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Tuesday, September 29, 2015
How An Anxious Space Geek Became Hollywood’s Most Unlikely Star
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Charlotte Gomez for BuzzFeed
Speaking at a spacious movie theater in Southern California back in early August, Andy Weir found himself sharing the stage with Ridley Scott, Matt Damon, NASA bigwigs, and even an honest-to-god astronaut.
Weir was promoting the upcoming film The Martian, based on his novel of the same name, to an audience of science journalists. After a glowing introduction, he grabbed the microphone with a wry smile. “So yeah... This is a Cinderella moment for me.”
In 1999, when he was 27 years old, Weir was laid off from his job as a software engineer at AOL and took a three-year writing sabbatical to see if he could make it as a writer. He finished a manuscript, but couldn’t find an agent to represent it. He figured his dreams of becoming a novelist were as far-fetched as an astronaut stranded on Mars returning to Earth alive. Now 16 years later, Weir has managed to write one of the most talked-about science fiction stories in a generation. Not only that, but he’s risen to fame with grace and humility, all while managing a fear of flying and other manifestations of an anxiety disorder.
NASA astronaut Drew Feustel, left, actor Matt Damon, director Ridley Scott, author Andy Weir, and Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters Jim Green, at a press event for The Martian.
Bill Ingalls / Getty Images
After his disappointing sabbatical, Weir went back to software engineering. But over the next several years, just for fun, he started putting serialized sci-fi stories on his blog, which had built up a small but loyal following. One of those stories was The Martian. “I posted a chapter once in awhile, whenever the hell I felt like it,” Weir told the movie-theater crowd. He had accumulated about 3,000 readers on an old-fashioned email list. But that was about it in terms of exposure.
So when, in 2012, he posted the final chapter of The Martian to his personal website, he figured that it was simply time to move on to a new project. But then he started getting emails from fans.
“They said things like, ‘Hey, I really loved your story … but I hate your website because it's crap,’” Weir said, admitting to the audience that the site truly was crap. His fans wanted a simple e-reader version of the book, so he made one. The book slowly climbed the Amazon best-seller lists.
Unbeknownst to Weir, an agent named Julian Pavia at Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, took notice, and passed it along to his colleague, David Fugate. Weir, whose inability to land an agent had once crippled his writing dreams, eagerly signed with Fugate.
Charlotte Gomez for BuzzFeed
Remarkably, Random House was not the only media corporation interested in Weir’s story. “While David and Julian were negotiating the deal for the book rights, Fox came for the movie rights,” Weir told the crowd. The two deals, each north of six figures, were made four days apart.
The print version of the book was published in February 2014 and ultimately jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Later, Fox greenlit the movie project after Ridley Scott agreed to direct the film adaptation starring Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain.
This was a crazy deal. Simon Kinberg, the producer who developed The Martian for 20th Century Fox as well as several X-Men films, told BuzzFeed that it is extremely rare for a studio to make a film from a book that, when optioned, hadn’t even been published yet.
“Big movies tend to be based on sort of a well-known underlying material, whether it's comic books, or a remake of another movie,” Kinberg said. “It's rare that something comes from a truly original place, and that's what Andy's book gave us.”
Weir, who said he gets anxious even driving to meet his friends for a meal, was thrust under a jarringly hot spotlight.
The Martian’s protagonist is astronaut Mark Watney, who after an aborted NASA mission to Mars is left wounded and alone on the surface of the cold, dusty, red planet. After regaining consciousness, Watney finds himself with two months of supplies and no way to contact anyone on Earth or his fellow crewmates on their long flight back home.
What follows are a series of problems — problems for Watney, but also the same kind of scientific problems that NASA engineers are paid to solve. Watney, among many other challenges, has to figure out how to maintain oxygen levels, produce water, grow food, contact mission control, and modify rovers for travel — all while maintaining his sanity when the only source of entertainment is a crewmate’s fully stocked library of disco tunes and a collection of '70s television shows.
Each of these problems is meticulously described. Weir, through Watney, shows his work as if he were in a series of graduate seminars dedicated to orbital mechanics, mission planning, chemistry, and biology.
