Exclusive Interview with ANDY WEIR for the release of Sir Ridley Scott’s THE MARTIAN
When Andy Weir first started writing The Martian he admits that his hopes for his work were modest. Mostly, he felt that his story would appeal to the loyal, hard core fans who checked out his website.
Some six years later, Weir is a publishing phenomenon and his novel – first serialised in episodic form on his site, then, after fans clamoured for it, as an e-book and then, finally, a best selling print edition – has been made into an eagerly anticipated blockbuster film by one of the most acclaimed contemporary directors, Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on the Red Planet and the desperate race against time to rescue him.
Weir is, of course, delighted and still can’t quite take on board the remarkable turn of events that has seen his life change in such a relatively short amount of time. The book’s success has succeeded all of his expectations – and then some.
“I think every author wants to get published but it wasn’t a goal when I was working on it,” he says. “I just thought it was something that I could put on my website and that would be that.
It didn’t occur to me that (the story) could ever be published. I wasn’t working towards that goal when I wrote it. I didn’t even think of it as potentially being mainstream publishable until I started to see the sales from the e-books that I self-published.”
The 43 year old always dreamed of becoming a full time writer and now that he is, he’s still adjusting to his new life. His inspirational success has been driven by fans of his gripping story of botanist Mark Watney, played by Damon in the film.
Watney is one of the six-man crew of the Ares 3, an exploratory fact finding mission to Mars that goes radically wrong when the astronauts are caught in the middle of a ferociously violent sandstorm. As the crew scramble to get back on board their ship, Watney is speared by an antenna – leaving him injured and destroying his space suit’s bio monitors in the process.
Believing he is dead, Commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) reluctantly aborts the mission to embark on the long journey back to earth.
Watney, a biologist and a brilliantly innovative mechanical engineer, has survived but, at first, has no way to contact mission control back on Earth and let them know that he has survived. NASA eventually realises that he is still alive when satellite images show evidence of his endeavours and plan a rescue attempt – a race against time to reach him before his limited resources run out.
Weir first started toying with the idea of a Mars based book back in 2009. “I was sitting around thinking about how we, in the real world, could do a manned mission to Mars because that’s the sort of dorky stuff I like to do – it wasn’t even for a story, I was just speculating.
I was thinking, ‘How do we get the astronauts there? How do we make sure they are alive on the surface? How do we get them home?’ And no mission plan is complete without contingency plans on how to deal with failures. So it was ‘what do they do if this thing breaks? What do they do if that happened?’
“And I started to realise that the increasingly desperate things the crew would have to do to stay alive would make a pretty good story. And so I created an unfortunate protagonist and subjected him to all of them.”
At that point, Weir was still working full time as a computer programmer. He had dreamed of becoming a full time writer for years and had tried it several years earlier – it didn’t work out.
“In the late 1990s I got laid off from AOL and I got a bunch of money as a severance package – enough money that I could go years without having to work – and so I said, ‘well, I’m going to take my shot at writing.’
And so I did. I spent three years trying to break into becoming a novelist. I wrote a book – not The Martian, it was a previous effort – and I guess it wasn’t that good and I got that standard experience which all authors can tell you about where I couldn’t get an agent, couldn’t get a publisher and I couldn’t get people interested in it at all and after a while I said ‘OK, I gave it a shot. I don’t have to wonder what might have been.’
And then I went back into the computer industry, which wasn’t a huge defeat for me, because I like that work. So it was ‘well, I tried that, it didn’t work, so now it’s back to a profession that I like.’”
The Martian, of course, changed everything. When Weir began to post episodes on his website, fans loved it and they couldn’t wait for more instalments to find out if Watney would be rescued before his meagre supplies on a hostile planet ran out.
“Absolutely, the fans have driven The Martian’s success,” he says. “It’s all word of mouth. Other writers have asked me, ‘how did you get so many people to read your book?’ because generally the hard part is getting people to hear about your material. And I always have to say ‘I don’t know,’” he laughs.
