'm a computer geek and so I'm like,
"I know stuff about this and I can really explain it in incredible detail,"
and I was like, "Yeah, no."
And it really suffered, in my opinion, in the audio book.
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. - GODDARD: Interesting.
WEIR: R. C. Bray is his name, the narrator of the audiobook.
He did a really good job.
GODDARD: It's funny. We shot those scenes, too.
WEIR: Really? GODDARD: Yeah.
But it's all voice-over there to sort of
bridge us across it.
WEIR: Well, I love that you guys abbreviated it because it's just dull.
(BOTH LAUGHING)
There's a lot of stuff that I think is great, like, the general decision you guys made,
which was basically, "Okay, we're gonna be scientifically accurate,
"but we're not gonna stop and explain everything like the book does."
So, anybody who wants to double check our math on their own
is gonna find out it's correct, but...
GODDARD: I gotta tell you, it was such a relief knowing that we always had that.
When I read it I kept saying, "Look, Andy did all the hard stuff"
You did all the hard parts. All we have to do is now just tell the story
and rock it forward. That's all we had to do, which is nice.
WEIR: I also really appreciate you guys maintaining the communication latency.
As far as I can tell, that is the hardest thing for Hollywood to do...
GODDARD: It's really hard. It's really hard.
...is accept the fact that there's a communication latency.
GODDARD: I guess it does sort of go against the nature of cinema.
WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: 'Cause you cut between one place to another and in your mind
it doesn't quite make sense.
WEIR: This one bit right here where he doesn't get an immediate response,
so he's like, "Are you receiving?"
I'm like, "Well, technically he would have been waiting 20 minutes."
- GODDARD: All right. Let's no-prize it. - No-prize it.
GODDARD: He waited 20 minutes, the normal amount of time.
WEIR: And there was no immediate response.
- And so, he's like, "Hey." - GODDARD: That's right.
WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: We shot those 20 minutes, but it was boring.
WEIR: Yeah, right. You just pointed the cameras at the actors and said, "Now..."
- GODDARD: "Now just wait." - "Take 20."
GODDARD: Yep.
Guys, can we get some space please?
Me?
Yeah, you.
Give me a sec.
SCOTT: This was a big deal 'cause they have a discussion early on, saying,
"Well, no one knows he's alive. When are we gonna tell the public?
"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 to them.
And so, he now is asking the big question.
"What was the crew's reaction when they realized that I was alive?"
And NASA have to now admit to 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.
Here, waiting for him to type something up.
And he types it out.
Oh, God.
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.
We had a really
obscure word in there that he called
"bureaucratic felcher, "but unfortunately "felcher" can't be in this film
'cause the word is very unpleasant,
Because both cases, they were very relevant.
It needed some kind of expletive to make it more amusing.
WEIR: Here we are, Hermes.
GODDARD: Yeah, and here's... WEIR: First full shot.
GODDARD: Here is the screw up that I feel the worst about.
It was entirely on me.
WEIR: What's that? GODDARD: 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."
- WEIR: Hermes, yeah. - And by the time
that you pointed that out, and you said,
- "It's like Serenity, Drew." - Right.
GODDARD: You never call it "The Serenity" and my heart dropped 'cause I realized
"I screwed this up throughout the whole thing."
And at that point we were so far down the hole that we couldn't change it.
WEIR: As long as it's consistent. GODDARD: I know.
We made sure we were consistent,
but it still hurts me 'cause I wanna be like Serenity.
You're in a hurry.
Yeah.
My son turned three yesterday.
SCOTT: The wire work is pretty pedantic and slow,
but all the actors are very good at it.
And, surprisingly, Jessica Chastain was very good, excellent handling herself
I think 'cause she's a ballet dancer. There's something about balance.
Dispatching them to your laptops now.
SCOTT: I wanted a room that moved to give us gravity on the ship
'cause everything out of this wheel is without gravity.
So, by putting the wheel in,
they're spinning, I think, quite simply at about the distance from the axis.
I think it's about 40-feet radius. So, you'd have an 80-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 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. Kind of fun.
- Two months? - Oh, my God.
MITCH: I was strongly against that decision.
SCOTT: It's a very dramatic moment where they're told Mark Watney is alive
and he's been alive since they've been back going to Earth.
They've been traveling two months now, so he's been alive for two months.
And they find that hard to deal with, that they left him behind.
Lewis, particularly, is saying "I left him behind.
"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 for him.
They don't know how he started to cope very well for himself
I left him behind.
WEIR: In the trailer, they show Hermes and the gravity wheel and stuff
And so, I did the math and I estimated the radius of the gravity wheel,
because you can see Johanssen looking out a window at one point,
and so I said, "Okay, well,
"Kate Mara's like this height and so this many..."
- And it did a freeze frame. - GODDARD: God bless you.
WEIR: So, I got the radius of it.
And then I paid attention to its rotation rate and it worked out,
- they would only have about .2 Gs. - GODDARD: Okay.
WEIR: But you know what? That's close, because realistically
what they would want is for it to be .4.
So, it's really not that far off, 'cause you'd want .4 Gs,
'cause that's Mars' gravity.
So, you'd want the astronauts to be prepped for Mars, right?
So, it's close. So, it's close.
GODDARD: So, you're saying we're geniuses?
WEIR: You're geniuses. You're geniuses. GODDARD: Fantastic news.
WEIR: Yes. Well done.
SCOTT: 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."
Which of course is right.
And he's irritated by the fact of being told what to do.
So, it's all getting, honestly, more and more amusing.
It's quite funny.
Matt's proved to be very funny here.
In your face, Neil Armstrong.
In other news, there's been a request...
SCOTT: Well, I had the Terrafoam 'cause it's so cold,
'cause it's at Christmas, January, February...
And I had to have potatoes at different growth levels.
And, of course, we allowed for it, a field of them
that big and then another one about six inches.
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 had a series of big rooms
he lined with plastic and if you stuck your head in the door,
it's almost like he had a marijuana farm.
'Cause daylight lights on certain times of the day.
Twelve hours on and 12 hours off, shining down on these plants.
Hey!
ANNIE: What is he doing?
I asked for a photo, and what, he's The Fonz?
SCOTT: Now he's gonna... 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 him at the right moment, 17 minutes, blah, blah, blah."
It's hard to capture it. She can't understand why not.
So, Matt then gives her a still of The Fonz.
And she said, "What is this, The Fonz?"
And that was how you pay off The Fonz, where you see it...
I think when you're watching it, you're wondering why on Earth
we're using The Fonz.
A, because the show is beloved and therefore you wanna take something that
ran that long maybe so you can watch it again and again.
But that this is the reason for The Fonz.
Get him in line, Vincent. We can't afford any miscommunication.
I hate this margin.
912 Sols worth of food. We get there on 868.
And that's assuming nothing goes wrong.
SCOTT: You guys will never see this, but a lot of the shooting,
I'd shoot without the plastic visor, I call "the blister,"
because you'll see all the camera crew in the bloody blister.
And sometimes you get away with it.
