With so many movies coming out all the time, the easiest way for some to describe a film is to compare it to another. Ridley Scott's The Martian stars Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on Mars, which sounds a lot like the character he played in Interstellar. Anyone who has read Andy Weir's book knows the two stories couldn't be more different, but even Damon had to be convinced of that at first. He tells Yahoo....
“I went in to meet him, then I signed on really quickly. I went in and I said, I really love this script, but my only hesitation is I’ve just done ‘Interstellar’, in which I played a dude stranded on a planet, it might be weird if, after taking a year and a half off, I played another dude stranded on a planet."
"I explained ‘Interstellar’ to him, and he said ‘The movies are totally f***ing different, this is going to be f***ing fun. Let’s do this!’ He was so infectious, I couldn’t really say no to him.”
Damon plays Mark Watney, who must learn to survive when his team abandons him on Mars after a freak storm. The story isn't so much about Watney's fracturing mental state as it is the skills he exhibits in finding new and creative ways to survive until a rescue mission can be launched. Damon says...
“One of the biggest differences is it’s primarily me on my own for a lot of it. That’s the big challenge. It has all the bells and whistles of NASA and the b-side of the story, the rest of the world trying to get this guy back. But the other half of the movie is me and Ridley on Mars, so that part’s different. You start there, there’s that mystery - what happened, how did he get left there? The mission part is the b-side, trying to figure out how to get back. So, structurally it’s different to anyone that’s ever been done.”
Also starring Jessica Chastain (also in Interstellar), Kate Mara, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Pena, Jeff Daniels, Aksel Hennie, Sebastian Stan, Donald Glover, Mazkenzie Davis, Naomi Scott, and Sean Bean, The Martian opens on October 2nd.
