How “The Martian” Went From A Best-Selling Novel To A Blockbuster Film
Matt Damon in The Martian.
Matt Damon has won wide acclaim for his performance in The Martian as astronaut Mark Watney, stranded on the planet Mars after a freak accident. And Ridley Scott has been heralded for his assured and expert direction of the herculean efforts by Watney to stay alive and his NASA colleagues to rescue him. But the reason Damon signed on to the film, and the reason Scott agreed to direct it — the reason, really, this film exists — is due to the screenplay, from writer Drew Goddard (World War Z, The Cabin in the Woods).
That script is based on the novel by Andy Weir, which was first published for free on Weir’s website, then as a popular 99-cent e-book, then as a wildly popular hardcover best-seller. Goddard, who quite literally grew up surrounded by rocket scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, first received a copy of Weir's book from The Martian producers Simon Kinberg and Aditya Sood in 2013, between its life on the Kindle store and as a printed novel.
“I usually say no to everything,” Goddard told BuzzFeed News in a recent interview in a bright Hollywood office conference room. “I prefer to self-generate. But I read it, and then the next day, I read it again. And then the next day, I read it again. And I said to my wife, 'I'm really thinking about this one.' And she said, 'Well, why?' I start telling her what it's about, and she said, 'Oh, so it's about scientists? Well, dummy, it's about your hometown for you.'”
Writer Andy Weir and screenwriter Drew Goddard from The Martian during the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
Jeff Vespa / Getty Images
Shortly thereafter, Goddard said yes. “I felt like Andy had captured scientists in a way that I had never seen, but yet was very familiar to me in real life,” he said. Capturing that feeling in a screenplay, however, presented two formidable challenges for Goddard: One, Watney spends virtually the entire movie by himself, recording his experience via a first-person narrative, which does not exactly scream cinematic. And two, practically the entire plot of the movie hinges on, as Goddard put it, “dense scientific jargon,” which screams, quite loudly, not cinematic at all!
And yet, The Martian, which had an outstanding $54.3 million opening weekend, is one of the most arresting feature films of the year precisely because it embraces Weir's love of using science to solve problems — without letting that jargon overtake the film. “The way Drew did it, it makes really good horse sense,” Damon told BuzzFeed News in August. “It made sense to me, and I assumed it would make sense to the rest of the audience. Rather than kind of get lost in the weeds, he just does the peanut butter and jelly version of what you need to do. … I mean, it cut down on my workload, because my marching orders were pretty clear.”
For his part, Weir recently told BuzzFeed science writer Alex Kasprak that he was surprised by how much Goddard wanted to keep to his novel. “From Day 1, he just said, 'Hey, I liked this book a lot so I just want to make a movie version of it. I don't want to change a bunch of stuff,'” Weir said. “This is just basically my book in script form — with stuff taken out of course, because otherwise it would be a 10-hour movie.”
Throughout the adaptation process, Goddard said he worked hard to keep two principles in mind. “I need to love it, and if I love it, then I trust that I will protect what needs to be protected because I love it,” he said. “And the second one is you have to really make peace with the fact that your job is not to karaoke the book. Your job is to make a good movie. You hope that if you have both of those two things in mind, you'll do your job well. But if it's only one, you're gonna really screw things up.”
Goddard talked BuzzFeed News through his entire process of winnowing down Weir's book into a tight screenplay, including some painful cuts and changes he had to make, why he was actually thrilled to get notes from the studio, and the literal number of fucks he could give in the script. (Naturally, MAJOR SPOILERS from the film and the book follow.)
Outline, outline, outline.
Goddard learned an important rule from his time working as a writer on Joss Whedon's TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and he keeps to it when he starts any writing project: “I work really hard on fuckin' outlines,” he said. “This is Joss training.”
Goddard said he spent three months on the major outline of the story, and then roughly five weeks writing the first draft of the script itself. His biggest advantage was that Weir's story fit rather neatly into a standard three-act structure, as Watney transforms his habitat (or Hab) he calls home into a makeshift garden to grow potato plants, NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab officials strategize on the best way to get him home, and Watney's crewmates from his aborted mission decide to turn their craft, the Hermes, around and head back to Mars to save him. “At the end of act one, Mark Watney makes contact with Earth,” said Goddard. “Midpoint, the Hab explodes, and Hermes turns around. And then act three is the rescue. So I sort of knew, OK, here are my acts. Now I know how much room I have to play between each of those signposts.”