On the side views, you can get away with it,
but to put a blister in, it's quite expensive.
And to put blisters in throughout the film is thousands of blisters.
So, really, it becomes very expensive. Or hundreds of blisters.
This is interesting where you now see the full value and use
of his 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 a star shape.
He's leaking like a bucket with 19 holes in it.
He's got about a minute.
FEMALE AUTOMATED VOICE: Oxygen level critical.
SCOTT: Plus, with whatever atmosphere is left in the...
Probably none in the airlock.
Gotta 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 ass.
(BREATHING HEAVILY)
FEMALE AUTOMATED VOICE: Oxygen level, 5%.
SCOTT: So, he saves himself here clearly.
And this is where you get a big reaction,
where he's now got to decide what to do next.
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 is gone.
So, all he's got left is what he grew, were in drawers...
Drawers full of potatoes.
WEIR: This is another thing where I think it's superior to the book
where, in the book, this is a huge, complicated problem
because he's in the airlock, but he doesn't have a functional spacesuit.
So, he needs to kind of 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 a really good simplification.
And the frost on the ground is a great way of showing why the plants are dead.
GODDARD: Yep. WEIR: It's hard to show
there's no atmosphere. It's practically a vacuum.
- It's hard to show that. - GODDARD: Yep.
WEI R: But showing them just frozen and brittle like this where he's like, "Crack."
It's like, "Yes, that is a dead plant."
Desolation.
GODDARD: For you screenwriting fans, this is the midpoint.
WEIR: This is the midpoint. This is the "All is lost" portion of Act 2.
GODDARD: It is. And it's funny,
'cause I don't need everything to hew to a three-act structure.
But for a movie like this,
you feel more comfortable, and 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?
WEI R: I think I've just been really heavily influenced by TV and movies,
so I probably do it without thinking about it.
But, yeah, the current book I'm working on now,
- I'm struggling with pacing. - GODDARD: Yeah.
WEIR: So... It is hard, yeah. GODDARD: It's hard.
WEIR: And it was actually, I guess, his kind of pseudo freak out
was during the... In the book, was the airlock blow.
GODDARD: Yeah. WEIR: Yeah, so it's right around this point.
So, has he got an airlock door in the back of the Rover?
GODDARD: I don't know. I didn't notice. WEIR: Well, there's a handle.
GODDARD: All right, let's pretend yes. WEIR: Okay.
Then why does it have a side door?
GODDARD: This is a tough one to no-prize. WEIR: Yes.
GODDARD: We'll come up with it. WEIR: Your greatest challenge.
GODDARD: Let me think on this one.
Crops are dead.
Complete loss of pressure boiled off most of the water.
Any bacteria that survived, died in the subzero temperatures...
WEIR: I think it's pretty cool that you guys never bothered to...
You never explain what a "Sol" is.
But it's so clear from context that you don't have to.
GODDARD: It was in the book. WEIR: That's nice.
GODDARD: You never explain it in the book, do you?
- Yeah, that was an oversight. - GODDARD: No, but I loved it.
I remember thinking right away,
'cause it takes you a little while to figure it out,
but when you do, there's a real sense of "This is exciting, that I'm learning
"not by being told. It's actually happening."
And I thought that that was sort of our mission statement with the whole movie.
Like we tried not to stop and explain too much.
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.
I'll let you call Bruce, give him the news.
Okay.
I'm gonna need a change of clothes.
WEIR: I have to point out that Hermes is powered
by a nuclear reactor and has huge solar panels,
so one wonders why a nuclear-powered ship,
which has enough power for the ion drive, needs solar panels.
But I've got a no-prize for that.
GODDARD: Okay, let me try to win one, too. WEIR: Okay.
No, I've got an answer, but let's see what you got.
GODDARD: How about it's a redundancy? What if the nuclear reactor breaks?
You wanna have a backup.
- WEIR: Right. - Is that possible?
WEIR: That's possible, but that's a lot of weight to put up there
- as an alternate power system. - Okay, how about this. It looks cool.
WEIR: It looks cool is always the good winner, right?
But here's my no-prize entry. Those are not solar panels.
They are thermal panels.
To dump the heat generated by the reactor.
GODDARD: Okay. Cool.
WEIR: So, it needs a lot more thermal panels than a typical space station does.
- GODDARD: Cause there's a lot of heat. - 'Cause there's a lot of heat.
- GODDARD: Great. - There, there is my no-prize.
So, those are not solar panels. Those are thermal panels.
GODDARD: I love it.
WATNEY: "I accidentally blew up the Hab...
"but unfortunately, all of Commander Lewis' disco music still survived."
SCOTT: This is very nice here. This is a touching scene.
Now the crew knows that he's alive. They're now able to,
are allowed to communicate with Mark Watney.
And so, the crew is very laconic
and laid-back and funny
with each other and it's a charming conversation
where Michael Peña, as the pilot, is elected,
"drew the short straw" as he says.
And they talk a lot of this gallows humor about what his position is.
And the crew all are feeling very vulnerable,
as Mark Watney's feeling very vulnerable.
It's a lovely scene.
That kind of helps him, inspires him.
Such great people, normal people, he decides to keep going.
So, now they wonder what the hell he's gonna do
and what he does right now would work.
All he could do is seal out... There's no atmosphere.
All he could do is seal that room so he can reheat it, et cetera, and start all over.
His one peril will be if a storm comes and blows a hole in that thing,
but he's double, triple plastic'ed it.
Plastic and gaffer tape.
WEIR: I also get a lot of questions about gravity.
Not the movie, but the force of gravity on Mars.
- GODDARD: 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 not in a protected environment,
like here, there's, I think, a slight slowdown of the film
or something like that, so it feels like the gravity's a little less.
And that was 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.
GODDARD: It would sound weird 'cause
there's a movie language that we get used to.
WEIR: Yeah.
SCOTT: You can't keep being stalwart, 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 because if it does, he's done.
And this counting potatoes here is lovely because he kind of breaks down a little bit
in the middle of it and I thought it was really cool.
This is where sound helps in the silence. You play up the sound, the fear here,
the habitat was being battered,
probably a storm of about 180 kilometers an hour.
Introducing a mathematical genius, Rich Purnell.
I'm not saying all mathematical geniuses
are scruffy and live in pigsties, but this guy does
'cause he sleeps on the job, literally. 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.
And I just kept running
and he just kept going. He said, "It's okay," jumped up and I just kept it.
He stood on his own coffee and slipped. I thought "Shit, he's hurt himself"
...and the fuel requirement is nearly identical.
Not a good time to launch, is it?
SCOTT: I like things to not be too planned.
I know what I want the scene to be like and I know the geometry.
And then I will rehearse immediately.
This is the first take. I always do one take immediately so that bam.
That's a real fall, gets up, "I'm okay," goes into the kitchen
and this is all in one take.
By Skype.
Skype is wonderful 'cause Skype now stops endless flights and stuff like that.
When flying becomes no more fun anymore, it doesn't, right?
Unless you're going on a holiday. I hate to fly and if I can avoid it, I do.
