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Home / Features / How I Wrote… The Martian (and how Hollywood turned it into a film)

How I Wrote… The Martian (and how Hollywood turned it into a film)

Self-published author Andy Weir on going from blogger to blockbuster

For 25 years I was a computer programmer, quietly sitting in a cubicle writing code, and suddenly I’ve been thrust into this world with movie stars and NASA people – it’s been a complete upheaval of my life but it’s been awesome.

I’d been poking around in my head at the idea for The Martian but I didn’t really do anything with it for about four years. I’ve been a big fan of space and the space programme for my whole life – it’s always been a hobby and an interest of mine – so I started off with more than a layman’s knowledge, because I eagerly watch any documentary on the subject. But it’s not like I researched everything in advance – I did that as I wrote it.

My brand of self-publishing was just posting things for free on my website, and I’d accumulated a mailing list of about 3000 hardcore science nerds – just like me – over 10 years of writing science-fiction stories. So when I got to a part where I needed to know how ion thruster engines worked, I’d do the research, post that part of the story and then get feedback from the mailing list.

There’s a guy on the list who works as a reactor technician and he emailed me information about radiation; another guy’s a chemistry professor and he told me I’d got some of the science wrong in one of the chapters. It was like having 3000 fact checkers – I called them beta readers.

The hardest part was explaining all the scientific stuff to the reader without it sounding like an encyclopaedia – that’s why Mark is a smartass and uses all that gallows humour. I’m also a light-hearted guy, so two or three jokes per page keeps pulling the reader through. I didn’t want the reader to be too heavily focused on the date. I wanted it to seem like it was true, but at the same time I wanted it to feel like it was happening now, so I mentioned things like Wikipedia early on in the story to make it feel contemporary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwSg_XFCE64

20th Century Fox got advisors at NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory to keep things realistic for the movie. Ridley Scott [the film’s director] cares a lot about scientific accuracy, which is great, because that was a priority of mine – but it wasn’t necessarily going to be a priority of his. I could tell from the deeply detailed scientific questions that would filter down to me from him that he was paying a lot of attention to accuracy.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but the trailer matches what I had in my head very, very closely, especially the video that shows Matt Damon talking to the psychiatrist. He has nailed the character – it’s perfect. The Hab, where the astronauts live while on Mars, is exactly the way I imagined it. The spacesuits are more sci-fi than I had in mind but I think they look awesome.

Hermes, the ship they take to and from Mars, looks totally different to how I pictured it, but I never really described it in the book so that’s understandable – and I think it looks great.

NASA is very happy with the book and they’re really excited about the movie. I think they see it as a way to hopefully re-engage the population in space travel.

The Martian is showing from today at UK cinemas

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