“I didn’t do anything at all in terms of publicity and marketing. I posted the chapters to my site and did nothing else. And when the readers asked me to make a Kindle version, because nobody likes reading stuff on a web page, I did that and set the price to the minimum and sent out an email to my mailing list and said ‘OK, now it’s available on Kindle for those of you that want that.’
And that was it, like I didn’t go out of my way to tell people about it, I didn’t market it – I didn’t do anything. It just took off on its own. I think it’s one of those things, you don’t know what’s suddenly going to become popular.”
A huge part of the appeal of Weir’s story is charm of his central character, a man who, in the face of the overwhelming odds stacked against his surviving on Mars, refuses to give up and faces each challenge – painstakingly growing a crop of potatoes to add to his dwindling food supply; working out a way to communicate with the NASA scientists back on Earth – with admirable ingenuity and wit. His plight, and his plucky personality, captures the imagination of everyone back on Earth.
“Watney is based on my own personality, no doubt about it. He’s kind of the idealised me. He’s all the parts of me I like about myself and none of the things that I don’t like,” Weir laughs.
“He doesn’t have any of my flaws, which is cool. For narrative purposes in the book I needed him to be funny because I was explaining a lot of science to the reader and I didn’t want that to read like a Wikipedia article so I wanted to break that up with jokes.
And so I decided that’s his personality – that’s who he is. And I do attempt to explain why there is a guy like that on a Mars mission and first off he is very competent, he is very good at his job, and second off he was selected in part because of his personality.
“Crew cohesion is very important when you are going to have six people in close proximity for over a year. Everybody likes Mark and that was kind of my excuse.”
Weir is, understandably, delighted that a filmmaker of the stature of Ridley Scott – a director who has made some of the very best science fiction films with Alien, Blade Runner and Prometheus – is the creative power house bringing The Martian to the big screen. And, of course, that it boasts a stellar cast, led by Damon and Ms Chastain, and including Kate Mara, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean and Kristen Wiig.
“It’s amazing,” he says. “It’s kind of like all of those fantasies you have when you are writing, like ‘this is going to be a huge budget Hollywood movie starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott.’ It’s all my dreams coming true. It’s really awesome.
“One of the things I love about Ridley’s films, whether they are science fiction or not, is that he loves to do grand, sweeping landscape panoramas to give you a sense of scale. It’s like you will see a giant cityscape or a huge desert.”
Sadly, a fear of flying meant that he didn’t get to visit Scott’s set for The Martian during filming in Hungary.
“It was in Budapest and that’s just too far for me. I’m working my way up on the flying but it’s hard for me. I’ve managed to do a few short fights here and there” he laughs “and it requires some pills and stuff like that”
“The longest flight I was able to do was to and from Houston, which is about a four hour flight from here and that was OK. But I was heavily sedated! NASA had invited me out for a week of tours and it was really awesome. I got to see a bunch of NASA labs and I got to hang out with Dr. Ellen Ochoa, who is the director of the Johnson Space Center. It was amazing.”
Indeed, NASA has been hugely supportive of his book, praising its scientific authenticity. “The NASA folks really love it. And one of the interesting things is that astronauts say ‘oh you really captured the personality of astronauts. How many astronauts do you know?’ And it’s like, ‘I don’t know any.’ I know a bunch of them now.
“But I just based the astronauts’ personalities on the personalities I had seen in many, many documentaries because being a space dork I watch every documentary on manned space flight I can get my hands on.
“And as for the internal structure at NASA and the bureaucracy in there, NASA people say to me ‘oh that was spot on.’ which is funny because of course I know nothing about the internal workings of NASA.
“But I based that on when I was 15 and I was working for national lab up here in the Bay area (of California) and that’s a large federally funded research facility and I worked for that.
“And I was like, ‘well, I don’t know anything about NASA but I’m just going to assume that large federally funded research facilities are kind of the same across the board’ and so I projected my experience there on to NASA and I guess that worked.
“Getting the science right was really important to me. Also, I’d had a lifetime of being a space nerd – it’s my hobby, so that helps. So I started with more than a layman’s knowledge, but not much more. I didn’t know anyone in aerospace when I wrote the book so all my research was just Google and Wikipedia and stuff like that and me doing lots of maths.”