Speaking to BuzzFeed by Skype (with sporadic interruptions by his two cats), Weir said that when he started, he didn’t know anyone at NASA or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA facility behind the unmanned missions to Mars that’s featured prominently in his book. Given the remarkable scientific accuracy and spot-on description of the political environment at NASA, this fact is almost as remarkable as Weir’s precipitous rise to fame.
In fact, at a Comic-Con panel back in July, NASA’s head of planetary research, Dr. Jim Green, described The Martian as “required reading” at NASA. Perhaps because nearly all of the technology in the book is already feasible, the story plays a prominent role in NASA’s efforts to build public support for its plans to get a human on Mars — an effort that, for now, is not much more than some beautiful posters and cool ideas that lack congressional funding.
A NASA poster highlighting their plan to send a human to Mars.
NASA / Via nasa.gov
Green, a veteran of NASA’s Mars program and also the scientific adviser for the film, told BuzzFeed that The Martian’s scientific details provides “a very heightened opportunity for us to talk about Mars and talk about how we're going to get there.”
Many space policy types have suggested that The Martian and its movie adaptation could reinvigorate the space program. But Weir, with his characteristic humility, isn’t comfortable taking credit for that.
“Everyone's just assuming and kind of saying that The Martian is increasing public awareness and interest in space,” he said. “I think they're not considering the other possibility, that maybe The Martian is popular because public awareness and interest in space is increasing on its own.”
Without professional contacts in the space industry, Weir did all of his initial research for The Martian using Google — that, plus his massive bank of knowledge garnered from years of watching pretty much every documentary ever made about human spaceflight. If he needed to write something about physics, he’d run questions by his dad, who had worked as a physicist for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
With a physicist dad and an engineer mom, Weir’s childhood was steeped in science. His dad was also a science fiction buff, and Weir grew up reading his seemingly inexhaustible supply of '50s and '60s sci-fi novels.
Weir always wanted to be a writer, but was skeptical of turning these passions into a career. "I wanted to eat regular meals and not sleep on a park bench," he told BuzzFeed. So he turned his professional interests toward software engineering. And he was good at it — he was first hired, at age 15, as a programmer at Sandia National Laboratory.
Eventually his career led him to AOL at the height of the first Silicon Valley tech boom — and the subsequent bust. In 1999, Weir was laid off and forced to cash in his very lucrative stock options at a time when, unbeknownst to anyone, they were at their peak value. “I had a bunch of money,” Weir said. “I realized I could go about three years without having to work.”
This three-year sabbatical was his first, and largely unsuccessful, attempt at becoming a professional writer. Without any interest from major publishers, he went back to work as a software engineer in 2002.
Charlotte Gomez for BuzzFeed
“I kind of decided, well, what I'm going to do is just write for fun and post stories to my website,” he said, one chapter at a time. This piecemeal approach to writing allowed Weir to stick to the stunning levels of scientific accuracy that characterize The Martian.
By releasing his books to a devoted and informed fan base, he pretty much had every chapter peer-reviewed by engineers, scientists, and other hardcore science enthusiasts. He’d receive friendly emails pointing out that he may have gotten a couple of minor details wrong, and he would change the book accordingly.
Unlike during the sabbatical, when he was focused on getting the attention of an agent, this time he was able to relax and follow his bliss. “I wasn't trying to please anybody but myself,” he said.
In press appearances Weir has often admitted that his protagonist, Watney, is an extension of all his good parts, without any of the bad parts — a sort of aspirational version of himself. Intellect and wit, for example, are shared by both character and creator. “I'm a smart-ass,” he told BuzzFeed, with a sly grin.
But there are striking differences, too. Weir told BuzzFeed that he has struggled with generalized anxiety disorder for most of his life. “[Watney’s] me without the anxiety disorder in a large part,” he said, “He's calm. No matter how bad things get, he doesn't freak out. He can handle what life throws at him, and I can't always.”
For example, Weir is deeply afraid of flying — until April of this year, he hadn’t boarded a plane since 2007. He’s also struggled with more amorphous anxieties, such as ruminating on seemingly inconsequential things. “Things bother me a lot more than they should. When something minor goes wrong, it's very upsetting to me,” he said.
