Brian Hiatt
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"What's fun about watching Ryan's career is he adds talents, like LeBron James or something," says 'Project Hail Mary' co-director Phil Lord. Jonathan Olley/Amazon Studios Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Project Hail Mary is, at its core, the story of a guy who wakes up alone in space and has to befriend a rock. It’s also one of the most purely enjoyable and uplifting movies of the last decade or so, imbued with very un-2026 optimism and near-relentless levity by the directors, from a screenplay by Drew Goddard (adapted from Andy Weir’s novel, like another Goddard script, for 2015’s also awesome The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott). In the lead role of reluctant non-astronaut Ryland Grace is Ryan Gosling, whose performance is a career milestone, proving that he’s one of a tiny number of actors/flat-out movie stars who could carry an entire blockbuster nearly on his own.
It’s Lord and Miller’s first movie as directors since 2014’s classic sequel 22 Jump Street, even though they’ve kept more than busy sice then as producers, screenwriters, and creative forces on projects including the Lego movies, the still-in-progress Spider-Verse saga, and more. They were, infamously, the original directors of another giant space movie, 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, until Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy removed them from the project in favor of Ron Howard, reportedly fearing a too-light, too-improvisational tone.
Chatting over burgers in a midtown Manhattan hotel room, a few hours before Project Hail Mary‘s premiere, Lord and Miller told Rolling Stone why Gosling reminds them of Warren Beatty, how Sandra Hüller‘s showstopping karaoke scene came together in 36 hours, what they really took from the Solo experience, the status of Beyond the Spider-Verse, learning to love Star Wars again, and more.
You guys know how to please a crowd and you want to please a crowd. Is there ever a moment where you pull yourselves back and think, this is too crowd-pleasing? Miller: You can’t give them ice cream for every meal.
Lord: It’s such an interesting question because it’s a word that is following the movie around a lot — crowd-pleasing, blockbuster, feel-good. And I can’t say we ever think about, “Oh, this joke’s gonna knock ’em dead.” We’re not gaming the audience. We are just trying to make the movie really good.
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Miller: Trying to have engagement from the audience. When you go to a movie you just want to be engaged from beginning to end. And we do show our movies to friends and family and filmmakers again and again, and watch the audience to see where they’re lagging, where they’re shifting their seats. But if we have their attention and they’re laughing at the things that are supposed to be funny and crying at the parts that are supposed to be sad, that’s a success.
Lord: And there are definitely times when we go, “They’re fine with this moment. [But] we love it. And it stays. It belongs here. It’s part of the story. And they don’t know it yet, but they’re gonna think about it tomorrow.” We don’t feel like we’re beholden to the audience. If they don’t laugh big, we’re not that brutal. And we’ve been proven right on this movie. You can’t hear it when people have their breath taken away. It doesn’t come up on the scorecards. You don’t get the same satisfaction as a laugh, but you can feel it when the audience are enraptured — you hear them be quiet. And that’s a big deal. But we do come from comedy, so we do spend the time going, did it land? That’s important.
James Gunn recently told me he was trying to pull back from his instinct to always need a laugh — what he called his tendency to “tap dance for the audience.” His example was the long dialogue sequence between Lois and Clark in Superman that he would’ve been afraid of before, because it was too sincere and didn’t undercut itself with a joke. Lord: The best part of that movie is the relationship between Clark and Lois, and Superman getting dumped. And how sweet Superman was. I texted James right after I walked out of that movie going, “This is your best film. Your most sincere.”
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Miller: We’re not really afraid of sincerity, as I think is pretty clear from this movie. Those Spider-Verse movies — that’s what makes them tick. There’s so much emotion in them. You think it’s flipping and zipping around the city, but the most iconic scenes are [the characters] Gwen and Miles talking on the top of a building. In [Project Hail Mary], the book was funny and emotional. The book was thrilling and it made you feel a lot of things. And that was our goal. We always feel like if the audience can feel different feelings, sometimes even in the same scene, they’ll come out of it and be like, “I feel different from how I felt when I came into the building.”
Lord: And I do think it’s OK for a dramatic scene to have laughs in it. Life is full of people making jokes to ease the tension. At funerals, you get some of the biggest laughs because the dramatic tension is so hot. Everyone who speaks is totally set up for a laugh. We’re dying for a laugh.
Miller: There’s a moment when [Gosling] is looking in the mirror and goes, “I pause on you,” and the whole audience erupts because you’re desperate. It’s such an emotional moment. And then here he is trying on being a good person for two seconds. And it’s really funny. It’s a catharsis.
Lord: And if you see 2001 with an audience — which we’ve had the luck to do; we never had the Cinerama Dome in 70mm, RIP Cinerama Dome — it gets hard laughs and you can’t believe it because this is held up on a pedestal, this movie, and you realize it’s a crowd pleaser. It’s a haunted-house movie that gets hard laughs with a cliffhanger intermission. So I think we try not to be snobs about putting a laugh in a dramatic scene.