He is delighted with Scott’s film version of his book. “I absolutely loved it,” he laughs. “But of course, I’m incredibly biased. I thought Matt nailed the character perfectly. It’s exactly how I imagined Mars.”
Watching the film was, he admits, rather emotional. “For the first five minutes of the film I was choking up. It was really emotional to see all of my dreams coming true like that. Then I managed to settle down and get into the film. It’s really good.”
Drew Goddard’s screenplay is a faithful adaptation of his book, he notes. “Absolutely. Drew liked the book as is and wanted to stay as true to it as possible. We had a lot of phone conversations as he was writing the screenplay and he sent me revs (revisions) of it for feedback.”
Weir, who quit his job as a computer programmer last year, is now hard at work on his next science fiction novel, Zhek, which is due to be published in 2016.
Q/A follows:
Do you feel that Drew Goddard’s screenplay is a faithful adaptation of your book?
Absolutely. Drew liked the book as-is and wanted to stay as true to it as possible. We had a lot of phone conversations as he was writing the screenplay, and he sent me revisions of it for feedback. He made some changes based on my feedback and ignored other bits of it.
What did you think of the film?
I absolutely loved it. Of course, I’m incredibly biased.
And what did you think of Matt’s portrayal of Mark?
He nailed the character perfectly. It’s exactly how I imagined Mark.
What was it like to see all of those ideas you put on the page come to life in this way? How did you feel?
For the first five minutes of the film I was choking up. It was really emotional to see all my dreams coming true like that. Then I managed to settle down and get into the film. It’s really good.
And what about the other cast – did they bring your characters to life in the way that you hoped?
I just wish the film could have been 6 hours long or something so they’d all get more screen-time. They were all fantastic.
How did the idea for The Martian first come to you?
Well, I was sitting around thinking about how we, in the real world, could do a manned mission to Mars because that’s the sort of dorky stuff I like to do – it wasn’t even for a story, I was just speculating. I was thinking, ‘how do we get the astronauts there? How do we make sure they are alive on the surface? How do we get them home?’ And no mission plan is complete without contingency plans on how to deal with failures. So it was ‘what do they do if this thing breaks? What do they do if that happened?’ And I started to realise that the increasingly desperate things the crew would have to do to stay alive would make a pretty good story. And so I created an unfortunate protagonist and subjected him to all of them.
So when did you start writing?
I started The Martian in 2009 and I finished in late 2012.
And what were your expectations at that point? Did you publish it episodically because that’s how you were writing or did you have a finished book and decided to release it in episodes?
I published it as I wrote it. You know the backstory, I guess. The Martian was one of many things I was writing at the time and publish on my website. I would write for fun and I was actually working on three serials at the same time and The Martian was one of them and another was about aliens attacking Earth and the third one was a kid’s story about a mermaid living off the coast of Maine in 1846.
But did you hope that The Martian would be published in traditional book form and did you try to do that?
Sure, I think every author wants to get published but it wasn’t a goal when I was working on it. I just thought it was something that I could put on my website and that would be that. It didn’t occur to me that it could ever be published. I wasn’t working towards that goal when I wrote it. I didn’t even think of it as potentially being mainstream publishable until I started to see the sales from the e-books that I self-published.
So the fans have driven its success?
Absolutely, the fans have driven The Martian’s success. It’s all word of mouth. Other writers have asked me, ‘how did you get so many people to read your book?’ because generally the hard part is getting people to hear about your material. And I always have to say ‘I don’t know..’ [laughs]. I didn’t do anything at all in terms of publicity and marketing. I posted the chapters to my site and did nothing else. And when the readers asked me to make a Kindle version, because nobody likes reading stuff on a web page, I did that and set the price to the minimum and sent out an email to my mailing list and said ‘OK, now it’s available on Kindle for those of you that want that.’ And that was it, like I didn’t go out of my way to tell people about it, I didn’t market it – I didn’t do anything. It just took off on its own. I think it’s one of those things, you don’t know what’s suddenly going to become popular.
And at what point did Fox come to you with plans to make a film?
