The Martian filming locations

THE MARTIAN FILMING LOCATIONS AND BUDAPEST

With a one-year gap in 2013, 2014, and 2015, we got three excellent sci-fi movies about space: ‘Gravity,’ ‘Interstellar,’ and finally ‘The Martian. ’ All three were warmly accepted and nominated for numerous movie awards, including Oscars, and each was a creation of a legendary director. Among his famous works, Ridley Scott is particularly remembered for historical epics (Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and Robin Hood) and sci-fi fiction: Alien, Blade Runner, and Prometheus. Ridley Scott was an ideal choice for the movie adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestseller ‘The Martian,’ which tells the story of a modern space Robinson, Mark Watney, who does his best to survive on Mars. The original novel was adapted into a script back in 2011, and Scott and Matt Damon enthusiastically joined the development in 2014, thus leaving a year and a half before the scheduled premiere. The principal filming began in November 2014 and lasted until March 2015 in two primary The Martian filming locations: Jordan and Hungary. Moving the production to picturesque locations was not new for the director since he had previously moved his team to Iceland and Spain during the work on Prometheus. 

The Wadi Rum desert in Jordan was another location that Ridley Scott had been familiar with since Prometheus. Even though it was not a main exterior location in 2011, in early 2015, the filming crew of The Martian came to Jordan for a panoramic view of Mars. Wadi Rum Desert is located in the south of Jordan and has a surface area of 720 km2. Way before it was included in the UNESCO Heritage List, cinematographers favored the location. It became recognizable to the Western audience in 1962 with Lawrence of Arabia’s premiere. The new wave of movie production came here in the XX century, with ‘Red Planet’ depicting Mars’s surface, and then in ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ in 2009, it worked for Egypt. In the 2010s, Wadi Rum appeared in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars: Rogue One, The Last Days on Mars, Aladdin, Dune 1-2, and John Wick 4. While most of them depicted either fictional locations or some other places like Morocco and Egypt, The Martian took advantage of the breathtaking landscapes in delivering a scientifically precise image of Mars, especially regarding the original novel and the enthusiastic involvement of NASA in the production. 

While Jordan was considered an ideal location for the Mars surface, moving the studio production to Budapest, Hungary, on the surface was not such an obvious decision. The production schedule of ‘The Martian’ and ‘The Force Awakens’ made it impossible to simultaneously shoot both pictures at the Pinewood Studios near London, and Ridley Scott had to cede. Moving production to Europe had long been the means to reduce budgets when Warner Bros. dedicated to Budapest. Apart from usual tax discounts and lower wages for the Hungarian staff, the chosen Korda Studio near Budapest had large pavilions with high ceilings and was one of the best sound studios in Europe, which would later result in the Satellite Award for Best Sound. The Martian filming crew occupied most of the Korda Studio facilities, and the largest set had a space of 6000 m2, with 4,000 tons of soil and sand brought there to look like the Mars surface. The crew brought around 100 tonnes of sand to the set of Watney’s living module and planted a real potato farm. Even Matt Damon, who had recently worked on Interstellar, was impressed with the scale of production, and the large green screens on the set used to fit the background with the Wadi Rum exteriors and the CGI shots of Mars. A scene of a sandstorm took three days to shoot, with giant fans throwing sand at the actors. 

NASA HEADQUARTERS

Apart from proving its production facilities, Korda Studio made another unevident appearance in the movie. The panorama of the entrance to the NASA complex was shot at the entrance to Korda. Only the futuristic gates are real, and all other buildings in the background were digitally added. We get inside the complex for the first time to witness the press conference led by NASA director Teddy Sanders, played by Jeff Daniels. A few can grasp that none of the scenes were filmed at Space Center Houston, Texas, USA. The futuristic interior of the scene and the monotone monologue of the bureaucrat Sanders evade us from the fact that the sequence, and several others of the same kind later in the story, particularly with Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), were staged inside a large event hall at the center of Budapest in Hungary. The choice of the location was dictated not only by the image of NASA and its scientific achievements, especially in the near future where the events of the Martian movie take place. The cold palette of the location was used to contrast with Mars’s dry, warm landscape, while both locations look sterile for different reasons. 

