Matt Damon Calls The Martian A Film of Two Sides

by Helen Earnshaw | 19 June 2015

Matt Damon has revealed that The Martian is going to be a film of two sides.

Matt Damon in The Martian

Damon has teamed up with director Ridley Scott for the new science - fiction film, which sees his characters stranded on Mars along after a mission goes wrong.

Damon reveals that one side of the film is Mark Watney trying to survive and cope with being alone on Mars, while the other side of the film is NASA trying to come up with a plan to rescue him.

And Damon believes that because that because there are two distinctive sides to The Martian, this is what makes it different to other movies in this genre.

Speaking to Collider, the actor said: "One of the biggest differences is that it's primarily me on my own for a lot of it, and that's a big challenge. It's got all the bells and whistles of NASA and the whole B-side of the story is the rest of the world trying to get this guy back, but the other half of the movie is me and Ridley on Mars [laughs].

"So that part's different, and you start there. It's this kind of mystery, what happened? How'd he get left there? And the mission part is that B-side, trying to figure out how to get back, so I think structurally it's pretty different than any of them that's ever been done."

The Martian sees Damon lead an all-star cast as Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Donald Globe, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena and Chiwetel Ejiofor are all on board.

This will be the first role for Damon since The Monument's Men - although he did make a cameo appearance in Interstellar last year - as he returns to the sci-fi genre.

The Martian is set to be one of the sci-fi films not to miss this autumn and is being tipped as possible Oscar fodder when the awards season gets under way.

Damon is currently working on new movie The Great Wall, which will be directed by Yimou Zhang, and he will be reuniting with Paul Greengrass to return as Jason Bourne.