They came pretty early. It all moved very quickly. I posted the book on Kindle and it started selling really well and I was approached first by an agent who said, ‘hey, I want to represent you.’ And I said ‘OK.’ So then I had an agent. And then Random House came to us and wanted to talk about a print deal and my agent and Random House were working out the deals on that and that’s when Fox approached us on the movie rights. So when Fox first approached me it was still just an e-book. It all came together around March of 2013. I finished the book and posted the Kindle version in September of 2012 so it was about six months after that. The book deal and the film deal were agreed to four days apart…
That must have been a good week…
It was quite a week! [laughs]
Was this one easy to write?
Yes, this one was easy and kind of wrote itself.
How important was it to you to get the science right?
Getting the science right was really important to me. Also, I’d had a lifetime of being a space nerd – it’s my hobby, so that helps. So I started with more than a layman’s knowledge, but not much more. I didn’t know anyone in aerospace when I wrote the book so all my research was just Google and Wikipedia and stuff like that and me doing lots of maths.
So you didn’t have a contact at NASA to ask questions?
No, I didn’t know anybody involved.
The book has been praised for its authenticity so you obviously did a good job…
I guess it worked out pretty well [laughs]. The NASA folks really love it. And one of the interesting things is that astronauts say ‘oh you really captured the personality of astronauts. How many astronauts do you know?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know any.’ I know a bunch of them now. But I just based the astronauts’ personalities on the personalities I had seen in many, many documentaries because being a space dork I watch every documentary on manned space flight I can get my grubby little paws on. And as for the internal structure at NASA and the bureaucracy in there, NASA people say to me ‘oh that was spot on.’ which is funny because of course I know nothing about the internal workings of NASA. But I based that on when I was 15 and I was working for national lab up here in the Bay area (of California) and that’s a large federally funded research facility and I worked for that. And I said, ‘well, I don’t know anything about NASA but I’m just going to assume that large federally funded research facilities are kind of the same across the board’ and so I projected my experience there on to NASA and I guess that worked.
I guess now that the book has been such a success you have given up your day job as a computer programmer?
Yes. I quit my day job last year.
You’ve clearly dreamed about being a full time writer for a long time so that must have been a great moment?
Yeah, I was leaving a job that I liked for my dream job.
Are you quite disciplined as a writer? Do you give yourself regular hours at the computer?
No, I’m not as disciplined as I should be [laughs]. I tried giving myself regular hours but I found out that I’m much more productive in the evenings than I am in the afternoons, I don’t know why, but maybe because that’s the way I’ve been writing my whole life because I always had a day job. So I’m a night writer. And I’m still learning how to deal with the discipline because going from being a computer programmer to a full time writer is a huge change in style. Being a programmer you have defined objectives and goals – it’s like ‘you need to implement these features and get it done by this date’ and you are working with a team of people and dealing with daily meetings and it’s very objective, you don’t have to put a lot of thought into ‘OK, what are my goals?’ You know your goals. And writing is like the opposite of that in every way. It’s ‘OK, write a book, make it not suck, you have 11 months to get it done. Give us a call if you want any feedback…’ And that’s it. And so it’s a completely unstructured thing and it’s been an adjustment because it’s hard for me to sit down and motivate myself sometimes.
Let’s talk about Mark Watney, your central character in The Martian. He is in a terrible situation stranded millions of miles from home on Mars and yet he faces it with that gallows humour. Where did that come from? Is there a little bit of you in the character?
Oh yeah, for sure. Watney is based on my own personality, no doubt about it. He’s kind of the idealised me. He’s all the parts of me I like about myself and none of the things that I don’t like [laughs]. He doesn’t have any of my flaws, which is cool. For narrative purposes in the book I needed him to be funny because I was explaining a lot of science to the reader and I didn’t want that to read like a Wikipedia article so I wanted to break that up with jokes. And so I decided that’s his personality – that’s who he is. And I do attempt to explain why there is a guy like that on a Mars mission and first off he is very competent, he is very good at his job, and second off he was selected in part because of his personality. Crew cohesion is very important when you are going to have six people in close proximity for over a year. Everybody likes Mark and that was kind of my excuse.
