Matt Damon stars in Ridley Scott’s “The Martian.”
“The Martian” fits into the mini-trend of putting the science back in science fiction — letting brainpower take center stage, not just firing lasers at monsters. That would be fine by star Matt Damon, who learned a lot making the film — and not just about surviving on Mars.
“(Screenwriter) Drew Goddard, he said, ‘I see this as a love letter to science,’ ” says a remarkably fit-looking and engaged Damon at the London hotel in West Hollywood. “He was really into science as a kid, and really connected to the book on a visceral level and immediately sat down and started adapting the screenplay. That was the writer’s intent, so hopefully we’ve held onto it.”
‘Yeah, yeah ...’
When it’s pointed out to the Harvard-educated star of the “Bourne” and “Ocean’s” franchises that intellect is rarely a selling point these days, he laughs and says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look at our political process.”
Damon plays botanist-astronaut Mark Watney, who in Andy Weir’s novel and director Ridley Scott’s film is abandoned on Mars when the rest of his crew thinks he has been killed in a freak storm. With a mix of problem solving and buoyant humor, Watney sets about finding ways to stay alive for the presumed four years until NASA’s next mission is due.
“The kind of procedural stuff that was really well laid out in the book was interesting, and I did learn how to grow potatoes … we couldn’t not learn that,” says Damon of Watney’s first bit of incredible ingenuity — growing food on a planet where nothing grows.
Grew potatoes
“We actually grew potatoes in an adjacent soundstage to the one we were shooting in. We had a little potato farm going the whole time.”
As the only — and therefore smartest — man on the planet, Watney displays the Swiss-Army-knife mental abilities of astronauts: “He has to do everything on his own. He’s got to become an electrician; he’s got to do all this stuff. The resourcefulness and the ingenuity was very attractive.
“Andy started with this premise, this question: ‘Could a highly trained person sustain himself on Mars?’ He said he just let the science lead the story. I would never have thought to do (what Watney does), but you feel like an astronaut would think of that.”
“The Martian” joins “Gravity” and “Interstellar” (also starring Damon) as peril-in-space movies in which the nuts-and-bolts of surviving off Earth are compelling enough to drive the narrative — sort of the progeny of “Apollo 13.” Another shared aspect: It took master directors to pull those films off.
“For me, it always is about the director. So I loved the story, I loved the script, and I loved the theme and messages in the movie; I did want to put that out into the world. But the absolute draw for me was always Ridley. I knew I was going to learn an incalculable amount about directing by standing next to him and watching him do this.”
Damon has previously acknowledged his interest in becoming a director — a la another guy he knows, Ben Affleck. Luckily, he has worked with a few pretty good ones over a career pushing three decades: Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Paul Greengrass, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg and Gus van Sant, to name a few. Working with Scott, Damon saw how meticulous preparation enables the director to famously shoot four cameras at a time, working at incredible speeds.
“When I first met Ridley, he goes, ‘I shot “Exodus” in 74 days … That’s f— irresponsible,’ ” Damon laughs in amazement. “He’s so fast. There are people — Soderbergh and Clint Eastwood — who are as fast as he is. But it’s the four cameras that’s really ...
“I was always snobby about that. ‘There’s only one place you can put the camera at any given time.’ But his shots are so beautiful. I walked into the tent one day, and he’s got
four monitors. I said, ‘Geez, Ridley, each one of those shots is perfect.’ He looked at me and said, ‘They’ve been f— perfect for a long time.’ ”
After finishing laughing, Damon cites Scott’s “speed and decisiveness” as key factors. Along with the superb compositional eye Scott has demonstrated over decades, they enable him to always seem to know when he has what he needs and briskly move on.
Long game
“A lot of these great directors don’t do a lot of takes,” says the actor. “It’s not that they’re sacrificing performance; it’s that the overall engine of the film is better served if you don’t overtax the cast and crew on every single setup. It’s like playing a long game.”
Eastwood in particular is known for blazing through a day’s pages.
“On ‘Hereafter,’ he’d always do one take with me,” says Damon. “Never more than three, usually two or one. But there’s a scene at the end with this little boy, and he’s a nonactor, and it’s this really intense scene. We probably did 50 takes. But Clint had that in the bank. The crew was there for him.”
But weren’t there times when Damon wanted to say, “I can do it better if I get one more”?
“Very first take I ever did for him,” he says, lip curled in an anticipatory smile. “On ‘Invictus,’ I had to do this South African dialect and it was so hard to do, I spent six months on it, literally about eight hours a day with this legendary dialect coach, Tim Monich. So I’d done these so many thousands of times, it was like a play I’d been doing for years. So I did the first take — I had 30 different ways I wanted to do the scene, but I did the first take and Clint goes, ‘Great, cut, print.’ I said, ‘Do you think I could do another?’ He turns around and goes,” Damon puts on that Eastwood snarl, “‘Why, you want to waste everybody’s time?’ ”
Damon laughs. “And that was it.”