He also has problems with uncertainty and transition, he said, sometimes disrupting his sleep. “I feel really, really insecure when things are in a transitional state,” he told BuzzFeed. “I don't mind being at home, I don't mind being at a restaurant with my friends, but getting from home to the restaurant with my friends I'm worried about everything. It's like, Am I going to hit traffic? Am I going to take a wrong turn? Is there going to be enough parking there? Did I get the time or date wrong? Am I going to end up looking stupid here?”
Anxiety medication, something he turned to only recently, has helped him manage these kinds of daily stresses, he added. “I feel like it's really improved my life. It's not like this big sudden change or anything. It's just stuff that used to bother me a lot doesn't bother me as much.”
Given the way that transitional periods and uncertainty bother Weir, his ascension from hobby writer to best-selling author was, understandably, fraught with a great deal more emotional peril than the strikingly calm, cool, and collected version of himself he presented at the movie theater that August morning.
Weir told BuzzFeed that it was one of the most stressful periods he’s ever experienced. “It was really rough,” he said. Every step of the way was a struggle. There was never any “champagne moment” — just a series of updates that made things seem incrementally, and painfully, more likely. “Talk about anxiety,” he said. “Good Lord.”
Charlotte Gomez for BuzzFeed
He said the movie deal didn’t really feel final until the first day of production on the film, because that was the day he got his first check from Fox since the movie was optioned.
Watney’s character requires constant vigilance and Weir’s storytelling relies on a constant supply of problems that need to be solved, so it would make sense that Weir’s anxiety had helped him compose The Martian. But Weir isn’t so sure. “I don't think it's [helped] in a positive way,” he told BuzzFeed, other than perhaps making him “paranoid enough” to think through all of the ramifications of a plot. But ultimately, he said, “it's just been unpleasant.”
Like Watney, Weir has been thrust into a fairly unimaginable situation, and these new circumstances have forced Weir to set out on uncomfortable journeys, too. He has to fly a lot more now, and notes that he has made great progress on that front. Before a flight, he now takes anti-anxiety medication given to him specifically for his fear of flying.
“What I do,” he said, “is I take it half an hour before boarding so it'll be in full effect when I'm getting on the plane, so I'm not, ‘Oh, God. I'm walking down the tunnel to my death.’"
The juxtaposition between the unflinching Mark Watney and the anxiety-prone Andy Weir can seem jarring. Watney is a fearless astronaut at ease with planning a long and potentially deadly journey over unexplored and uncertain terrain. Weir specifically has problems with uncertainty, with transition, and perhaps most relevant, with travel.
But there’s actually much more of Watney in Weir than the author admits. The character’s authenticity is obvious from the very beginning of the novel, and that’s likely a huge part of why Weir has found such success.
“The tone and the voice, to me, is what felt so unique and exciting,” Kinberg told BuzzFeed. “I felt if we could capture that sort of, I call it intelligent optimism, and real humor and humanity, then it could be a really entertaining film, and different from other science fiction.”
Weir comes off as deeply intelligent but also remarkably playful, self-aware, and self-effacing. He knows exactly who he is and what he stands for — just as he knows what he wanted The Martian to be — a work of fiction created primarily to satisfy his own interests. These are the same traits that make Watney such a fun character to root for.
Andy Weir at the premiere of The Martian at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Kevin Winter / Getty Images
Both Weir and Watney are irreverent, and love speaking truth to power. When NASA personnel were asked at that press event to give their thoughts on the proposed “one-way mission to Mars,” a project known as Mars One, the officials hemmed and hawed. Not Weir. He called the idea “a joke.”
In the face of his rapid success, Weir remains remarkably humble. “It's amazing what you can get used to,” he said. “It's like this has been creeping up for awhile. It never really felt real to me until a couple weeks ago when I saw a cut of the film.” He said that he choked up watching the movie for the first time.
Some things have changed for Weir, though, and he seems just as proud of these more humble achievements as he does his remarkable success. In a 2014 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Weir said that he didn’t date. “I’m terrible with women,” he said. Now, things are different. He’s dating a woman he met at a press event related to The Martian, and he seems palpably excited about the relationship.
“In typical kind of form for me, she asked me out,” he said. “I'm definitely too chickenshit to ask women out.”
Jack Black Is Super Creepy As R.L. Stine In This New "Goosebumps" Clip
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Here’s an exclusive look at a new scene from the movie that will definitely give you…goosebumps.