The real Johnson Space Center from Houston was digitally added to the establishing shot in the movie, behind the actual Corda Studios gates. What deserves attention is that among those buildings in the background, there is the one that served as the interior for the NASA scenes. In other words, the filmmakers were so attentive to the details that they put the Hungarian event hall among the digitally added buildings in the background of what was supposed to be the NASA complex. The building is known as Balna Event Center or ‘Whale’ thanks to its shape. This building, made of glass, steel, and concrete, was opened in 2013 in the area near the Danube, the old Market Hall, and the iconic Liberty Bridge. The magnificent structure soon gained the nickname ‘The Whale’ because of its round shapes, visual resemblance to the famous marine mammal, and location near the water. Of around 30,000 m2 of space, including 2,000 square meters of outer terraces, one-third, or 12,000 m2, is accessible for rent for office spaces, shops, restaurants, and events. 

When the filming crew came here in late 2014 to turn ‘The Whale’ into one of the memorable The Martian locations, the building had been open for around a year and not surprisingly impressed the filmmakers. The movie’s production designer, Arthur Max, later admitted that building a stage of the same kind from scratch would have cost millions of dollars, and the Balna Center provided perfectly lit interiors for several scenes. When Teddy Sanders and later Vincent Kapoor led press conferences, the scenes were filmed on the upper floor of the event center. The control center, where secondary characters get the satellite picture of the Marc surface, was also created on the upper floor of the Whale, with dozens of giant screens, whose content was specifically designed by a separate studio. The idea was to simplify the information on screen to allow the unprepared audience without technical skills to understand the scene’s context and what was going on. Another location created inside Balna Center was Director Sanders’ cabinet, where we can see the elements of the building’s metal structures and the CGI-edited background with the supposed Houston Center complex. In the same year, 2015, Balna Center also appeared in a comedy with Melissa McCarthy, ‘Spy’, and several years later as a location of the ‘Ransom’ TV series on CBS. 

THE CHINESE SPACE CENTER

While the production team recreated the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from California in the complex of Hungarian Expo buildings, abandoned since the 1970s, the building that depicted the China National Space Administration was a modern creation of Hungarian architects. In a movie, when a NASA cargo spaceship blows up soon after launch, a chance to save Mark Watney deteriorates. A helping hand comes from an unexpected side: some elderly Chinese scientist, a vis-à-vis of Jeff Daniels’ character, single-handedly decides that a multi-billion-dollar project will serve the American efforts in saving their astronaut on Mars at the expense of years of work of the Chinese scientific community. The center of the Chinese Space Center appears several times in The Martian, including the visit of the American delegation. The building looks restrained and conservative, ‘pro-communist’ and cold, especially considering the winter scenes with snow around it. 

Ridley Scott’s movie squeezed the distance between Beijing and Houston to the two modern Hungarian buildings in Budapest, with around 2 km and several tram stops between them. Like the Balna Event Center, the building that played the role of the Chinese version of NASA is located on the bank of the Danube, and it is known as Mupa Arts Center on Komor Marcell u. 1. When the CNSA building appears for the first time on the 81st minute, we see the famous Rakoczi Bridge in Budapest in the background, leaving the National Theatre behind, beyond the perspective. The most attentive can even identify green and white Budapest tram cars on the bridge; a part of the Csepeli HÉV tram line, which originates at Boráros Square to the north, runs across Rakoczi Bridge. 

‘Művészetek Palotája’ Palace of Arts, which currently covers an area of around 10,000 m2, was built at the turn of the XXI century on the site of the old freight station, which used to operate here between 1883 and 1992. Opened in 2005, Mupa Center looked like no other building in Budapest. It lacked decorative elements and was characterized by constrained lines of concrete and glass surfaces. Its conservative look made the building an ideal choice for depicting Chinese communist architecture. Nowadays, the center accommodates three different institutions: the Ludwig Museum, the National Concert Hall, and the Festival Theatre. 

MARK WATNEY IN THE PARK

In the epilogue of the movie, we finally see Mark Watney on Earth amid the greenery of a park, rather than the desolate yellow landscapes of Mars. He is sitting on the bench and enthusiastically reveals a small plant coming from the soil beneath him. A group of future astronauts makes their running schedule next to Watney, and the scene makes us believe that he is back home in the United States. The sequence in the park was actually filmed in Budapest on the territory of the Margitsziget Park, located on the Margit island on the Danube, around five kilometers from the Balna Event Center. The island has a length of two and a half kilometers and a total area of a little less than one square kilometer. The island was in private ownership for centuries until 1869, and nowadays it serves as one of the cozy places where people in Budapest spend their weekends with family. The final scene where Watney instructs a new generation was shot not in Budapest but in the Town Hall of the Budaors municipality to the east of the Hungarian capital. The filmmakers worked there during working hours, which created great excitement among the staff as well as a commotion.