So, I use Skype wherever I can. And so, even my visual effects in France,
I'm doing to London. I'm spotting 3D visual effects on a desk in France.
Anyone else know a safer way to buy more time?
SCOTT: And visual effects are technically now refining now, color grading.
Do the whole film in a day. Used to be six weeks,
but you gotta have really good graders, and I use the guys here. Stephen is great.
It's just like, yeah, MA V is one of them up on the wall.
I was really sad that the actual launch status check,
like the Apollo 13 scene wasn't in there.
- And we talked about it. - GODDARD: Yeah, but it was written.
It's one of those things that just got cut down.
WEIR: The movie's long and it's like, that's a thing that can go.
GODDARD: And we're getting into this section
where the cuts get more and more painful.
I remember you said this
when we first talked in our very first conversation,
it's in this back half that we started to have to make the tough decisions,
'cause at a certain point, the movie would just be five hours long.
- WEIR: Right. - You know?
WEIR: I thought this was pretty clever, the IRIS launch,
because there just wasn't really enough budget
to show 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...
- Is it actually file footage? - GODDARD: I don't know.
It's a Ridley question, but it was definitely...
We don't do a lot of objective point of view in the movie.
It's occasionally there, but in general you're with characters.
WEIR: I think it was a little premature for them to be celebrating.
GODDARD: There was a lot of conversations about when they should be celebrating.
I remember that.
SCOTT: The guy who did the electric car, Musk,
our design of our MA V evacuation vehicle
is Musk's, fundamentally.
And his design, when we looked at it, we kind of thought it was pretty cool.
It's more streamlined than you'd expect.
But his is reusable. It would 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 resources just wasted.
You gotta reuse this stuff, right?
These aircraft are very strong. You got a 747 that's 30 years old.
Shit, with all the stresses that goes through, it's unbelievable.
So, this is where they fail,
so this is fundamentally a kind of death sentence on Mark Watney.
They're getting what he describes as an irregular pattern,
which is an understatement.
And in the book, on the take-off,
some of the cargo had shaken loose and created an imbalance,
setting the rocket into a kind of spiral.
Now they have a problem.
So, now we bring in new players, which is China.
WEIR: Actually that was a question I asked to the real NASA mission controllers,
where I was like, they have a shift and they have to be at their station
- all the time. - GODDARD: Right.
WEIR: How do you go to the bathroom? And it's like, well,
they can spell each other a bit.
For the most part, the other controllers, the ones other than flight and CAPCOM,
and so flight is the equivalent of Mitch, right?
And CAPCOM is the person who actually talks to the astronauts.
Other than those two, it's okay 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.
- GODDARD: Really? - It's actually pretty, pretty kind of grimy
and that's awesome. But the CAPCOM and flight
- actually spell each other. - GODDARD: Interesting.
WEIR: So, 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...
GODDARD: What happens when they both have to go at the same time?
WEIR: They don't. They have to... Like, one or the other.
GODDARD: Right. WEIR: Yeah.
And another thing.
There are still periods where ISS goes through LLS.
So, there are parts of its orbit where they're actually
not able to communicate with it. You wouldn't think that.
GODDARD: Right. Why? WEIR: Right?
I don't know, but it just has to do with where it's, like,
over the middle of the Pacific Ocean and stuff like that.
So, then they can take breaks during LLS because there's nothing to do.
GODDARD: Do you think that those breaks are real,
or they're just making them up so that
they can go to the bathroom?
WEIR: "We've got LLS here."
SCOTT: Now go to China. China's our new player in this.
That was the opera house in Budapest.
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 worked great.
I was just down the road from there. I got it all in one spot.
And two very good Chinese actors.
This woman is the biggest television actress,
very important television actress in China.
And the scene is kind of 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 a good idea.
The world would never know we could have helped.
Then, for the sake of argument, let's say we decide to help them...
SCOTT: So, they decide to help.
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 got what it takes.
He really cares about what is gonna happen,
but he can't afford to show it.
Right here, there.
Yes!
WEIR: So, this is interesting, the China angle.
I'm glad that that made it into the movie.
And I think the studio's really happy
because of course this means this makes it easier to market in China.
GODDARD: Yeah, though I don't think that that's why.
WEIR: Right. GODDARD: I think people think that we
added this after the fact to try to get some sort of financial relief,
but it's not true.
It's in the book. And 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.
WEIR: Yeah, right, well... GODDARD: They're the next space program,
they would have this capability.
WEIR: I love that it's in Chinese and dubbed, or rather subtitled
and stuff like that. One thing, yeah, is
in the book, the Chinese come to the rescue
pretty much because they do it in exchange for
getting an astronaut on an Ares mission.
And so, it's a deal. It's a tit for tat.
But in this, they changed it to they just kind of did it to be nice.
GODDARD: Yeah. And we shot that. WEIR: You shot the original?
GODDARD: And it got cut down and you'd have to ask the powers that be
- as to why that happened. - I got my own theory.
"Ready, action, cut," so then you run out.
You gotta be then actually 11 seconds to walk through the floors.
It's a long time.
So, each one on that wheel is four spokes.
Each spoke is probably half the diameter of this room with a ladder,
a bit like those bodies of those propellers that you get in the wind farm.
That kind of technology.
But the outer room's gotta move at five miles an hour and you're walking.
Shocking, isn't it?
WEIR: This is a little bit of cinema OS stuff going on here where we have...
if it's a pure text file, it wouldn't be animated like this, right?
View as text does this?
GODDARD: Maybe they have an additional program
that makes it more exciting.
WEIR: View as text, more exciting.
GODDARD: 'Cause they know astronauts get bored.
WEIR: Yeah, right. I also like how when you view as text,
- it cycles randomly through letters until... - GODDARD: Yep.
I like how there's even a little bit of angle
where Lewis is standing and stuff
GODDARD: Yep.
WEIR: I'm guessing that this was all just done with Batman cam, right?
- Just tilt the camera? - GODDARD: No, the set swung.
Yeah, the set actually rotated.
Not fully, but it was definitely on a swivel.
WEIR: So, they would swivel as he walked? GODDARD: Yeah, yeah.
'Cause they would get that. And then the lights would also swivel.
It was a complicated endeavor.
WEIR: That's cool.
SCOTT: So, this is where she's saying, "What do you wanna do? This is the plan.
"But let's not mince words. This is about mutiny.
"You'll never be used again. They'll never allow you up here again.
"Doesn't matter what your motives are on this.
"They say, 'Great, I've had enough for one lifetime. '
"And let's go back
"and I'll add another nine months to my life in space
"to go back to save Mark Watney."
Very strong, Jessica here, as the captain who's very cool, never loses her cool,
never gets angry, never loses her temper, completely balanced.
Sign me up.
SCOTT: Actors like this, you don't really, you just meet with them.
I meet with them, I know what they can do and we just chat.
I just like to get to know them, that's all.
It's a shared process,
and I take 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 really feel it,
they've been thinking really about what they're gonna do,
and every one of these, believe me, is so pro.