Giles Keyte / 20th Century Fox
The changes can start on page one.
Despite having a clear blueprint to work with, Goddard still ended up having to make a major change starting on the very first page. In Weir's book, Watney's mission on Mars, called Ares 3, ends on the sixth day, or “sol” going by the Mars clock, when a massive dust storm forces the crew to abort and head home, and strands Watney after he is struck by an antenna and presumed dead. In the movie, however, that mission ends much later, on sol 18, a somewhat last-minute change requested by Scott before production began.
“It was so tragic that they had to leave after six sols,” said Goddard. “He wanted to get a sense the team was working [on Mars] so that you understand that this work was important.” But, according to Goddard, Scott was also concerned about the supplies of human waste Watney needed to use as fertilizer in order to grow enough crops to survive. “He wanted to make sure there was enough feces, that you could have generated enough, which is a great note,” Goddard said with a laugh.
Scott's decision, however, meant that Goddard had to rework all the precise math Watney had done in the film to calculate how many rations he had left in order to know how many potatoes he needed to grow. “My brain just starts going, Oh no,” Goddard remembered. “’Cause I realize that changes not just one scene, every scene. But that's why you get paid is to go do that math. I would do it, and then I would call Andy Weir, and say, 'Does this make sense?' He would always double-check me, and at times just say, 'No, you're an idiot.'”
You need to ration how many “fucks” you can give.
The MPAA has a rather ironclad rule that you can only say “fuck” once in a PG-13 movie, and Goddard spent it on the moment after Watney had gone through a harrowing bit of self-surgery to pull out the antenna that had impaled him. “I knew that that first 'fuck' was crucial,” the screenwriter said. “It's funny, because we tested a version without that first 'fuck,' and scores dropped dramatically. When you watch the movie, you realize, Oh, it's so intense, and then he says 'fuck,' and it tells the audience it's OK to laugh. So you really understand the tone of the movie.”
Later in the movie, however, Damon improvised the line “Fuck you, Mars,” and everyone loved the moment so much, the filmmakers did a bit of horse-trading with the MPAA in order to keep the second fuck and the PG-13 rating. “There was an insult in there like 'ass filcher,' and the MPAA said, 'No, you can't have 'ass filcher' in your PG-13 movie,'” Weir explained. “They're like, 'Oh, come on. If you're going to make us get rid of filching, give us a fuck.'”
Damon tends to a potato plant in The Martian.
Giles Keyte / 20th Century Fox
Clarity will always win over detailed precision.
At many points throughout Weir's novel, Watney spends countless paragraphs detailing the complicated equipment that is keeping him alive, things like the water reclaimer, oxygenator, and atmospheric regulator. It is engrossing to read about on the page, but Goddard barely plays lip service to it in the film. “We were asking a lot of the audience right away,” he said. “You're like, This is going to be a movie about farming in your own shit. And at a certain point, it's this balance of, Have we veered too much into the intellectual world and forgotten the emotional world? You'll cling to, Oh, he's getting food. Oh, he's getting water. When you get into the complications of NASA equipment, it just gets hard.”
That also meant that Goddard gave Watney detailed maps of the Mars surface — something he is sorely missing in Weir's novel — so the audience could see him plot out his journey. “None of us have a real sense of what Mars' geography is like, so if you say you're going to Acidalia Planitia, who knows what that means?” he said. “We struggled with making journeys clear to the audience so that it felt like you could understand.”
One of Goddard's favorite changes for clarity, however, came from Weir. Toward the end of both the book and the film, NASA instructs Watney to strip down the pod, called the MAV, that will blast him back into space, so he can reach his crew waiting to rescue him in orbit. And Goddard decided to add a scene in which Watney describes his feelings about those particularly insane instructions. “I felt like the more we can talk about it, the more it will help set up what's about to happen, ’cause I knew we wouldn't be able to talk about it while it's happening,” he said. “I remember calling Andy and saying, 'OK, I want to put this scene in, but I want to make it really simple for the audience. So I want him to say, fastest man in the history of space travel.' And Andy said, 'Well, a physicist would never say that, because it's all about velocity.' Andy lecturing me about how dumb I am delighted me so much so I just put it in the movie.”
