Ridley Scott has been multi-tasking while doing the requisite press for The Martian—last month, he casually mentioned in an interview with the film’s star Matt Damon that he’s already begun work on Prometheus 2. Now, in an exclusive interview with Deadline, Scott has just shared some of the film’s plot details, as well as confirmed the return of Michael Fassbender (though hopefully not just as a head).
Deadline caught up with Scott at the Toronto International Film Festival following a screening of The Martian. The director discussed his involvement in multiple sequels, including Blade Runner 2, and how “watchable” Damon is while pretending to be on Mars. When asked about Prometheus 2: Intergalactic Boogaloo, Scott readily confirmed that Fassbender would reprise his role as the android David. Filming will reportedly begin in February, so we guess Fassbender will just have to find a way to juggle this role with whatever he’s doing in Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman.
As for where he’ll take the sequel, Scott said that despite having the option to “jump ahead” and forget the events of the first film, he’s going back to the beginning. Citing Noomi Rapace’s line from the end of Prometheus—“I want to go where they came from”—Scott said he also wants to delve into the origin of the Engineers, humanity’s hateful forebears. Scott then waxed eloquent about the miracle of life on Earth, and the likelihood of similar civilizations across the universe:
I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system.
Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don’t believe it.
The director then wanders into a teleological argument, asking where the “big boy” a.k.a God is, and whether or not any of this—life, that is—could have just happened “by accident”. But Scott’s a self-proclaimed “logical agnostic,” so he claims it’s just in his nature to keep asking these questions because no one currently has the “perfect answer” (unless you’re willing to accept that a wizard did it).