They thought a great deal about who they are and what they're gonna do.
Makes my job easier.
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 gotta read them and things like that, you know?
He's very good. I just watched him in a film,
a Scandinavian film called Headhunter.
It's why I cast him. I thought he was really interesting.
He was the lead of Headhunter.
Johanssen?
Yes.
Yeah!
WEIR: I don't know.
You're a copper-eyed bullet man.
GODDARD: Yeah, right. I would like to know.
WEIR: If you screw up, you're like a tin-eyed rock man,
or something, I don't know.
Yeah, so during the launch of Apollo 12,
the Saturn V, as they were launching, got struck by lightning twice actually,
just like two shots, one after another.
'Cause it turns out the exhaust from
a Saturn V rocket is ionized and it basically acts like a lightning rod.
GODDARD: Really?
WEIR: It just can follow the exhaust trail all the way to the ground.
So, it's actually not that uncommon, and they accounted for it.
They have like a lightning rod on the ship and stuff
But the Saturn V, during its ascent, this is Apollo 12,
got struck by lightning twice and their computer systems
just went completely haywire.
Just all of their systems were fritzing out.
All of the caution warning lights came on and stuff like that.
All the indicators popped off and said like, "Everything has broken."
And this one guy, and I wish I could remember his name,
we could look it up some other day,
at NASA said, "I think I've seen this problem before.
"It'll happen when there's an overcharge in this one system."
He says, "Switch SCE to AUX."
And no one in mission control knew what the hell he was talking about.
No one knew what he meant. But they just said,
"Okay, CAPCOM, tell them. Switch SCE to AUX."
So, CAPCOM sent it up.
And 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,
SCE has two modes and he switched it to AUX.
And it completely took care of all the problems.
GODDARD: That's amazing.
WEIR: And so, that guy at mission control was, you know,
"You are a steely-eyed missile man."
GODDARD: Is he the only person that has been it?
- No. There have been others, yeah. - Okay. But they give it out sparingly?
WEIR: Yes. Well, it's not an official thing, but it's like...
...really, all of the brainpower on the entire planet...
helping me with this endeavor.
SCOTT: I thought this was funny.
And he said the best thing, "That I've got the entire attention
"on this from this scientific body,
"and all they've come up with so far
"is drill holes in the roof of your vehicle, 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.
The same guy, stunt, stunt. Here we go.
Bang.
Back to China.
This is the thanks.
The deal is sealed here.
That worked well, didn't it, for Yangtze?
GODDARD: This montage, I think, is actually my favorite part of the movie.
- WEIR: Yeah? - I just feel like it all comes together.
WEIR: It's like, "We have a plan."
GODDARD: Yeah, you sort of see the spirit.
I love the idea of drilling holes in the Rover on one end and showing...
It just feels like science to me,
- like we're all figuring it out. - WEIR: Yeah, it feels like science.
That's what science is.
GODDARD: And it's a little rough, but they're doing it.
And then you mix that with the emotional component of people
saying goodbye to their families.
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.
- WEIR: You just can't go wrong with him. - No.
GODDARD: Also, I love this ad-lib. "He didn't do cheese."
It delights me.
And so, Bruce,
after they take the picture, he looks to his compatriots and he goes,
"He didn't do cheese."
WEIR: "He didn't do cheese."
GODDARD: It really makes me laugh every time.
SCOTT: This is his lung.
He's attaching a lung to enable him to have a larger atmosphere
inside his vehicle, so he could drive longer.
WEIR: In the movie it's the only time you ever see that
- Lewis truly does love disco. - GODDARD: Yep.
WEIR: It's always been something just inflicted on Mark.
Well, and also at the very, very end, in her house...
GODDARD: Yes.
WEI R: .. .you can see they have like framed disco albums and stuff like that.
SCOTT: He drives for four hours, then he runs out.
So, he then has to hibernate
for 13 hours.
The best thing to do is go to your suit and sleep
while the solar energy is recharging
and the whole thing is being charged again to drive for another four hours.
So, the journey ends up being 3, 200 kilometers at 25 miles an hour,
doing 25 over terrain like that, you've got to be careful
that you don't turn it over
or snap something.
WEIR: I like the Chongqing launch complex.
Do you know what they used for it?
GODDARD: I do not.
WEIR: 'Cause it's, it's obviously very different than the MCC set,
- or maybe they just redressed the... - GODDARD: Probably, but I don't know.
WEIR: But the MCC set is built
in that place in Budapest that has the weird windows in the background
- and that's not there. - GODDARD: Right.
WEIR: Well, if they redressed the MCC set, they did a great job of it.
And this is another, you know, sneaky,
"We got away with a launch without having to put the special effects into it."
GODDARD: Yes. Yep.
'Cause those launches are expensive.
WEIR: Yeah. GODDARD: They really are.
SCOTT: And so, he just said, "Do we really need this?" I said,
"Well, yeah, we're doing a space film."
So, this is where you get the upside down effect of gravity change.
Look, she's upside down, he's the right way up, and then vice versa.
WEIR: I like this, a little bit of Beck and Johanssen.
Just a little touch.
I was a little sad that
the kind of romance plot between Johanssen 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 them with a baby.
- GODDARD: Yep. - So, it's clear that that happened.
But there were a couple of..
GODDARD: Well, the big one, and we shot it, we just had to cut it for time,
is the "everything is going wrong on the Hermes" scene.
'Cause that's the one where she tells him they can share the bunk.
WEIR: Right.
GODDARD: That's the one where they 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.
WEIR: And it's also too bad because Martinez is a smart-ass
- and he's funny and stuff - GODDARD: Yes.
WEIR: He goes, "Yeah, a million mile high club,"
or whatever, and it's too bad that was gone.
Yes. He's very thin now.
When I saw on the screenplay that he has a body double.
GODDARD: In the credits? WEIR: Yeah.
- Well, a Mark Watney double. - GODDARD: Yes.
WEIR: So, there was, 1 was Mark Watney, 1X was his stuntman,
and then 1XX was body double.
And I'm like, "Ha, ha, they got a butt double," or something like that.
But it wasn't. It was the super-thin emaciated guy double.
GODDARD: Yep. WEIR: Yeah.
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 waters.
GODDARD: This speech is in the book. This speech is great.
How did you figure this out?
- WEIR: I don't know. - Do you remember?
I don't know.
I don't know. It was just a random thought.
GODDARD: Well, look, you wrote this over four years?
WEIR: About three years, yeah.
GODDARD: Did you know, did you have a good plan,
or do you just sort of write and go chapter to chapter
and let it roll?
WEIR: 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 kind of went one scene at a time.
- One problem at a time, usually. - Okay.
And I love this thing. I don't know if it was you or Ridley
where he leaves his helmet behind.
GODDARD: It's Ridley and I love it.
- It's so human. - WEIR: It's like, "Yeah, I'll need that."
GODDARD: Yeah, you know?
WEIR: And he's walking triumphantly out like...
- And he's like, "Right." - That's so great.
WEIR: Yeah, that's a big moment in the book,
- when he's leaving the Hab. - GODDARD: Yep.
