Watch This Before You See Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary

I always wanted to be a writer uh ever since I was a little kid when I read my dad's inexhaustible science fiction collection when the time came to choose a a college uh a path to follow in college I decided that I liked writing but I also like regular meals and I wanted to sleep somewhere other than a park bench so I went into computer programming and I was a programmer for quite a while but I still always wanted to be a writer it's worth noting that while I was in college I wrote a book

and it was really bad it was uh so bad that even at the time I wrote it I was like this is bad this is crap uh in '99 I was working for AOL and I got laid off along with 800 other people when they merged with Netscape and I had uh a whole bunch of stock options with AOL that I hadn't paid attention to so I'm like okay well I guess I'll sell them well that turned out to be aol's alltime Peak and so I ended up with a bunch of money and so I'm

like oh okay I have I have a bunch of money I don't need to work for a few years I can live several years off of off of the money I have in savings so I'm going to take three years and I'm going to write a book and I'm going to try to break into the industry so I did that I uh I took three years off I wrote a book that book was not the Martian you haven't heard of that book this this time unlike the first book which I knew sucked the second one

I didn't know it sucked and so I tried really hard to get it published but it's the standard tale of Woe that every author will tell you couldn't get an agent couldn't get any Publishers interested it just couldn't get any traction and after a while I said like well okay it's been 3 years I I I tried to live my dream now I don't need to wonder what if time for me to go back into computer programming but I decided all right I still want to write but I it's not ever going to be my

profession I was wrong so what I'll do is I'll write and I'll post it on this new fangled worldwide web I'll uh I'll start posting short fiction to my website I'll make a website and post things there so I made some web comics and I made uh short stories and I made some serials around the time I started the Martian it was one of three serials I was working on at the same time one of them was about aliens invading Earth and the other one is about a mermaid in 19th century New England so I

have eclectic tastes I was working on those three Cals at once I had a modest mailing list of about 3,000 people uh which seems like a lot but remember it took me 10 years to build that up while I was writing the Martian I was like oh crap my readers are like me there's they're they're picky little snot no brats when it comes to science which I am I'm the worst I'm like all of you you like you read something and you're like well that's not right i'm taken out of the story entirely so I

I wanted to make sure that dorks like me could enjoy the book that I was writing so I put a huge amount of effort into being as scientifically accurate as possible I also put a huge amount of effort into procrastination it was fun to do the research so I ended up doing more research than I had to because it's more fun than writing it took me about 3 years to write the Martian uh posting in a chapter at a time to my website about one chapter every two months or so and I'd get feedback from

my readers and they would tell me all the mistakes I made and so I would correct the mistakes and and so on and so it was pretty solid by the time it was done so once I finished I said like okay I'm done with a martian on to working on other cereals or other whatever and I started to get email from people saying like hey I love the Martian but I hate reading it on your website because your website sucks so they said can you make an e-reader version just post it an e-reader version to

your site so I'm like okay I made an e-reader version that people can download and put on their e-readers there you go then I got other email from people hey I I love the Martian hate your site I I see that you have an e-reader version that's super but I'm not very technically Savvy and I don't know how to download a thing from the internet and put it on my e-reader can you just post it to Amazon so that I can just use their system because I know how to do that so I'm like okay

so I figured out how to do that Amazon has this whole self-publishing system called KDP which stands for Kindle Direct publishing there's no initial cost or or Financial Risk which is what I liked about it you just post your thing up there and it goes up for sale well with a few C number one you're not allowed to give stuff away for free you have a minimum price of 99 CU Amazon doesn't Amazon actually loses money on the Kindles they sell they make their money off of selling stories and content so they're not going to

let dorks like me give stuff away they want their money so I set the price to the minimum 99 Cents meaning I was pulling in a cool 30 cents a copy once they post it then I announced to my readers okay everybody you can uh read it for free on my website download the e-reader for free from my website or you can pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you knock yourselves out and more people paid the buck than got it for free which shows you a couple of things first off

uh Amazon has a huge reach into the readership market just the number of customers they can access is so astounding it's it's insane and two people are willing to pay a buck to get around technical hurdles especially if they've already got the system set up it's like I could push this button and have it on my Kindle right now for a dollar yeah so uh people liked it uh people started giving it really POS reviews on Amazon it scored very well it started snowballing uh one thing worth noting is my my core readership those 3,000

people had for many years been emailing me every now and then saying like hey can I donate to your site you know because people like to donate to the site maintenance costs of you know stuff like that well I always said no I I'm I'm an engineer I make lots of money I can this is my hobby I don't mind paying for it and I would feel bad if people who make less than me are donating money to me right so I'm like no I don't take any donations I don't have PayPal things set up

for that or at all and so now all these people who had been wanting to find an excuse to give me money now so like oh your book's on sale so they all bought it even though they've already read it so they all bought it they all paid a buck and that helped the initial sales Spike and that plus the good reviews plus people recommending it to each other got it into the top sellers lists in Amazon once it got into like the top 10 in science fiction then it really started going because um you

know you're like oh I don't know what I want to read what the top sellers in sci-fi I'll buy one of these got up to number one after uh 3 years earlier in life of not being able to get an agent now I've got one knocking at my door so I go online to make sure he's a real person and then and then uh I'm like sure and David's like all right Julian how much you going to give us for this book a little predatory but that's how it is so while they were working on

those negotiations 20th Century Fox came and said like hey we want to talk about the movie option movie options aren't as exciting and overwhelming as you think they are it doesn't mean like you know since we're here to buy the movie option we're we want we're going to make a movie no it just means um they are securing the exclusive ability to get the movie rights so they pay you a small amount of money to have 18 months during which no one but them are allowed to buy the movie rights that's what an option is