But you could have gone the other way and had him become introspective whilst stranded on Mars…
I didn’t want it to be a deep, dark story of a man’s struggle against crippling loneliness. I didn’t want to write that.
How did you feel when you were told that Ridley Scott would be directing the film of The Martian?
It’s amazing. It’s kind of like all of those fantasies you have when you are writing, like ‘this is going to be a huge budget Hollywood movie starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott.’ It’s all my dreams coming true. It’s really awesome.
Is it true you don’t like flying?
That’s true.
So did that mean you couldn’t visit the set in Hungary?
No, I didn’t go out to the set. It was in Budapest and that’s just too far for me. I’m working my way up on the flying but it’s hard for me. I’ve managed to do a few short fights here and there and it requires some pills and stuff like that [laughs]. The longest flight I was able to do was to and from Huston, which is about a four-hour flight from here and that was OK. But I was heavily sedated! NASA had invited me out for a week of tours and it was really awesome. I got to see a bunch of NASA labs and I got to hang out with Dr. Ellen Ochoa, who is the director of the Johnson Space Center. It was amazing.
NASA is clearly very pro the book and the film and I understand that they helped the production where they could…
Yes, NASA loves this. I think there’s a couple of reasons and first off I think they see it as a way to engage the American populace in to space travel and hopefully bring more interest in manned space flight and also I think they like the scientific accuracy. And thirdly, it portrays NASA in a very positive way.
And there is that powerful central theme of ‘if we leave somebody behind, we’re going to go back and get them to bring them home…’
You know, I wasn’t really thinking about an overall theme or a point to the book. When I was writing I was just writing. But that’s what emerged when I was writing it and I was like, ‘OK, I’ll live with that..’
Do you regret not being able to go to see your book being made into a film?
If it wasn’t for the flying issue, I would have gone to the set. It would have been neat to see it all come together. But I will get to meet all of those people at the premier and I’m really looking forward to that. So the thing that I missed out on was not being able to see the set itself.
Did you enjoy Comic-Con?
Oh yeah. It’s the second time I’ve gone. But this time I had all this bizarre access to things. Like being back stage at places and meeting famous people – I met [filmmaker] Joss Whedon and I hung out with Adam Savage for a few hours. It was all really cool.
You’ve read the screenplay. Would you say that the film is faithful to the book?
Yes, I’m very happy with it. I think it’s going to be a great film.
Are you a fan of Ridley Scott’s films and if so, which ones are favourites?
One of the things I love about Ridley’s films, whether they are science fiction or not, is that he loves to do grand, sweeping landscape panoramas to give you a sense of scale. It’s like you will see a giant cityscape or a huge desert. Wherever a film takes place you will see huge shots of sweeping, beautiful nature and so I’m looking forward to those shots in The Martian because it will be these beautiful shots of Mars, which will be really cool. And with Ridley’s films, it’s weird because everyone expects me to pick Blade Runner and Alien and I love those films, but actually one of my favourites is Matchstick Men. I like heist movies, I like The Sting a lot and so I love Matchstick Men. I also really like Black Hawk Down and Gladiator. I definitely like his sci-fi stuff too.
Were you concerned about Matt Damon having played an astronaut stranded on a planet in Interstellar and the similarity with the scenario in The Martian?
I’m not concerned about it. It’s a distraction and people who don’t know anything about the book – and there’s nothing wrong in not knowing anything about the book – they just say ‘oh Matt Damon’s stranded on a planet. OK, that’s just like Interstellar’ because they don’t have any other information to go on. And that’s a distraction but that will be taken care of by anybody who watches the film. It’s completely unrelated to Interstellar.
Which authors did you read when you were growing up?
Mostly when I was growing up I read my Dad’s inexhaustible supply of baby boomer era paperbacks, sci-fi stuff. So I grew up reading classic sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960s so the authors that I grew up reading were [Isaac] Asimov, [Arthur C.] Clarke and [Robert A.] Heinlein and a few others.
Are you working on a new novel now?