Everyone who grew up reading Goosebumps has been on the edge of their seat waiting for the new movie to come out in October.
In the movie, Jack Black plays the character of R.L. Stine, the real-life author of the famous book series.
Sony / Via youtube.com
And now we have an exclusive sneak peek at a clip from the movie that gives us even more insight:
buzzfeed-video1.s3.amazonaws.com
Jack Black is really channeling his inner R.L. Stine here.
Sony
"The Leftovers" Changes The Game
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Co-creator Damon Lindelof and star Justin Theroux talk about the show’s second season — its move to Texas, diversifying the cast, and why it almost didn’t return.
Van Redin / HBO
A meditation on grief, anger, survival, loss, and madness — it's safe to say that there's never been anything on television like The Leftovers. Tom Perrotta's 2011 novel of the same name examined the aftermath of the disappearance of 2% of the world's population through characters in a small New York town; Perrotta and Damon Lindelof (Lost) co-created The Leftovers for HBO, and its first season aired last year. For some critics and viewers, the show was just too sad — "grim" and "grimness" were a frequent criticism.
It had its champions, too, of course. And those who stuck with the show through its first 10 episodes were rewarded with an unprecedented emotional experience. Also, yes: even some hope for these characters' futures. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Amy Brenneman, Liv Tyler, Christopher Eccleston, Margaret Qualley, and Chris Zylka led the cast in its first season, and they will all be back in its second, though The Leftovers' center will move from Mapleton, New York, to Miracle, Texas — a town that claims to have lost no one in The Sudden Departure. Miracle, therefore, is a place where Kevin Garvey (Theroux), his daughter, Jill (Qualley), and his girlfriend, Nora Durst (Coon), along with their new adopted baby, will seek safety. And there, the Garvey-Dursts will meet the Murphy family (led by Regina King and Kevin Carroll), who clearly have their own secrets.
BuzzFeed News talked with Lindelof and Theroux, who had to leave to go to a press conference about two-thirds of the way through the conversation, about The Leftovers' new location and characters, why Lindelof almost thought one season was enough, and for Theroux, why working with Lindelof reminds him of working with David Lynch.
Oh, and — why the hell Ann Dowd is back on the show when her character, Patti Levin, the leader of the Guilty Remnant, is dead!
Justin, what was your reaction when Damon told you the show was going to mostly move from Mapleton to Miracle?
Justin Theroux: My first reaction was "Yay!" because we're going to get out of the places we were shooting in Queens. It did start to feel in the first season that it became kind of oppressively small in that town. And it felt like it was kind of shot out in a way. Obviously, at the end of the first season, Kevin had gotten his wish.
Most shows don't blow themselves up in between the first and second seasons. Could there have been a scenario where everybody stayed in Mapleton?
Damon Lindelof: Absolutely. That was the default position. And this was a very unique experience for me, largely because it was an adaptation. And working with Tom and saying, like, All the things that make this a good novel — in my opinion, a beautiful novel — run sort of counterintuitive to making it an ongoing television series. So how do we take that idea: This actually kind of feels like it's over.
Let's start to talk about what life looks like in Mapleton a week or a year or five years later in the way that, you know, most television dramas would continue, whether it's Desperate Housewives or Friday Night Lights or even Lost. And we started to talk about that, and I started feeling just like, You know what? Maybe we're done. Maybe there shouldn't be a second season of The Leftovers. This is just feeling like we're continuing for a continuation's sake.
And most importantly, what do the characters want? Because in the finale of the first season, all of them are sort of articulating this desire to stop feeling shitty. So what are they going to do about it? What if there is this kind of kitschy town that claims that nobody was departed from there? It's a town of like 400 people, and it's not really that amazing. And then we started talking about what it would be like to live in that place.
And then it was like, What if the Garveys moved there? That seems like it's not just a gimmick, like that's a place that they would gravitate towards. They wouldn't say they were moving there because it was magical, but that's exactly why they're moving there. And it started opening up, and I started getting excited creatively.
JT: There's kind of a — not a separate belief system for the people that live there, but there is a kind of disease of uniqueness. They have their own brand of why they were spared, or why they were special, or what Miracle is. So it was cool just from an audience standpoint to watch those people, and a character standpoint to interact with them. Because the Garveys bring their own set of problems with them.
