Q: What's Mark’s approach to
his predicament of being alone on Mars?
Matt: Well, Mark has a very
scientific approach to his predicament.
He basically assesses what his situation is and then once he completely
understands it, he sets about trying to methodically solve one problem at a
time. There are so many things that can
kill him, so he just basically has to go down a checklist of things and he has
to do it every day to basically just maintain his situation. Because the smallest break in anything,
[CLEARS THROAT] if the hab breaches in any way, he’s going to meet a grisly
death because he'll lose all of the atmosphere around him. If he runs out of water, he'll die of
thirst. If he runs out of food, he's
going to starve to death. So he’s
[LAUGHS] in a bit of a fix, but he has a very methodical approach and a
scientific approach to his situation.
Q: And what role does humor
play in his survival story?
Matt: Well, humor, the book is really
funny. And the movie I think is really
funny, which might surprise some people.
But a lot of the people in my travels that I’ve met who do really
dangerous things for a living tend to have great senses of humor. I think because if they really [CLEARS
THROAT] just dwelled on how perilous their situations were, they'd go
crazy. So, instead, they crack jokes. And so Mark has a really kind of great
gallows humor about him. And we really
wanted to keep that because that’s something that’s very much in the book.
Q: Many kids dream of becoming
an astronaut. Was that a childhood dream
of yours or is it now?
Matt: I played at being an astronaut
a little bit but, no, I’m not like—I think you need to have really kind of a
hardcore pioneering spirit. I think
astronauts are the same people who were explorers 500 years ago and jumping on
ships and sailing to faraway lands and courting death and pushing the envelope
for all of humanity. And thank God there
are people like that because that’s how [CLEARS THROAT] we grow and expand and
that’s how eventually we'll get some of the species off of planet Earth and
someplace else.
Q: How did you prepare for this
role?
Matt: Well, kind of the worry, the
risk for me was doing all these scenes by myself and not having a scene partner
for a lot of the movie. So Ridley and I
sat down and really kind of combed through the script moment to moment and
really kind of designed a plan of attack for the whole thing. So it was a lot of meetings with him and we
just kind of didn't want to leave anything to chance.
Q: What was the most
challenging scene that you had to shoot?
Matt: The most challenging scene? With Ridley, he makes it pretty easy. At the end we went to Jordan in the desert
and shot all of our exteriors, which it was so beautiful there. But the spacesuit, had Ridley been slower,
had it been another director, I would have been like sweating like crazy and
that spacesuit would have been really uncomfortable. But because it was Ridley, we went really
fast and so even in the Jordanian desert wearing the equivalent of a 4.3
wetsuit, I never even broke a sweat.
Q: And Mark is stranded with
several forms of entertainment that his crewmates have left behind, like Happy
Days and disco music. What would you
bring with you to Mars if you had to go?
Matt: [CLEARS THROAT] I would bring better
programming, definitely. I think I’d
bring The Wire instead of Happy Days and I’d bring my own playlist.
Q: Thank you so much.
Matt: All right, thanks, Arianna.
(The Martian will premiere on Star Movies
for the first time on Sunday 9th October.)