Yes, the novel I’m working on is tentatively titled Zhek and it’s a more soft sci-fi and not really based on technical accuracy. It’s got aliens and faster than light travel and things like that. It should be out in mid 2016.
How’s that going?
Oh it’s going. I missed my original deadline and everybody is fine with that because the movie marketing stuff has taken up a lot of my time. It’s kind of a long one and I’m about three quarters of the way through the first draft.
Was there ever a time when you thought you would give up writing?
Sure. In the late 1990s I got laid off from AOL and I got a bunch of money as a severance package – enough money that I could go years without having to work – and so I said, ‘well, I’m going to take my shot at writing.’ And so I did. I spent three years trying to break into becoming a novelist. I wrote a book – not The Martian, it was a previous effort – and I guess it wasn’t that good and I got that standard experience which all authors can tell you about where I couldn’t get an agent, couldn’t get a publisher and I couldn’t get people interested in it at all and after a while I said ‘OK, I gave it a shot. I don’t have to wonder what might have been.’ And then I went back into the computer industry, which wasn’t a huge defeat for me, because I like that work. So it was ‘well, I tried that, it didn’t work, so now it’s back to a profession that I like..’ So I guess you could say that was giving up on writing but what it really was, was me giving up on professional writing. I still enjoyed writing and I posted my stories online and so I don’t think there was ever any point when I considered giving up on creative writing itself but for sure, there was a long time there where I couldn’t break in and I thought it was just a hobby. That was in 2002, when I went back to programming.
So what advice would you give aspiring writers out there who are trying to make a living?
I have three bits of advice for anyone trying to break into writing. Number one is you have to actually write. I know so many people – personal friends and stuff like that – who have ideas for books and they’ll talk to you all day long about all the cool stuff they are going to have in their book but they haven’t written word one yet. So in order to be a writer you have to write; you can’t just day dream or imagine what your story is going to be like, you have to sit down and write it. Number two you need to resist the urge to tell your family and friends the details of your story, which is very hard especially if you sense that they are genuinely interested. And the reason for that is that for most writers a major motivating factor that keeps you writing is the desire for an audience – you want to know that people are going to read your story and enjoy it. If you verbally tell the story to your friends it satisfies that need and saps you will to actually write it. So it’s a motivation thing. If you make a rule that the only way anybody is going to hear about your story is by actually reading it, which really helps motivate you to write it. And finally, this is the best time in history to self publish. There’s never been a better time – there’s no longer an old boy network between you and the readers, if you write a story that’s good people will recommend it to each other and the ranking system at places like Amazon and Barnes and Noble are specifically for that purpose. So if you write a book that people like it will get around and your audience will find out about it.
How did you come to use potatoes so prominently in the story? Mark Watney’s life literally depends on him cultivating a crop of spuds. Was that based on research too?
One of the main plot lines was that he had to grow his own food to survive and I did a bunch of research on what plant he could grow and originally I wanted it to be peas because it would make sense for him to have peas that would self germinate. If you take peas, like peas from a meal or whatever, that have been dehydrated and dried if you re-moisten them some percentage of them will still be viable and you could plant them and grow pea pods. So I thought that would be cool and some of the meal packs would have peas in them and so I thought he would be like ‘OK, I’m going to make some of these peas germinate and we’ll work from there.’ And they are a good source of protein. The problem is it takes way too much space to grow enough peas to keep a human alive. It’s like way more than would be plausible for him to have access to. Even if he had shelves going from floor to ceiling he still wouldn’t have enough space to grow enough peas to survive. So then I had to do some more research and find out what crop is produces the largest amount of calories in relation to the area he would have available. And it turned out to be potatoes. Potatoes in order of magnitude are way more efficient than anything else in terms of how many calories you can get in return. So then I had to come up with an explanation of why he had some live, viable potatoes to plant.
You’ve been to Comic-Con, you’ve been to NASA, and Ridley Scott has filmed Skyping with Buzz Aldrin, your book. Life has changed for you. How is it?
It’s great! It’s awesome and it’s absolutely wonderful [laughs].
THE MARTIAN IS IN CINEMAS TODAY