Introduced as “one of the hottest new screenwriters in Hollywood today,” Drew Goddard appeared after the Malibu Film Society (MFS) screening of “The Martian” last week to talk about his work on the film, which has already garnered over a dozen nominations from the Golden Globes, BAFTA and others — and the Oscar nominations are not even out yet.
Starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott, the movie is a survival tale of an astronaut in the near future, accidentally abandoned by his crewmates on the planet Mars. There is a lot of humor mixed with a lot of science, and plenty of interplay with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) back on Earth.
The original science-fiction story was an eBook written and self-published in a serial format in 2011 by moonlighting computer programmer Andy Weir. It was later purchased by Crown Books and printed in 2014. Weir, whose father was a physicist, took great pains to research the science in order to make it as realistic as possible.
In the meantime, Drew Goddard first made a name for himself working in television on shows like “Lost” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” He was given a chance by J.J. Abrams to write his first original feature film, the financially successful “Cloverfield,” tried his hand at directing “The Cabin in the Woods” and later helped Paramount by completing a major overhaul of the script for “World War Z.”
Goddard was next approached about doing an adapted screenplay for “The Martian.” He told the MFS audience that he called computer programmer/author Andy Weir at his day job to give him the good news that, “Your life is about to change — your book is going to be made into a movie!” The response from Weir was that he was not allowed to take business calls at work. “He didn’t quit his job until six months ago,” Goddard said with a laugh.
The two writers discovered they had a lot in common. While Goddard had grown up in the scientific community of Los Alamos National Labs, Weir’s parents had worked at Sandia National Labs.
“The thing that spoke to me in my gut was the way Andy’s writing captured scientists — they were like my friends’ parents — the camaraderie amongst colleagues and the sort of sense of humor I saw between them, he captured,” Goddard said. “We were very much on the same page.
“With adapted screenplays, I try to only do what I love,” Goddard explained. “And what I loved was how detailed the science was, and I had to trust that’s what audiences would love about it, too.”
That being said, Goddard let Weir know that “there would have to be some hard decisions made” about what to let go.
“The book is wonderful, but if I put everything on the screen, the movie would be seven hours long,” he said. “I tried to find the soul of the book. In ‘The Martian,’ the scientific process is a metaphor for life. There’s an individual trapped in the wilderness with nothing but his faith in science. I felt we had to structure the movie so that it was all about Matt Damon’s [character’s] survival, and anything that was not part of that could be let go.”
Another challenge in adapting this screenplay “was that so much of the book consisted of first-person diary entries, not the scintillating present-tense and dialog of cinema,” Goddard shared.
He also wanted to keep as much of the science as possible, and was able to get a commitment from the filmmakers not to delete the scientific parts later on.
“There’s an underserved audience out there who want to know these things. I don’t think you can ever go wrong by talking up to an audience. There’s something invigorating about learning,” Goddard observed. “It seems there’s no middle ground anymore — most films are either very niche or very broad.”
One member of the audience questioned the film’s general appeal, saying one-third of Americans reject science, and even most Republican candidates deny global warming and evolution.
“I’m passionate about how much I love science and felt if we did this film in an optimistic and positive way, and connect on that level, maybe we can win people over,” Goddard said. He noted that before “The Martian” came out, JPL used to get “a couple hundred people” at their open houses. After the film came out, they got 7,000.