Olivia Williams Video Interview On ‘Last Days On Mars’ At Cannes [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

I managed to read it all the way through. I’m really bad at reading scripts, and if I don’t like them, well…. It’s not that I don’t like them; I just tend to fall asleep around page 36 usually. For this one, I read it straight through and I loved it. It was character driven; it was a breakdown of the relationships between these colleagues, scientists, who are stuck in this confined space. It’s not a sci-fi story; it’s an internal story of human interaction and I love that.

Yea, or not even reintegrate, but integrate for the first time. I take jobs on the basis that I like the script and it goes into a new and interesting area for me, and if it brings Britain and Ireland along that would be great. There is no reason not to. We have the technology, we have the skills and we have the imagination, and we might even have the space program for that.

I didn’t have a chance to prepare. I was cast very late because another actress who I stepped in for fell ill, and so I flew in from Vancouver where I was shooting The Seventh Son with Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore and got out of the snowy and rainy, muddy costume and into a space suit, and ran up and down a sand dune about fifty times in a row, so it was very tough physically. Space suits really confine you, both as an actor and as a human being. You could say I wanted my character to kneel down, but you simply couldn’t. So I think that contributed a great deal to that sense of panic and frustration the characters felt.

She is as popular as every woman in history who thinks she’s always right. I just played Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt basically in a space suit. I wanted to play more of Eleanor; I mean I’m not kidding! There’s a character from the Greek myths called Cassandra who is given the blessing of prophecy and the curse of never being believed that I believe is a human prodigy that has existed all the way through history and makes for fantastic drama, and I think Kim is the sci-fi of a modern Cassandra.

There was an astonishing day, which doesn’t really make it on to the screen because it was a dust storm, so all you really see is the dust. But we were on the most beautiful plane with these extraordinary well formation rafts, and some of the stills from the day were some of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen. And the landscape! He was in there with the fighting and the dust, and the fighting and the ground and in the spaceship and the height of the drama, but he shot that landscape very beautifully.