WEIR: Which has been like his savior for...
SCOTT: 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 orchestral.
Nice. Beautiful.
WEIR: 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.
This was much more simplified. And a lot of people didn't notice
that one of the Rovers got destroyed by the MA V launch
right at the beginning.
GODDARD: Yeah. WEIR: You actually see it.
- It happens. - GODDARD: It's there.
WEIR: But it goes by pretty quick.
You can see it. It's just getting baked by the blast.
GODDARD: And we talked about it more in the first cut.
It was much more about Rover 1 and Rover 2 and what we were doing
and we found it was just confusing.
Here's another thing,
'cause in the book this speech happens much earlier
and when we shot it, this whole section was earlier.
And we moved it in editing because it just felt like
this was where we wanted to get more existential.
WEIR: isn't it during his trip to Schiaparelli?
GODDARD: Is it? Is it this part?
WEIR: It might have been during his trip to Pathfinder?
GODDARD: Yeah, I think that's where it was, at least in the script, originally...
WEIR: Okay, okay.
...was the trip to Pathfinder.
But, look, this is where the biggest cuts happen, I think.
WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: Between book to script.
WEIR: And this is the right place to cut them, too,
because it took a lot of pages for him to do his trip.
GODDARD: And they do do a beautiful job with the score,
and just the visuals 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 100%,
'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...
WEIR: It illustrates the difference between
the wrong physics dust storm and the right physics one.
GODDARD: There's that.
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.
WEIR: So, if you'd known it was gonna be Ridley's problem...
GODDARD: Maybe. But 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's the book problem where
you're relating something that happened after the fact.
WEIR: Well, are you talking about the thing where he drops off the sensors?
GODDARD: Yes, and he gets cut off from NASA.
WEIR: Yeah.
- He got cut off earlier. - No, yeah, but I mean,
'cause he's cut off, he can't talk to anyone, right?
WEIR: Right. GODDARD: So, he can't...
WEIR: Oh, and you didn't wanna cut him off from NASA?
GODDARD: Well, we didn't... WEIR: Yeah.
...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... - WEIR: Hmm.
...exactly what was happening to the audience.
WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: (STUTTERS) It was a triply-challenging thing.
WEIR: He could have articulated it because,
that was a process that took him days, but it would have
required you to cut him off from NASA.
GODDARD: But there was one period,
and you know this better than I do,
where's NASA's watching, hoping to God that he's gonna figure it out
- in a fairly short time. Right? - WEIR: Right. Right. Well...
GODDARD: There's one period where if he doesn't get it solved in that time,
he's in trouble.
WEIR: Right, yeah. GODDARD: Which would be the part
we would wanna do.
- That's the part that's hard to verbalize. - WEIR: Right.
I think you were right to cut it. I mean... Honestly...
GODDARD: I wish we could have figured it out,
but I could not... I couldn't quite crack how to do it.
SCOTT: Yeah, this is done to a nice, uh,
really beautiful piece of score by Harry Gregson-Williams,
but all the score right through this is really kind of majestic
and touching.
Uh...
And when he's growing his crops, there's a kind of nobility to the music.
It was very nice.
Yeah, the gravity, the gravitas comes from the music,
which is sometimes a nice counterpoint to what he's doing.
The Hermes, well... It, it... It can't enter Mars' orbit.
SCOTT: There's a great American composer that I liked and we talked about
called Copland, Aaron Copland.
High planes and, uh, things like that, it's fantastic.
But very emotional, but somehow, uh,
inspiring, yeah. Nice.
You can do that, right?
Well, there's some gimmes right off the bat.
The design presumes 500 kilograms of Martian soil and samples.
Obviously we won't do that.
And there's just one passenger instead of six.
With suits and gear, that's another 500?
Ditch the life support, don't need it.
And we'll get Mark to wear his EVA suit the whole trip.
SCOTT: Yeah, I think Benny's gonna be really amazed how well this worked out.
Poor bugger, locked on the other studio doing this again and again.
And then was suddenly put into JPL and I think he suddenly started to twig.
But I think he comes off really well.
And I, I suddenly realized I had to have the two nose cones.
It wasn't planned. I said, "I want the two nose cones."
I said, well, "One's a studio, one's a rough cut. I want them."
So, we brought them in and it helps enormously. (MUMBLING)
I don't know how I didn't think that I would have to have two nose cones,
but they fortunately made them.
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 they stuff the cone and put the chute over it and he's like... Oh!
The ground's fantastic.
And this is... I love this scene.
It's kind of really funny. And everything they say here is feasible.
You really don't need anything on the front 'cause there's no air
to keep in or keep out.
He said there was zero. Here, you're a vacuum.
Yes.
SCOTT: "Should I go on?"
"No." (CHUCKLES)
I love this scene.
This is funny, these two. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"He means the first one or the second one?"
SCOTT: 'Cause he's the boss. She's funny 'cause you realize she better let him win.
SCOTT: "It could be that. Yeah, it could be that."
Like it'll distract me from how insane their plan is.
GODDARD: Okay, this is my favorite story of collaboration between you and I.
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 as basically what is Act 3.
(WEIR CHUCKLES) Yes.
GODDARD: We're going to explain to you Act 3 and we wanted to make it clear
because we wouldn't have any more time from this point on to explain anything.
- Right? So, we wanna talk about it. - WEIR: Mmm-hmm.
GODDARD: So, I write this 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." - (WEIR LAUGHS)
GODDARD: You know, like that's what happened here
and I remember this phone call
between you and me, as you're like, "No, that would never work, Drew.
"Physicists wouldn't use that word."
And I thought, "Oh, let's just put that in the movie."
- WEIR: You just worked it in. Yeah. - Let's just do it."
- 'Cause that's the stuff that delights me. - (WEIR LAUGHS)
SCOTT: Love this soliloquy.
Right through to, "Let's do this."
And then I think we save the last for the best,
which is my favorite band, ABBA.
I'm sure they're gonna be surprised.
I mean, they're formidable and they're all really sensible. Smart, great.
They knew what they were doing.
I love his cynicism here.
Well, hmm, I like it. I like how it sounds, too. "Let's go."
A little joke at the end,
which... Yeah, I think is worth it 'cause to be covered in dust...
Can you imagine getting there and the electricity doesn't work?
(WEIR LAUGHS)
GODDARD: I've always meant to ask him about this,
whether it was something
decided on the day or if he had this planned.
But the idea that the dust covered up the buttons is so great.
(WEIR LAUGHS)
SCOTT: It's like leaving his helmet behind on the table when he walked out.
He couldn't do that and open the door, he'd 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 people are flashing you and you think, "Fuck you."
You're on the wrong side of the road.
Film set every day is a bit like that.
But there's always some prick that's, sort of, saying,
"What are you doing this for?"
I got over that years ago.
It no longer happens. It hasn't happened for a while, actually.
But, one, as a director you've gotta learn to say, "Back off," you know?
Or never even let it in. The key is to never let it in.
That can be frustrating. That's like...