DL: Yeah, I think that the story that the show wants to tell is that The Sudden Departure is a scapegoat. It's this excuse for people to behave the way that they wanted to behave before it happened. So this idea that Episode 9 in the first season was really all about showing that the Garveys were very fucked up prior to The Departure. And I think that the show is very interested in telling that story now again in Miracle — the best place to tell that story is a place where The Departure didn't happen at all. Sort of like, Are families still fucked up? Yes, they are.
Damon Lindelof and Justin Theroux.
Jeff Kravitz / HBO
Justin, I know that Damon is aware of — even if he doesn't want to be — what critics and viewers are saying about his work. Do you pay attention to those kinds of things?
JT: I was never a — not on purpose — fan of Lost. I didn't watch the entire series. So I didn't come to our show with any preconceived anything. You know, I only based it on sort of what our conversations were, and what he was pitching as a show, and the themes that we were going to explore. If there's a recurring theme that I'm loving this season, it's this sort of extreme agnosticism, or this exploring of belief systems and things like that. I mean, when I first heard just conceptually what The Leftovers was, I was like, Is it a rapture show? Is it one of those weird, crazy Christian books? And of course, three pages in the script, that's dispelled. But it has kind of taken a back door into some of those issues, you know, which I really love. Because to me, that's where sort of the rubber hits the road emotionally for an audience or myself.
DL: I don't want to make private conversations public, but Justin is very aware of my inability — is it an inability? I'll say that I have a proclivity to focus on and seek out negative feedback as a way of balancing the immense kind of blessed life that I have been leading and sort of the idea that I get to do this, period — or that anybody is watching anything that I've done or that I have achieved any level of success. So I feel like I need to tie the figurative cinder block around my ankle in an effort to kind of find some balance, because if I didn't do that, I would just — I'm very scared of what I would become. And Justin has intervened on multiple occasions and said, "That is very toxic, and I used to do that, and you need to stop it."
JT: Through a different spectrum — whatever is out there about you on your life or work. No one really knows Damon or the way his brain works. They know his work. And when you seek out the bully in the high school or when you chain yourself to this idiot avatar, you're inevitably going to get punished for it.
DL: So the name of my production company shouldn't be "Idiot Avatar"? I just registered that domain name. I thought it was so clever.
JT: Damon puts more bricks on his back than he ever should. But when the show is working really, really well, which it does frequently, it's when he's, I can tell, untethered himself from that stuff, and is really exploring the ideas and themes that he wants to do. It operates in its own tempo, like a great jazz record. So if people are willing to sort of watch, not be looking for hooks and poppy lyrics, they're going to be very excited by the show.
And also, live in mystery, you know? Having worked a little with Lynch, it's a different milieu, but it feels the same in that he goes down the channels that he wants to go down, with dream logic or whatever. And certain things aren't explainable. And some things are. You have to tune your ear to it a little bit.
I think Damon's "idiot avatar" is, like, showrunner/creator guy who is sensitive to criticism about Lost — causing him to quit Twitter, and so on. Just to be clear, Justin, is your idiot avatar the story told about you and your life in the gossip press?
JT: Yeah, two totally different things. But you learn within a week — at least I did — like, Oh my god, if you even open that can, you're just going to feel terrible about yourself all day long. Because there's this sort of anonymous democracy that's happening out there, that's anything but. It's more like a swarming dictatorship sometimes.
13 Wise Life Lessons From Mindy Kaling's New Book
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, September 29, 2015
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And if you don’t got it? Flaunt it. ‘Cause what are we even doing here if we’re not flaunting it?”
In September, Mindy Kaling released her second book of essays, Why Not Me? It follows her second coming-of-age, musing on life, love, work, and friendship. Here's what we learned from it.
1. Having confidence in yourself is not an effortless endeavor.
Ilya S. Savenok / Getty Images
"People talk about confidence without ever talking about hard work. ... I don't understand how you can talk about self-confidence if you don't do the work."
"Sometimes a story just needs an ending, and I used to not be a creative enough person to think of an ending to a romantic story that isn't wedding or death. This story didn't end in fireworks, because the truth is, fireworks are something from my twenties. I could have made fireworks, but I chose to make a nuanced memory of a person who is neither a hero not a villain in my life. All I had to do now was move on."
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