'Stowaway': How YouTuber Scott Manley helped director get science straight in new space thriller

The developer and popular myth debunker consulted Hollywood director Joe Penna on his latest film

'Stowaway', starring Anna Kendrick, is a science-fiction thriller about a compromised mission to Mars. Netflix

Scott Manley is a man of many talents. By day he’s a developer for Apple, a profession he has worked in for the past 20 years, after moving to Silicon Valley from Scotland. He has also dabbled in DJing around the San Francisco Bay Area, but his expertise is in physics, astronomy and computational physics, all of which he pstudied at the University of Glasgow.

For his 1.24 million YouTube subscribers, though, Manley is famous for his channel, on which he meticulously breaks down scientific stories and questions for his devoted following.

With more than 400 million views on the platform, Manley is clearly rather skilful at making technical jargon much more understandable for the layman. So much so that in November 2015, Hollywood director Joe Penna brought Manley on board to consult on his Netflix sci-fi thriller Stowaway.

"We were both talking to each other on Twitter," Manley tells The National. "Then he said, 'Hey, do you want to help? Do you want to look at a script?'"

By this point, Penna and his co-writer, Ryan Morrison, had already consulted with various former astronauts, engineers and Nasa employees about Stowaway, which stars Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick and Daniel Dae Kim. They play a three-person crew on a mission to Mars who suddenly face an impossible choice after an unplanned passenger, played by Shamier Anderson, jeopardises their lives.

Penna had long been a fan of Manley’s YouTube channel, especially after he watched a 20-minute video purely about the type of screws that were required for the second stage of a rocket launch.

“He was so passionate about those things,” says Penna. “So, I thought if I can make him relatively happy with the film then I can be certain that pretty much everyone else out there will be OK with the science. He was the Litmus test.”

Unsurprisingly, Manley jumped at Penna's request. Especially since his own enjoyment of space movies had previously been ruined by questionable science. That even goes for the Oscar-winning Gravity, a film Manley says he loves, despite the fact it has a "couple of scenes" that he could have improved on. "Not because Alfonso Cuaron is a bad director," he says. "That stuff is just in his blind spot. That's all it is."

Over the next five years Manley would read each of Penna's scripts and updates for Stowaway and point out errors that might take his audience, especially scientific scholars and experts, out of the film. This included his insistence that the start of the mission had to be short enough so that the titular troublemaker could still be alive by the time he was discovered.

Manley also took it upon himself to work out the orbital mechanics for the mission, which included answering why they could't just turn back. After figuring out the exact numbers, he told Penna that the shuttle would be "going too fast" to do so. Not all of Manley's notes made it into Stowaway, but they were still integral to Penna and his cast and crew, because they helped to squash any of their concerns over the film's authenticity.

Manley was happy to work on the mathematics and science behind Stowaway for free, too, doing so around his day job. "It was just something that I thought was fun."

It's similar to how Manley started on YouTube. After hearing numerous players complain about how difficult a video game was, Manley proved the complete opposite by showing his four-year-old daughter playing it with ease. From there, he made a number of other videos about the game, which kept getting more and more hits.

“The next thing I knew, I’m making videos about video games in space and, over time, it became more about the science and the games. There’s a lot of other great people who do this stuff. I just do it in an amateurish fashion for fun.”

Despite Manley’s modest claims, millions of viewers are drawn to his videos, which have proven to be genuinely life-altering. Not only is Manley repeatedly told that he teaches people stuff they’re “too afraid to study because they think it’s too complicated”, but his content has even inspired some to study aerospace at university. One person even emailed him to say: “I just applied to the astronauts selection process because of you.”

“Forget the numbers, it’s just very nice to get direct feedback and see that you’re changing things in a nice way,” he says. “That’s probably what keeps me doing it. It’s a hobby that I can’t give up. I am working very hard all the time. But I love it.”

So after his stint on Stowaway, does he want to work on a Hollywood production again? "I would be delighted to," he says. "I've always been delighted to work with people who are writing stories. I'm always happy when people come and ask. Because I would much rather help than have to criticise them after."

Having provided notes on Penna's 2018 debut feature film Arctic, as well as Stowaway, there's every chance they'll collaborate again. Especially since Penna was hugely impressed by Manley's speediness. He would take only a couple of minutes to do renderings and create images of the shuttle's exterior, interior and movement through space, which other artists were insisting would take weeks.

Maybe next time they'll even meet face to face. Manley and Penna's work so far has been entirely over Twitter and email, as the filmmaker shot Stowaway in Germany.

“The process was I’d send them a bunch of emails, then immediately think, ‘God, they’re gonna hate it.’ Then a few hours later he’d send me a message saying, ‘This is great.'”

Modest to the end, Manley says he can claim little for the science in Penna and Morrison's script for Stowaway. "They had so much good stuff in there already," he says. "When I came in, my job was to make sure that I kept that in there and just made it better."

Stowaway is now on Netflix