Director Ridley Scott on The Martian
There are few filmmakers who have been as successful at giving moviegoers the full experience of exploring outer space as Ridley Scott, whose 1979 film Alien made the idea of space exploration a scary prospect. He continued that theme into 2012’s Prometheus (for which he’s currently developing a sequel), so when he decided to take on Andy Weir’s bestseller The Martian, it was evident that it was going to be a very different take on space travel.
It stars Matt Damon as Mark Watney, a botanist on an exploratory trip to Mars who gets stranded there after a storm hits that sends the rest of his crew packing. NASA thinks Watney was killed during that evident, but when they learn he’s still alive, they need to figure out a way to rescue him while he has to find a way to survive for what might potentially take years for them to get a team back to Mars to find him.
In advance of its nationwide release on October 2, The Martian premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival a few weeks back where ComingSoon.net had a chance to talk with Ridley Scott, Matt Damon and the rest of the cast about the movie. You can watch the Ridley Scott interview in which he talks about his process for making in the film, and then at the very end of the interview, he confirms that the Prometheus sequel will be his next movie. (Although we’ve learned a lot more about it in the weeks since we did this interview.)
At the junket, we also spoke to most of Sir Ridley’s cast, including Matt Damon, and we asked both the experienced vets and relative newcomers what it was like working with Ridley Scott and what he brought to the table as a director. The result was virtually a four-minute love fest from the likes of Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejioror, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Sean Bean, Donald Glover and more, talking about how Scott works and how that helps their acting. You can watch that below and look for more with some of them later this week.
(Photo Credit: Eric Charbonneau/Invision for Twentieth Century Fox/AP Images)
