Ridley Scott reveals just how closely he worked with NASA for hit film The Martian

WHEN news about water on Mars trickled into NASA headquarters, director Ridley Scott was standing right there. There’s a reason The Martian has been such a big hit.

IF THERE’S one person who has defined popular culture’s idea of what space is really like, it’s Sir Ridley Scott.

From his classics Blade Runner and Alien, to more recent entries like Prometheus and The Martian, the 77-year-old filmmaker has been eternally interested in the world outside our own.

So much so that when it came to NASA’s most recent discovery about water being found on Mars, it was Scott who was one of the first people to know about the findings weeks before the rest of the world.

Having worked closely with NASA over the course of making of his latest film The Martian — which follows the plight of an astronaut stranded on Mars — Scott was at their headquarters in Washington when early news of the breakthrough came filtering through.

“I was at NASA and we were looking at some photographs and they said, ‘You know the big white things you see there in the pictures, which come and go? We think they’re glaciers and we’re working on that right now to confirm. We don’t know if that’s salt or fresh water’,” Scott told news.com.au.

“So my first comment on that was, ‘If it’s fresh water, does that mean we’ll see the first alien on Mars that might be microscopic?’ and they said, ‘Yeah, hopefully’.

“And then literally when I was in Washington this week they came out on the news and said that it was salt water and then I spent the evening with NASA at National Geographic.

“It’s just fantastic.”

A picture released by NASA showing evidence of flowing water on Mars. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Some of the first people to see Scott’s latest science-fiction blockbuster The Martian were, in fact, astronauts with the British filmmaker holding a special screening for NASA, its astronauts and senators involved in the space program.

To take it one step further, the veteran creative can barely contain the excitement in his voice when he talks about The Martian being viewed in space by actual astronauts.

“I was so honoured because they’d taken the film and sent it up to the International Space Station a week ago,” he gushes.

“They played it for the astronauts there, which I thought was really cool.

“They were very happy with how the astronauts and how the staff on the ground were portrayed.”

Director Ridley Scott, pictured with his wife Giannina Facio, made sure that NASA astronauts were the first few people to see The Martian. Picture: Joel Ryan/Invision/AP

For a man who has been considered one of the greatest filmmakers throughout the past four decades of his career — and who specifies that you don’t call him “Sir”, because he hates it — there’s an almost childlike curiosity to his fascination with space.

In fact, he credits it with some of his first inspirations for the large scale filmmaking that has defined his filmography (think sweeping epics like Gladiator, road adventures like Thelma & Louise, and period pieces like American Gangster).

With just his complex debut feature The Duellists under his belt in 1977, it was the same year George Lucas’s first Star Wars film — A New Hope — hit cinemas and changed everything for a young Scott, who was then inspired to go and make Alien.

“George Lucas with his very first Star Wars, I have to say that blew me away.

“It was kind of a fairy story set in space with the evil Darth Vader: there was the princess and the prince of space, the cool guy in Harrison (Ford).

“Then Stanley (Kubrick) did a version of what he thought it was really like with 2001: A Space Odyssey and he was working a lot with the advice of NASA.

“Those two films were very much in my sights when making Alien. I knew I was doing the horror version of that.

“I don’t like using ‘horror’ — it’s kind of a better film than that, isn’t it? It’s kind of a classy film.”

Yeah, we’d say this is horror.

The humour in his voice is evident as he describes his own, but he doesn’t deny Alien went on to impact and largely shape the science-fiction genre as we know.

With the futuristic Blade Runner just three years later in 1982, it would be 30 years before he returned to space with Prometheus, as he preferred to focus on earthbound tales.

Yet the 2012 Prometheus — which is a prequel to his seminal classic Alien — seems to have sparked something in a much more mature Scott.

He’s now returning to space three more times with The Martian, Prometheus sequel Alien: Lost Paradise and Blade Runner 2 all scheduled within the next five years.

Unlike his other entries though, there was a hopefulness and humour in Andy Weir’s best-selling book The Martian (which the film is based on) that was so very different from the often bleak and gritty survivalist space tales.

“It was all there in the book,” says Scott. “Andy is a really funny guy, he’s a bit of a pistol — and the screenwriter Drew Goddard is the same.

“They have a laconic humour, a dry humour — which I like — because it stands side-by-side with gallows humour, which sometimes you’ve got to use when you’re in a serious situation.”

It seems have to worked, with The Martian not only shaping up for one of the biggest financial successes of Scott’s career — it already opened at No. 1 in Australia with the $1.3M gross in a matter of days — but also one of the best reviewed films of 2015.

Scott, who’s no stranger to critical smashes and flops, says it’s “very nice when it happens” but admits the most exciting thing about The Martian is where it could lead realistically.

“Funnily enough, I was listening to this US Senator last night John Glenn who was a very nice spokesperson for NASA.

“This guy was an astronaut about 30 years ago and he really knew what he was talking about.

“He spoke with assurance that we would be there, on Mars, in 10 years time.

“That’s no later than 2024 and I thought ‘this is a really exciting time to live in’.”

For a man at 77 who still doesn’t even dream of stopping work, it seems the key to eternal youth is remaining forever excitable.

Matt Damon in The Martian. Picture: Aidan Monaghan/20th Century Fox

The Martian is now in cinemas.