It’s been years since filmmaking duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller last directed a live-action film. After reshaping animation with the Spider-Verse films, the two are making their grand return to live action with the ambitious sci-fi adventure Project Hail Mary. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher recruited to help solve a problem that will slowly but surely destroy Earth. True to form, it’s a genre-blending film that captures Lord and Miller’s signature quirky, humorous energy, as well as their heart. We sat down with the two to discuss their latest film, what drew them to this project, how they kept their out-of-space scifi grounded, and their favorite moments on set.
You previously said Project Hail Mary is not a Mac, it’s a PC. I’d love for you to unpack that and explain how that shaped the filmmaking process.
Phil Lord: So a lot of times when you go to space, it’s slick and shiny, and it can feel on the antiseptic or cold side. And we wanted space to be messy. We wanted our spaceship to be like the ISS, a machine in space with all of the inside parts on the outside in case you have to fix something. And it fits our character, played by Ryan Gosling, who is a character whose insides are all visible on the outside and needs a bit of fixing.
Chris Miller: I think it’s what helps ground the movie and make it feel real and not just idealized. There’s a bit of grounded reality because it turns out that space is messy.
Weir’s books are heavily scientific and your films usually thrive on heart and humor. Was there a specific detail that worked on the page but needed to be simplified for the screen? And how did you balance that authenticity with accessibility? Because there was a moment where I was like, I understand this mission. Am I a scientist? I think I can do this.
Lord: Yes! That’s the thing. Every human being is basically a scientist. You grow up like, “I’m going to try this thing. Oh, it didn’t work. Okay, let me try this other thing. Oh, that did work. Noted.” It’s like what separates us from… well, animals are pretty smart. I don’t want to diss on bears or dolphins, but I would say that an essential part of being human is trial and error, and that’s what the scientific method is about. And we wanted you to be emotionally invested with Ryan in the scientific issues and problems of the movie. And so when Ryan is solving them, we are hoping that it feels like somebody cracking a safe in a movie. You love watching the process. I don’t know exactly how it works. I don’t know if I could do it myself, but I feel like I could. That should be the feeling. Hopefully, we’ll generate a bunch of amateur scientists walking out of the theater.
Miller: And we had Drew Goddard, who also adapted The Martian. [He] is really, really good at taking complicated ideas and making them easily digestible and entertaining. And so you couple that with Ryan Gosling, one of the great actors of our time, who’s able to make you just understand what he’s going through just by his expressions. And we were able to get a lot cinematically out without having to say a bunch of mumbo jumbo business.
You talked about wanting to create things future generations can reboot and being mindful of nostalgia culture. Project Hail Mary is like that OG sci-fi type of story that’s not a franchise or anything like that. Is that one of the things that drew you to this project?
Lord: We’re always trying to do something that feels original, that feels like an approach you might not expect and certainly something you haven’t already seen. That’s a huge value to the audience. That’s what we learned making things like Spider-Verse. As an audience, we want to see something we can’t get anywhere else.
Another thing Weir said, I think it was at Comic-Con, was that you guys approach complicated elements as problems to solve rather than things to cut. What was one of the problems that almost had you beat?
Miller: I mean, this movie is full of challenges that people might say like, “Oh, we can’t have an alien that has no eyes or mouth and can’t speak or breathe the same air that our main character is. We can’t always have them behind a wall. We can’t do so much of this movie in zero or microgravity, where they have to be on wires.”
Lord: For us, those are all provocations that prompt us to be more creative. And that’s what I love about Andy’s book, Big Problems. They spur the characters on to creative solutions. And so as filmmakers, we’re adapting this book. We can’t make a 15-hour movie, but we didn’t want to cut anything that made our lives easier. We left in all the things that were hard, hard to pull off, because that feels like a spectacle to me.
Miller: Right. That’s why you’re like, “Oh, I haven’t seen this version of an alien before. It’s got five legs. It has no face.”
Lord: “How could I ever imagine a personality in that thing?” Well, I don’t know. Pixar can make you fall in love with the relationship between a lamp
Miller: And a smaller lamp.
Lord: And a smaller lamp! So if they can do that, then we can make you fall in love with a rock.
Gosling mentioned that his daughters are his unofficial critics that give him notes.
Lord: When they were on set, we would get really nervous.
Miller: Totally. Two little Caesars.
Do you have unofficial focus groups in your own lives and did any of their inputs make it into the final project?
Miller: All over the place. I mean, we have a group of director and writer friends that we show our work to throughout the process just to get other smart eyes on things. I’ve also got two kids that I show things to, and they have lots of thoughts.
Lord: Very tough critics. My three Labradoodles: extremely easy to please. They like everything. They do fall asleep a lot.
Miller: I think when we show early versions of the movie to our director and writer friends, they always have very smart thoughts that we take in. But a lot of it is about how do we shape this movie into being something where you are continually engaged throughout and there’s nothing confusing and you’re following the story. And I think we listen to people when they’re like, “I thought this meant this.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s not what we want.” And so we would make little tweaks along the way just to keep things clear and exciting.
Lord: And the main thing is holding onto your engagement across the picture and making sure that you stay in the pocket and things and you stay interested and leaning forward and never feel like *leans back*… Or sagging and that you’re just locked in. It is a performance after all.
What was the best day on set where it was like, ugh, this was either the best scene you shot, just the best day in general vibe-wise?
Miller: There’s a couple really memorable moments, but one was the scene where Rocky and Grace really meet for the first time and Grace starts doing movements and Rocky imitates those movements. We had the puppet team on set in the foreground and Ryan in the background behind a wall, and we would feed Ryan through an earwig – Try doing the Macarena. Try doing rock paper scissors, try this or that.
Lord: But we wouldn’t tell the puppeteers. They didn’t know what Ryan was going to do. So their job was to try to copy him.
Miller: Whatever he did, just try and copy it. And when it was happening on screen, we knew right then and there that this was a really special movie magic moment. It just seemed so special
Lord: And you looked off camera and the boom operator is just grinning ear to ear. Everyone on set was reduced to the wonder of being a kid and seeing a puppet show really engage you. That was really special. And there’s one other moment, which we talked so much about, Ryan and the incredible performance of Rocky, but Sandra Huler, who plays Ava Stratt in the movie, is such a movie star. And she sings a song in this movie as a way of expressing how much she cares about these people that she’s about to send to their death. And when she started singing, the entire place was riveted. I’m pretty sure we’re using the first take, and our jaws just dropped. And you cut around to the other members of the cast watching her sing. Those are real reactions. They’re not acting. They’re just stunned.
Project Hail Mary opens in theaters on March 20.
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