You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
I gotta figure out a way to grow three years worth of food here on a planet where nothing grows.
Luckily, I'm a botanist.
That's a clip from the film The Martian, where Matt Damon plays astronaut Mark Watney.
who's stranded on Mars and has to rely on science and ingenuity in order to survive.
At the time of this recording, the film's been number one at the box office for two weeks straight.
In this episode, composer Harry Gregson Williams breaks down his music from the film,
where part of his job was to score the excitement of scientific discovery and the grandeur and mystery of Mars itself.
He begins with how director Ridley Scott first offered him the job to work on the film.
A script plopped through the letterbox one day.
with a terse little note on it which said, read it, like it, do it.
I'd ploughed through the script in one hungry sitting, and it was a no-brainer, man.
It was certainly something I really wanted to do.
I'm Harry Gregson-Williams, and I'm the composer of the Martian score.
Our first conversations were about tone and colour, and he showed me a very,
I thought, very complete first assembly of the film.
So the film had really taken shape by the time I came to it.
The outcome of the first meeting really was that I should focus on Watney, you know,