Life on Mars: Fictional astronaut Mark Watney contemplates an exceptionally realistic landscape in The Martian. (All images credit: 20th Century Fox) With its strong showing at the box office, The Martian joins Gravity and Interstellar in the club of science-fiction movies that succeed by emphasizing the science and downplaying the anything-goes fantasy elements. But even in this rarefied company, The Martian stands apart. Unlike Interstellar, it is rooted in present-day technology and challenges. And unlike Gravity, it fully respects the physical rules of space travel; in fact, it makes them central to the plot. The Martian comes at a pivotal time for NASA. With space imagery getting better and better--taking on an almost cinematic quality--the need for human exploration in some ways seems less obvious than ever. At the same time, the difficulty of getting any concrete answers about life on Mars (or even definitive answers about water and methane) illustrates the huge limitations of doing science using robots. Artificial intelligence and remote control are just not cutting it. By treating the human exploration of Mars with scientific respect and genuine emotion, The Martian make its case more powerfully than NASA's slick posters and earnest Congressional testimony have managed to do. The movie's vision belongs to director Ridley Scott, but its hugely perceptive look and feel is largely the work of production designer Arthur Max. So I caught up with him to find out exactly how he went about making The Martian seem so authentic. Along the way, Max also made a convincing argument for scientific accuracy as an inspiration for great storytelling--something that is very familiar to those, like me, who get goosebumps with every new image sent back from Pluto. An edited transcript of my interview with Arthur Max follows: The Martian is full of hardware that looks very true to genuine NASA engineering. How did you go about creating that? The fist thing I did was go to the Jet Propulsion Lab. They were very kind and gave us a tour of every square inch of their facilities. We looked at the Martian testing facility, where they’ve got a clone of the Curiosity rover all hooked up with thousands of cables. It’s just the most beautiful object, with polished alloy and gold-coated gold components, matte-black anodized aluminum and brilliant white paintwork…and a brand new set of tires. And then they’ve got the most amazing things stored in old tin sheds, gathering dust—prototypes of previous things, duplicates—which is very much of the ilk with our story, unearthing the Pathfinder lander on Mars and all that.
There’s not much real-life precedent for the crewed spaceship, the Hermes, and for the habitat on Mars. What inspiration did you draw on there?