GODDARD: And it is. (STUTTERS) You know, when you think about this movie,
the sheer amount of exposition we don't do is...
- WEIR: Yeah, yeah. - ...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. - (WEIR LAUGHS)
Like, we barely talk about these people's lives before.
And, you know, we barely talk about so much stuff that in most movies
- they would always talk about ad nauseam. - WEIR: Mmm-hmm.
GODDARD: And it sort of.. It delights me
how much of the story is told through action.
WEIR: (CHUCKLES) It's like the characters are not very deep, right?
I mean, what do we know about Lewis? She likes disco.
GODDARD: Yeah, but you know what... WEIR: She's a good commander.
GODDARD: But I also think the emotion of it is strong
- and that's what gets us through, you know. - WEIR: Yeah. Mmm-hmm.
GODDARD: Like it's not about when I was kid, I lost my toy astronaut.
- Now I have to find a real astronaut. - WEIR: Right. (LAUGHS)
GODDARD: Crap like that. It's like, no...
- (WEIR LAUGHING) - ...I define my character through what I do,
- rather than what I say. - WEIR: Right.
GODDARD: Which is really hard in Hollywood to trust.
...that we're watching this as it unfolds.
So we'll try and keep you up-to-date...
SCOTT: This gentleman is actually CNN
and actually is one of the more foremost CNN newscasters in Europe right now.
German and, uh, very good.
I asked him to come in to do that interview and...
he was so good, we just used him at the studio.
We did all that at the studio gates.
The gates of NASA are the gates of the studio.
And, you know, we put NASA everything inside it.
I also thought the gates were kind of, you know, blingy.
I thought, "Why not NASA?" But people go, "Nah, nah."
So, you gotta not listen to that.
You just gotta go, "No. That's gonna be the studio gates."
The mirror brings him to a point of reality.
He 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, the very thin arms, isn't it?
It's great.
Thin back.
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 the magic of filming, you just do that.
I had it on a couple of clamps. You tear yourself off it.
REPORTER: ...just how long Mark has been completely alone on Mars.
We're talking to a psychology expert later to discuss...
WEIR: Yeah, that was the only time I ever felt like I had
kind of, uh, poetic prose.
I've still got a lot to learn about the skills of writing, like the prose.
I'm not, I'm not... I've still got a lot to learn there.
But where it said, you know, they came from Times Square
to Tiananmen Square to Trafalgar Square, I like that.
- Those like T's. (CHUCKLES) - GODDARD: T's and squares.
- WEIR: T's and squares. Yeah. T squares. - T squares. There you go.
WEIR: Hey, I didn't mean that.
JOHANSSEN: Engine alignment, perfect.
Communications, five by five.
We are ready for pre-flight checklist, Commander.
Mission Control, this is Hermes actual. We will proceed on schedule.
We are T-minus 2 minutes, 10 seconds to launch, by the mark.
About two minutes, Watney.
How you doing down there?
I'm good.
I'm anxious to get up to you.
Thanks for coming back for me.
LEWIS: Well, we're on it.
WEIR: That's really nice. GODDARD: It's lovely.
WEIR: That was really nice.
GODDARD: That was Matt Damon's instinct...
...to really save that emotion until the first time he talks to Lewis.
Which I thought was so inspired.
Copy that, MAV.
CAPCOM.
JOHANSSEN: Go.
SCOTT: This, this is interesting here. It's a very nice reaction here.
And afterwards he said, "I don't know what happened."
He said, "I just heard those voices and I got really upset."
I said, "That was real funny, isn't it?"
It's funny how when they're acting, but they're right into it.
They're right into the character and the scene.
And I always like to have playback as much as I can into his earphones,
so he's not on his own, you know?
But I like that 'cause it really helps enormously.
JOHANSSEN: Four...
three...
two...
one.
WEIR: Awesome.
I love that CGI. I love a good rocket launch.
- GODDARD: Yep. - (WEIR CHUCKLES)
SCOTT: The lights started winking on the takes. I just lost the light.
But we just used that shot. I like the one where it's going on and off
WEIR: And then everything goes to, according to plan of course
- and there's no complications... - (GODDARD CHUCKLES)
...as you know, the audience wouldn't expect anything
to go wrong here.
(BREATHING HEAVILY)
JOHANSSEN: Velocity, 741 meters per second.
Altitude, 1,350 meters.
That's too low.
It's fighting me.
SCOTT: We did the music at Abbey Road, and Harry had been mixing down the last,
in it, on a desk upstairs where he mixes all his tracks together.
(BREATHING HEAVILY)
So, I think it's gonna be pretty wonderful.
MARTINEZ: Booster separation complete.
Velocity, 850. Altitude, 1,843.
He's well below target altitude.
How far below?
JOHANSSEN: Checking.
Watney.
Do you read?
SCOTT: There's a nut that wakes him up beginning to clickety, click, click.
The separation. All of this is fairly what'll happen.
This is all in order.
MARTINEZ: Back to automatic guidance.
Shutdown confirmed.
SCOTT: As he starts to undo everything and open up the windows
and take off the roof, in his speed he just let 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, although, they're in now, they're fantastic.
There's about 300 bolts all floating around him,
slowly bouncing off his helmet. Click, click, click. It's cool.
Distance at intercept will be...
SCOTT: 68 kilometers.
BECK: 68 kilometers?
SCOTT: So, the problems just keep occurring.
To close the gap, you'll have to use fuel.
How much fuel do you need to get us back?
I can use about 20% of what we've got. So, okay, burn the jets.
That brings them in at 68 kilometers.
Then the closing speed is still way too fast,
which is, I think about 40... No. It's about...
I forget what the timing is, but it's, it's too fast to try and catch him.
So, 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 all gonna need this fuel for docking
when you get back to Earth,
'cause right now they haven't gone into a slowdown,
which will cost you fuel.
And to get back up to speed will cost you fuel.
So, you're going full bore here.
They could be doing 20, 000 miles an hour here,
but so is he.
So, it's almost even-even. They're all traveling at the same speed.
(BREATHING HEAVILY)
SCOTT: It's relative.
I was once shooting a racing car
on a track and I was three feet from the nose.
We were both doing 140,
and I could... (TAPS) Tap on the body and just get him to back off two inches.
The driver starts evening, it even sounds ridiculous but two good drivers,
you just trust them.
And it feels like you're zero. You're not on.
LEWIS: We've corrected the intercept range,
but we've got a problem with intercept velocity.
WATNEY: How big a problem?
42 meters a second.
This is nuts and bolts bouncing off his helmet.
Commander, I have an idea.
LEWIS: Go ahead, Mark.
Well, if I can find something sharp in here...
and poke a hole in the glove of my EVA suit...
SCOTT: But you forget about shit like that. He's not gonna pick up every bolt.
He's just gonna go... (MUMBLES INDISTINCTLY)
And somebody said, "Gee, wouldn't you be worried about it piercing it?"
I said, "No. They're all traveling the same speed as he is."
Yes, yes, those are all very good points.
SCOTT: That's why I kept it in wide to keep the...
