Interestingly, because it's a five-hour miniseries and a novel -- Charlie (Pellegrino) and I can do this -- what do they think going in? What does it mean to them when they start the process, and what is it like after this 2-1/2 year odyssey? How has it changed them? How do they come back changed as people?

You know, the Apollo astronauts came back changed after a few hours on the lunar surface. But the changes took years to manifest themselves. These people are gonna add years. They're gonna change during the mission. Their outlooks are gonna change. How are they gonna start seeing the goals of the mission? How are they gonna be relating to mission control after a couple of years out?

Uh, I think these are all pretty interesting and fertile areas for drama. I want to feel the excitement of the crew on the day the final crew selections are announced. You know, when they know they're really going after years of thinking about it. I want to see their fears before the landing. And they're probably not the fears of dying as much as the fears of screwing up in front of billions of people who are watching.

How about the epiphany, the fulfillment of a life's dream when they find a simple living bacterium on Mars? I want to feel that excitement. If the characters care about it, then the audience is gonna care about it. You got the years of training, the intensity of the landing, the siege of a 500-day surface mission.

We wanted to have documentary-type accuracy, but the event we're showing hasn't happened yet. So the challenge and the attraction of it for me is to project ourselves into the living experience of the first Mars landing team, the first Martians to walk a mile in their shoes or 250 million miles in their shoes. What's it gonna feel like to fire the engine on that trans-Mars injection and know that you're committing yourself to a two-and-a-half-year ordeal with no possibility of an earlier return, no matter what happens and no matter how bad it gets? That's gonna get your attention.

How's it gonna feel to get out of bed and walk downstairs to put on the morning coffee and glance out the window at an alien-orange landscape, knowing that you're gonna be munching your toast further from home than any human being has ever done previously by a factor of 1,000? You know? How is it gonna feel to be pulling on your pressure suit for a work EVA on day 460 of the surface mission when the thing is scratched and worn and taped together and it smells like the used socks at the bottom of the gym bag?

You know? Is that gonna be still all romance and adventure? Or is it gonna feel like one of the hardest things you ever did? And then what's it gonna be like for the people at home, the wives and the husbands and the children, who are separated by such a vast distance, seeing their loved ones on video downlinks daily, but unable to have a simple conversation because of the time delay? We want to make it experientially real.

These people are gonna go and live on Mars for 500 days, and at the end of it, they're gonna become hardened, steely-eyed Martians. They're gonna wake up each day to the Martian sunrise. They're gonna work under a pink sky and the landscape is utterly devoid of life -- hopefully not completely, but visually it certainly will be. They're gonna see beautiful sunsets, they're gonna see dust devils and nights where the stars shine without twinkling.

They're gonna hunker down in dust storms that sweep the entire planet, 150-mile-an-hour winds are gonna keen around their dwelling place like the souls of Bradbury's Martian dead. You know, in one mission, they're gonna write the rulebook on how you live there.

Perhaps they're gonna find fossil evidence of ancient life or even extant microbial life. But whatever they find, they're gonna start to uncover mysteries. And every question they answer, they're gonna find five more to ask.

But even more important than what they're gonna learn about Mars is what they're gonna learn about themselves. Good and bad. And what happens to the human animal in such an extreme and isolated place? Finally, they're gonna begin to count the days and then the hours, and finally the minutes until they can leave this God-forsaken wasteland.

And when the time comes, they're gonna enter their ascent vehicle with regret. Because in leaving Mars forever, they're gonna be leaving a part of themselves.

-- from James Cameron's address to the International Mars Society, August 1999