Director of The Martian was shown photographs of water flows by Nasa ‘about two months ago’, but by then it was too late to include the information in the plot of the Matt Damon film

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On one level, The Martian may be functioning as a giant advertisement for Nasa, but the close collaboration between the space agency and Ridley Scott’s film-making team has resulted in the director remaining blasé about the dramatic announcement of evidence of flowing water on Mars. “I knew that months ago,” he said in response to the news.

Yahoo Movies reported that Scott and The Martian scriptwriter Drew Goddard had consulted with Nasa for an extended period during the writing process to help film-makers create the most realistic possible version of Mars. Scott said he investigated Mars’s water early on. “When I first talked to Nasa, we got into all kinds of stuff and I said: ‘So I know you’ve got [these] massive glaciers.’ And [they] said, ‘Yeah, that massive white thing [on the surface of Mars] that gets covered with dust, we think that’s ice ... And I said, ‘Wow! Does that mean there was an ocean? Are we right now what Mars was 750 m years ago?’ And they went, ‘Uh, good question.’ So they want to go up there and find out.”

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According to a report in the New York Times, Scott said he had seen the photographs of water flows “about two months ago” – meaning that it was too late to incorporate the revelation into the film’s narrative. However, Scott declared himself satisfied with the outcome, as it would have meant potentially changing a key scene in his film. The Martian, which follows an astronaut (played by Matt Damon) attempting to survive on Mars after becoming stranded there, features a sequence in which Damon’s character finds water by using a steaming device and trapping droplets on plastic sheeting – which, according to Scott, “is the most basic form of irrigation. They still do it in Spain that way.”

However, said Scott, had the information of surface water been available earlier, Damon’s character would have dug down to find a glacier. “He would have found the edge of a glacier, definitely. It would be fascinating ... But then I would’ve lost a great sequence.”