Every washer and nut and bolt that was on the floor is now floating.
WATNEY: Commander...
let's go Iron Man.
SCOTT: Here. Here it comes. She says, "Here's what we're gonna do.
"We're gonna explode the front of the ship to slow us down."
Then fundamentally she's saying to the German astronaut,
"Can you make a bomb?"
"Yes, I can make a bomb." But of course making a bomb on board a ship is insane.
But also blow the nose off the ship.
And all the air would leave and we need air...
SCOTT: And what she's gonna do is evacuate all
the atmosphere in all the chambers
except the bridge, where they are, and that would be sealed.
The evacuation of all the interior pressure
coming from the nose
on its trajectory will slow it down.
That's the idea,
'cause in space
the smallest little wispy engine will
drive you quickly to where you wanna be.
That's why it's... She gets that idea from his glove.
He says, "if I cut a hole in this glove,
"I can use the air coming from my suit as an engine
"to close on the person who's trying to come and save me."
Beck, leave your suit on. Meet Johanssen in Airlock 1.
GODDARD: One of the great unsung heroes of The Martian is our editor, Pietro Scalia,
who is so talented,
and so much of this final set piece is just Pietro's tour de force.
WEI R: Just good edit, edit. It's just nice, tight.
GODDARD: (CHUCKLES) One of my favorite Pietro stories,
- Pietro looks like Geppetto. - (WEIR CHUCKLING)
Very tightly wound Italian man.
In one of our, um, test screenings, they do these focus groups and at the end,
uh, the 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.
- (WEIR LAUGHS) - But I started laughing in the background,
and I say it to Pietro all the time.
And he'd be like, "I know!" 'Cause Pietro takes this very seriously.
He's like, "You don't need to tell me. I know. I need more time."
And I said, "Pietro, they just mean that the movie's still rough.
- (BOTH LAUGHING) - "It's okay."
- Sugar? - Yeah.
SCOTT: 2001 I went and looked at one afternoon in the Strand in London.
It'd only been out a week, so I went and saw a 70-mil print
in the Strand all by myself with a pack of cigarettes
'cause I could smoke in the theater then. And absolutely watched 2001 around 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, and not really real.
There were some good ones.
Good-ish.
The Day the Earth Stood Still, um, things like that.
But never that... The reality of it and the logic of it and...
I think it's the first time a computer
was ever really considered at all in a film,
which threw up details which were fantastic. And HAL was a character,
I thought that was just genius.
So, I've always tried to think, if I can,
like Stan, but he was fucking clever.
And he did not wanna go to travel. He would not fly.
By the time he did 2001, he would not fly.
So, to go the cutting carbon copy of 2001, he got a ship,
went and bought a liner, just caught it, got a train across the United States
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. (CHUCKLES)
He learned all that in Strangelove,
all about 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 because the pilot changes his mind
on bombing Moscow or whatever. He can't do that.
...we're gonna be off on our angle.
What's the intercept distance? Johanssen?
SCOTT: And there, I love it the way he thought...
'Cause then I think some special department came to him
and said, "How did you know that?" He said, "What do you mean?"
"Well, that's what we do." He said, "Well, kind of logical, isn't it?"
So, he worked it all out, but it's actually what they do.
I always thought that was wonderful.
Open D3.
SCOTT: 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, 'cause she had to get into 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
and all this is fairly seamless.
On 2001 they had to invent this process, which still was on wires.
We are still on wires today.
The wires weren't as sophisticated as these, so he'd be very often looking up
from below the studio floor up to the gantry
and be dropping a guy down towards him on a wire,
so he couldn't see the wire, 'cause he couldn't take out the wires,
so he couldn't photograph him.
His stars, 'cause it was 70 millimeter, were holes in the cyclorama.
That's why there's only, like, 12 a shot.
(EXPLOSION)
WEIR: I like the decompression. I like the... I like that.
- I like how that just... You know? - GODDARD: Yeah.
(WEIR CHUCKLES)
GODDARD: Boy, the amount of conversations we had
to have about the difference between
acceleration and deceleration and how it doesn't matter.
WEIR: Yeah. It doesn't matter.
GODDARD: But, boy, a lot of back and forth about that.
LEWIS: What's the relative velocity?
12 meters per second.
LEWIS: Copy.
Hook me up.
BECK: Done.
SCOTT: 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 200, 300 meters is a long way.
And he knows he's not gonna make it, so he's insisting,
"I'm gonna cut a hole in 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 hand.
Closes his hand and he has to wait it out. "What am I gonna do?"
Watney reports. He says, "Okay, here I come."
Bang. That would do it. That's what'd happen.
But you'd spin a little bit out of control,
so she's gonna go to meet him.
GODDARD: So, here's a big change from the book.
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... - (WEIR LAUGHS)
...that I just didn't wanna bother with
'cause I knew that it would never come to that point.
But I remember thinking, "Okay, you know, this actually feels right,
"that we should switch, we should have Lewis go catch Mark at the end."
It just felt like the emotional story's right
and I was expecting you to say, "No, that's crazy."
But your first instinct was, "No, no, that's what you should do."
WEIR: Yeah, it works. And also because it's Jessica Chastain.
GODDARD: Yes. WEIR: Right.
GODDARD: And it also feels like it is the emotional culmination of the story
- between those two people. - WEIR: Right.
- GODDARD: Between Mark and Lewis. - She feels, even though it's not her fault,
WEIR: she feels responsible for him being stranded,
so she's the one who actually rescues him.
She's the space captain commander hero.
GODDARD: And I think he has that fondness for her as well,
so it works both ways.
WEIR: Yeah, she's his commander, you know?
GODDARD: Yeah.
SCOTT: But you're doing this all on wires
with green screen.
It's laboriously slow.
(SCOTT CHUCKLES)
And you think, "My God, it's too slow." But then you put it all together.
You've 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 save that for the closing title, which I think kind of works very well.
The danger was it would mess up this part, but I don't think so.
What I've seen, the 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, hug each other,
leap about, burst into tears.
WEIR: Gotta have the cheering scene.
- GODDARD: Gotta have the cheering scene. - Gotta have it.
GODDARD: We also added this scene, which in the book
you actually say if this was a movie,
- we would say that's all kind of boring. - WEIR: Yes. (LAUGHS)
GODDARD: And then we actually did it, which made me feel, like a terrible person.
WEIR: But it ties it up so well. GODDARD: That's right.
- Yeah. - WEIR: You guys had to do reshoots on this.
- You brought everyone back. - GODDARD: To do this.
We added it and I had to say, "You guys realize Andy put this
"in the book as though
- he was making fun of it... - (WEIR LAUGHS)
"...as though this is what Hollywood would do."
And then here we are doing it.
WEIR: Well, you know what, this is a movie, not a book.
GODDARD: Yeah. WEIR: (CHUCKLES) Right.
And so, all the actors, you say, you brought them all in
except Sebastian Stan, who they couldn't schedule.
GODDARD: The magic of editing.
WEIR: Yeah, the magic of editing.
