Page 267 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

equipment, such as the Mars rovers.

In order to film the recent blockbuster movie The Martian, film director Ridley Scott had to re-create
the Martian landscape on Earth. I came across an interesting article in The Hollywood Reporter
which I will cite below.

How 'The Martian's Ridley Scott Replicated Mars in the Middle East
By Pamela McClintock

In early summer 2014, production designer Arthur Max placed two photographs on a table in Ridley
Scott's Los Angeles office. Both looked much the same, revealing vast, desolate, reddish-coppery
landscapes that seemed equally hostile to human life. One picture was of Wadi Rum, the high desert
in southern Jordan. The other, shot by the Curiosity Rover, showed an even more remote location.

"Which one is Mars?" asked the director.

"Exactly," answered Max.

And that's how ‘The Martian,’ Scott's $108 million sci-fi drama... starring Matt Damon as an
astronaut marooned on Mars, ended up shooting its third act on the location that Omar Sharif
described as "the sun's anvil" in Lawrence of Arabia. "I'd gone to Jordan before, when I was making
G.I. Jane," says Scott, 77. "In summer, it's 120 degrees. But there's a perfection to the simplicity of
the environment. There's no vegetation. It's crisp and magnificent. I knew it was the one place to do
a strange planet."
[Source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/how-martians-ridley-scott-replicated-842642]

Actor Matt Damon and Director Ridley Scott in Jordan Desert