Childhood and The Martian
It was like being a kid again.
And really, how could it have been any different for the all-star cast of Ridley Scott’s new interplanetary blockbuster, The Martian, which saw them floating in zero gravity and stirring up clouds of red dust on Mars.
“You end up like you were a kid in your bedroom pretending that you were in space,” said Matt Damon, the star of the film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday.
The film stars Damon as an astronaut stranded on Mars, while his colleagues – played by Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Pena, Donald Glover and others – work to bring him home.
That catch-phrase – Bring Him Home – peppers the movie posters that line King St. outside the TIFF theatre where the cast answered press questions before the screening Friday.
“It’s like being a little kid and watching these movies and hoping someday you get to do that,” said Chastain, who also plays an astronaut in the sci-fi adventure. “I don’t really want to go to space but I want to pretend to,” she joked.
“You feel like a little kid,” echoed co-star Kate Mara. “Ridley seemed just as excited as we did when we were doing the scenes and floating through the air.”
It took a full two minutes for TIFF moderator Richard Crouse to read out the acting, directing and writing credits of the people on stage. And try as he might, Crouse didn’t get through everyone. The cast of The Martian really is that good.
“I cast great and turn ’em loose,” Scott said about the strong ensemble of actors.
Damon, whose character was alone in most scenes — being as he was left behind on Mars, after all — joked that he “literally just met most of the cast right now.”
“Fifty-five actors were wrapped by the time I started working on the movie. It was a very different kind of movie for me,” Damon said.
But Damon added later that trusting Scott helped him face the challenge of holding the scenes on his own.
“I knew Ridley was going to be standing next to me the entire time, so obviously that mitigates the risk substantially,” he said. “Neither of us had ever done anything like it so we didn’t now if it was going to work so that was also the fun.”
Scott has tackled the sci-fi genre before in such classics as Alien and Blade Runner, but said he’s most inspired by another type of film altogether: the western.
“I was brought up on westerns,” he said.
“I was weened on the idea that it’s always the man against the odds, or man against nature …
“I put myself always in that place of being the cowboy. I’ve never done a western but I always apply that to everything I do.”
But The Martian, Scott said, never felt too out-of-this-world, despite being based in space.
“This is a lot easier because you can lean very heavily on the science in the book,” he said, referring to Andy Weir’s novel of the same name upon which the film is based.
“The way the characters are, the way the NASA people are … this was a much more realistic movie,” Scott said.