Goddard loved Weir's conceit that Watney would be stuck listening to his crewmate's collection of ’70s disco music that he wrote every disco music cue right into his script. “A, I wanted the studio to understand that we needed a large music budget,” he said with a chuckle. “And B, I just thought it was so important that you could really track the emotion of the character. It was one of the things that frankly made me say yes to the project right away. I think I have the emails back and forth with Simon Kinberg at the beginning when we were talking about whether or not we should do this. And I said, 'I'm driving around in my car listening to ’70s hits and thinking about Mark driving across Mars, and I'm crying.' I feel like that's what this movie is. I think I pitched that in the Fox meeting: 'If you picture a man destroying a spaceship to [ABBA's] “Waterloo,” that's our movie.'”
Damon and director Ridley Scott on the set of The Martian in Jordan.
Aidan Monaghan / 20th Century Fox
It's important to heed input from your director, star, and even your studio.
One of the most powerful moments in Weir's novel comes after Watney travels several days to find the old Pathfinder probe and rover, and repairs it enough to communicate with Earth. After receiving his first signal from NASA, Watney breaks down crying. In the film, however, Watney celebrates instead by screaming, “Woo hoo!” — without a tear in sight.
“That was Matt's instinct, [and] he was right,” said Goddard. “The idea was, Let's just save it ’til the third act.” In the film, Watney doesn't turn on the waterworks until just before he’s about to blast off and head back to the Hermes, when he talks with his commander, Lewis (Jessica Chastain). “That moment is where you really break.”
Scott on the set of The Martian.
Giles Keyte / 20th Century Fox
It was just one example of how willing Goddard was to always chase after the best idea in the room — and often those ideas came from Scott. In Weir's novel, the Hab and the Hermes are both cramped, utilitarian spaces, but the movie makes them both look relatively palatial in size and beauty. “I think Andy and I both said, 'Well, wait a minute. This is supposed to be intimate and small,'” said Goddard. “And Ridley would look at us and laugh and go, 'But look.' And then he'd show us what it'd look like. And you'd go, 'OK, well, that looks amazing, so we should just do that.' That is definitely moviemaking. You realize, No, no, you've got to put something onscreen. … The book will always exist. And Andy was great, by the way. He was like, 'Make it better, Ridley.'”
Elsewhere, Scott requested that Goddard compress the scene in which one of the airlocks rips and explodes out of the Hab. In the book, Watley is trapped inside the airlock for 24 hours as he tries to repair a leak in his suit and the airlock walls. In the film, Watley slaps some duct tape on his helmet and is good to go. “I wrote in the first couple drafts very close to the book, because one of the things I loved was not knowing where the airlock was leaking and him lighting his own hair on fire [to use the smoke to find the leak]. Ridley sort of said, Yes, this sounds good in theory, but lighting hair on fire and shooting that in a way that the audience understands what's going on is going to be very difficult and challenging. And I trusted him on that, ’cause I understand from having directed, if you can't see it in your head, you're never going to be able to convey it to any audience.”
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Donald Glover in The Martian.
Goddard even happily took notes from the studio, specifically for the scene in which astrodynamicist Rich Parnell (Donald Glover) explains the maneuver that will allow the Hermes to slingshot around Earth and head back to Mars to save Watney. In the first draft of Goddard's script, Rich explains the maneuver to Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the director of Mars operations, and then Vincent explains it again to the rest of the NASA team. “So you have two problems,” said Goddard. “One, it's just two guys talking, which you try to avoid if you can. And two, you have two people explaining the same thing back-to-back. And the studio just said, 'Can you just put Rich in that [second] scene?' It was one of those notes where you're like, Why didn't I think of that, goddamnit?“
But sometimes, it is important not to heed your director.
When Watney goes on long missions in his rover that last for several days, Weir spends a fair amount of ink detailing how he copes with going to the bathroom in a vehicle that was never designed for him to do that. Those scenes, however, are not in the finished film — but not from lack of trying by the film's director.
“We shot it,” said Goddard. “Ridley was very interested in it, almost to a hilarious degree. And I get it. He wants the reality of it to really feel real. So there are scenes of Mark going to the bathroom. We have them. Maybe they'll be on the DVD. But I think at a certain point, let's call it a shit tolerance. There's just a certain amount of shit we can watch onscreen.”
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