SCOTT: I was resisting 'cause I didn't wanna do one more wide...
I went, "All right then." So, we did this.
This is the payoff right here. That's it.
Yeah, he said, "Whoa! Give me a break. I haven't had a shower for a year."
WEIR: When they took his helmet off, he smelled really bad.
- GODDARD: Which is nice. - (WEIR LAUGHS)
WEIR: Ah, yes, the day one.
GODDARD: Day one. WEIR: You wanna talk about day one?
GODDARD: Not really. WEIR: Oh, you don't wanna...
- (GODDARD CHUCKLES) - ...talk about day one?
- All right. (LAUGHS) - GODDARD: No, I do. I mean, part of it,
the ending was complicated. It's funny 'cause,
when I first read the book, too,
the book went through at least one different ending.
WEIR: Yes, there was.
GODDARD: And the version I read he was back
- on Earth and I always sort of liked it. - WEI R: And swearing at a child.
- (WEIR LAUGHS) - GODDARD: And swearing at a child.
I tried to get him to swear at a child, but...
But I think 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 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...
- WEIR: Mmm-hmm. - ...you know, it was that instinct.
There's so much talk about Ares 5 in the book.
WEIR: Right.
GODDARD: Part of me just wanted to see it,
which just felt like it's not just about Mark Watney.
- Let's see all of these people. - WEIR: Right. I really like it.
- The machine rolls on and stuff - GODDARD: Yeah.
WEIR: So, 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 1" title came up right as they showed Earth.
GODDARD: Right. WEIR: And the heavy, heavy implication
of that is that this is his first day back on Earth.
GODDARD: Correct. WEIR: It's clearly not.
- Which is not what it was intended to be. - WEIR: Right.
GODDARD: It was intended to be the day one of the next launch.
WEIR: Right. GODDARD: You know?
WEIR: Yeah. And so, it's cool that they waited a bit.
Ridley moved it, yeah.
GODDARD: It was one of those editing things where we tried it
a couple of different ways.
And I think we landed on the best version of it, for sure.
And that's what you need to know going in because it's going to happen to you.
This is space. It does not cooperate.
At some point, everything is going to go south on you.
Everything is going to go south and you're going to 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. You solve one problem...
then you solve the next one.
And then the next.
WEIR: And I guess there was a completely different version of this
on a different set and a different place with...
GODDARD: Yeah, we tried, one of the problems...
- I don't even remember why. - WEIR: Yeah.
- It was more of a "Let's try something else." - WEIR: Mmm-hmm.
GODDARD: And we tried something else and it didn't work.
WEIR: Hey, there you are. GODDARD: Hey, look, me.
WEIR: Your own personal private title placard.
GODDARD: It's exciting. Hey, look, you.
WEIR: And there's me, yeah. (LAUGHS) GODDARD: It's pretty good.
WEIR: It's pretty good. Here we are, Andy's first press conference.
(GODDARD AND WEIR LAUGHING)
GODDARD: She keeps her job. That's good.
(GODDARD LAUGHS)
WEIR: Well, she didn't screw up.
GODDARD: No, she did good. It turns out everyone kept their job except Mitch.
WEIR: Except Mitch. GODDARD: Which feels right to me.
WEIR: (CHUCKLES) Yeah. I didn't know you were an EP.
GODDARD: Yep.
WEIR: And here all this time I've been respecting you.
GODDARD: I know. WEIR: Well, that's over. (LAUGHS)
GODDARD: This is how we had to tell you. WEIR: This is how, yeah.
GODDARD: To show you.
(GODDARD AND WEIR LAUGHING)
WEIR: There's the Chinese astronaut, by the way.
GODDARD: There he is.
- There was more that happened. - WEIR: It went by real fast, but there he is.
- GODDARD: Pietro, I love you so much. - (WEIR LAUGHS)
I really love Pietro.
He is one of the great editors of our time.
WEIR: 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. - GODDARD: Yeah.
WEI R: It's just, he's got kind of a social thing.
GODDARD: Like a lot of us introverts,
he just likes to hang back.
MISSION CONTROL TECHNICIAN: Three... two... one.
MALE REPORTER: And liftoff As the crew of the Ares 5...
WEIR: So, there's the disco albums in the background.
MISSION CONTROL TECHNICIAN: Pressures look good.
(ALL CHEERING)
(WHOOPS)
WEIR: Man, these mission controllers cheer in the middle of the launch.
- They should really wait... - GODDARD: It's funny. Here's the thing.
We talked about this ad nauseam,
and Ridley's point was always, have you actually seen how much they cheer
during a launch?
- They cheer everything all the time. - WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: And I said, "That's crazy, Ridley."
- (WEIR LAUGHS) - And he showed me and I went, "Oh, okay."
WEIR: Yeah, they really do. GODDARD: They love to cheer.
WEIR: There we are, Beck and Johanssen.
Happy day.
(GODDARD AND WEIR LAUGHING)
(I WILL SURVIVE PLAYING)
WEIR: Yep, now she's promoted to guidance.
GODDARD: Benedict is so good. WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: Our cast, I cannot believe this cast.
WEIR: (LAUGHS) It's really good. GODDARD: It's really good.
WEIR: Disco.
GODDARD: And at the risk of sounding like a kiss ass, Ridley, I love you.
WEIR: Yeah.
GODDARD: I mean, this movie is what it is because of Ridley.
WEIR: I'll kiss a little ass on that, too. Yeah, you're right.
GODDARD: Yeah. He really made this movie transcend.
WEIR: Yep.
GODDARD: And this was not an easy movie to make, without question.
There's a reason he's one...
- (WEIR CHUCKLES) - ...of the great geniuses of cinema.
All right.
WEIR: And then perfect ending credit music.
- GODDARD: By the way... - (WEIR LAUGHS)
...you say that in the book, though.
There's a part where you say, "if this was a movie, we'd put this inner..."
- Or is it just, "This is my theme song?" - WEIR: Or it's like he had to choose
- a theme song. - GODDARD: That's what it is, yep.
WEIR: And like either Stayin' Alive or I Will Survive.
Or Life on Mars?
I just walked in to find you here
With that sad look upon your face
WEIR: All right. Well, uh...
GODDARD: Thank you for listening.
WEIR: For those of you who made it through this far.
GODDARD: It was delightful to be on this journey with you, dear listener.
- (GODDARD AND WEIR CHUCKLING) - Yes, and, well, this is Andy Weir.
This is Drew Goddard. This is The Martian.
- Thank you. - WEIR: Signing off
GODDARD: Signing off
SCOTT: You'd be watching a video and 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
and very proud of the film and everything about it.
It's a great fun
and it teaches you something about
human behavior and never give up.
Bye.
Boy, now go, walk out the door
Just turn around now 'cause you're not welcome anymore
Weren't you the one who tried to break me with goodbye?
Did you think I'd crumble?
Did you think I'd lay down and die?
Oh, no, not I I will survive
For as long as I know how to love
I know I'll stay alive
I've got all my life to live
And I've got all my love to give
And I'll survive
I will survive