so it's not that exciting but it's interesting at that point to have a studio you know a major Studio like 20th Century Fox come and want this want the movie rights but my agent and my film agent everybody said like don't get too excited they only make about one movie for every like several hundred options they go secure so it's not don't don't get too excited but I was excited eventually like both of these deals are being worked on I got my my uh literary agent working on the a print deal with random house got

my film agent working on the movie deal with 20th Century Fox meanwhile I'm in my cubicle fixing bugs cuz I'm still a computer programmer at this point and so sitting there in my cubicle fixing bugs running off to take a phone call about my movie deal then back to so it was it was a really surreal time and in the end the publish the print deal and the movie deal were agreed to 4 days apart that was an eventful week I had to take a day off just to go home and lay down once the

print deal happened we went through uh a few editing passes it wasn't it it wasn't that invasive actually I'm told that it was a very mild editing process and then it came out and it sold really well and it got on the New York Times bestseller list meanwhile in movie land they they brought Drew Goddard on to write and direct the film or at least that that speculatively Drew G by the way is a veteran screenplay writer in Hollywood he wrote a bunch of episodes of lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer he wrote Cloverfield he

directed Cabin in the Woods he really liked the book so to follow the book he wrote the screenplay to follow the book is as well as possible he was originally set to direct as well but then Sony came along and offered him the director's chair for uh the next Spider-Man movie and so he's totally a superhero guy so uh he's like oh I got to do this so then the studio was like oh oh oh they're like well we've got a screenplay now but we know director know nothing and then Matt Damon said hey I'm

interested in playing the lead and video was like okay okay now we're taking this seriously but now that we we have a bigname actor who's interested in playing the lead but we don't have a director and so regle Scott came and said I'll direct it and they're like really so at that point it was pretty much greenlighted although I didn't know it it's just one of those things where all these things just snuck up just bit by bit bit they snuck up it was like Ridley Scott might be interested Ridley Scott is interested Ridley Scott's

in negotiations if he can find it you know time in his schedule if we could uh okay rley Scott's on board okay now now we're now we need a female lead well Jessica Chastain has expressed interest and it's like we got all these big name actors start piling on and the studio was like whoa whoa whoa everybody we can't afford all of you go away we got Matt Damon and Ridley Scott they're expensive but a lot of those a lot of these performers you saw are working for less than they would normally get just because

they think it's a cool project thank you thank you the first question I always get asked uh is like what did you have to do with the movie Mostly my job on the film was to cash the check seriously in the contract it's like we will give you this pile of money and then you get to go to the premiere but they chose to involve me which was really cool when Drew was writing the screenplay he he called me almost every day to ask questions some technical some storyline questions when he got the uh when

he when he was done with the first rev he sent it to me for feedback uh I gave him lots of feedback he made some changes based on it and ignored other things it's his screenplay and then once they were filming it I would occasionally get these questions filtered through from Ridley it was actually really heartening to see the kinds of questions that were coming through from Ridley one of the questions was hey can we show Watney pouring hydrazine from one container to another out on the surface of Mars so he's in his Eva suit

and he's just pouring it from one container to to another I'm like no Mars's atmospheric pressure is really really low the hydro would just boil off and he's like okay then we won't do it I'm like okay that's what I like to see oh one other thing so I put a lot of effort into being technically accurate but there are a few places where I'm not and uh the biggest one is the sandstorm at the beginning in reality uh Mars's atmosphere is about um uh what half a percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure so they do

get sandstorms and dust storms that are 150 km an hour but the I of the of the wind that's hitting you would feel like a 1 km an hour breeze so it wouldn't damage anything I knew that was the case when I wrote it and I decided to look the other way because I wanted it to be awesome I I had an alternate beginning in mind at first that had um like they were doing an MAV engine test and there's an explosion and that causes all the problems that uh lead to Mark being stranded but

I decided against it because it's a man versus nature story and I wanted nature to have the first punch the other deliberate inaccuracy I had was I really handwaved around the radiation issue in space um and I I just have like a paragraph or two in the book that say like oh yeah the hab The Rovers my Eva suits are all radiation shielded in reality that's a huge problem and there is no thin you know light easy material that completely takes care of it so realistically having gone what he went through and being on Mars

for so long mark would have so much cancer as cancer would have cancer but they have it's a magical techn technology that they developed between now and 2035 and then there are things that have been s that have been invalidated in the story since the book was released so those bastards at JPL landed curiosity those of you who' have read the book may know that there's this a huge part of the plot is uh him having to create water you mix the hydrogen and the oxygen burn them in a controlled way and yay you've got

water well so curiosity went to Mars and went scoop there's a shitload of water in the soil it turns out for every cubic meter of Martian soil there's about 35 L of water in it so what I say for that is um Mars does not have a single solitary climate just like Earth doesn't we have the Sahara and we have like the Amazon right they're very very different climates on Earth well Curiosities in Gail crater which is about 5,000 kilometers or so from acidalia plena where the Martian takes place so I say acidalia plena is

a desert and no one can prove me wrong until you send a probe another fun thing that has sent happened you know since the book has been released the new pisses which the P portable life support system that's the backpack part of a space uh space suit the new pisses have the ability to separate carbon dioxide out of the air without any filters without any expended materials at all they can just do it forever okay thanks NASA there's one more thing oh yeah so the University of Arizona runs the high-rise instrument on Mars uh reconnaissance

over it's basically a spy satellite in the book I say exactly where the hab is in asdel plenish the exact latitude and longitude coordinates and so the people who run the high-rise instrument said let's see what's there and so they took a highres picture and they're like this isn't anything like he described it so thank you everybody [Applause]