There are levels to movie stardom, and I feel like Gosling hit a new one here. Other than the flashbacks, he had to do the thing Tom Hanks did in Cast Away — hold the screen alone for practically the whole thing, with nothing but a rock. And he more than met the challenge. Miller: You see him in Half Nelson or Drive and you see his incredible dramatic acting chops. And then you see him in Nice Guys or Crazy, Stupid, Love and you’re like, oh, he can do anything. But you haven’t seen him do all of those things in the same movie. We knew he had the range … We didn’t know just the extent of how many different moves he had that were ones we’d never even seen before. Watching a person who has complete control over every aspect of his body — we were putting him on wires, doing physical shenanigans for weeks.
Lord: He created with his body and his silhouette. Which is what it was like working with Channing Tatum, whose creativity is about how he moves.
Miller: He’s a dancer.
Lord: What’s fun about the movie and the tremendous value is you get to see all those moves in one place. What’s fun about watching Ryan’s career is he adds talents, like LeBron James or something. Every season it’s, “Oh, you learned how to do that?” And then watching him put it all together into one film is really exciting.
Miller: The secret for him isn’t that he just naturally can do it all, though he can. It’s that he’s really thoughtful and he really cares and he puts a lot of creativity and thought into every scene, every moment, every costume. He comes in the morning with ideas for the scene.
Lord: And we sweat the details and we work well with people like that.
From left: Directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord with cinematographer Greig Fraser and actor Ryan Gosling on the set of Project Hail Mary. Jonathan Olley/Amazon Studios It was pretty interesting that Gosling came up with the karaoke idea — the idea that Sandra Hüller’s character would sing. Lord: Yeah, it was like, she’s a great singer. We’re crazy not to put her in the thing. So we were like, alright, how do we craft a scene that makes the movie better? It isn’t just a sideshow. And then we all came up with this thing of, oh, it’s her way of revealing herself. It’s a dare that Ryan gives her.
Miller: And then we had to ask Sandra, will you sing a karaoke song in 36 hours from now? Which is not a thing you’d want to do. Normally, you give weeks to practice and have a singing coach and get comfortable with the piece. And she was like, “I’ll do it, but I get to pick the song.” So she picked the song. So the creativity of Ryan going, “Isn’t it crazy that we have a person with the voice of an angel who we have this karaoke scene and it’s about how she can’t be part of it? Wouldn’t it be great if she did sing.” And then the creativity of Sandra to pick that Harry Styles song where the lyrics were so poignant for the moment and be able to do it without much preparation at all. We shot the reactions first to give her a chance to warm up. But the other actors didn’t know what was coming.
Lord: We didn’t tell them. So they were really surprised for real. And then we went back and altered that scene and made sure that Ryan’s character challenged her to sing, so that it was accepting a dare.
Was there a licensing scramble to clear that song? Lord: The funniest one ever. We were in a little country town in England and people are making calls like, “When does L.A. wake up?”
Miller: It’s our last day on this location and we tried to push it as late as we could to give her time to practice. We were like, oh, that song is not gonna be easy to clear. Get a public domain song as a backup. Our music supervisor got us most of the way there that we felt confident enough.
And now that’s the centerpiece of the movie. Miller: When she started singing, it was very clear that, oh, this is something special.
There’s a thing James Cameron supposedly said to Leonardo DiCaprio during the casting of Titanic — Leo wanted to give the character a drug addiction or a missing leg or something, and Cameron told him, “You’ve gotta learn how to hold the center without all that stuff.” This felt like that kind of performance. Lord: We talked about a lot of backstory stuff with Drew [Goddard], because we all did wonder, do we need to know more about this guy? But every time we tried to shunt something in, it just didn’t fit. We tried to figure out what relationship was he leaving behind on Earth. And ultimately, to pack Earth with a lot of relationships that needed to be resolved at the end of the movie was not what the book did. This is a story about someone who’s lonely on Earth, makes a friend in space, and stays there.
Miller: Rather than a person who’s got a rich life on earth and goes and becomes sad and lonely in space — like most space movies are.
Did Ryan want that kind of backstory for a while? Miller: We were trying to dig into the character. We had lots of conversations about that type of stuff. And then we shot the movie relatively in order with the space stuff first. The first week of shooting was him waking up out of the coma and making his way into the cockpit with the beard and crazy space caveman.
Lord: And all the Earth stuff’s at the end. So there was a hope to know, do we need something to hold onto to drive this performance? And by the time we got to the end of the movie, it was clear it wasn’t necessary.
The Rocky character is incredibly lovable, but in theory it could have been very difficult — he’s naughty, he’s not expressive, he’s not Yoda. There were a lot of challenges. Miller: You look at him in a still image, you’re like, what is it? It’s a bunch of rocks. I don’t see where’s the appeal. But it’s the way he moves, [puppeteer and voice actor] James Ortiz’s personality, all of that stuff that makes him so appealing. I think that’s part of the fun of it — he doesn’t look conventionally cute, but he worms his way into your heart in the movie. As an audience, you’re like, “What is this thing? I’m not sure I get it or I like it.” And then he really grows on you. But I think that’s because of all the work we did designing the puppet with Neil Scanlan and the creature shop team, all the details. And then James and the Rocketeers — what we called the puppet team — the way they developed how he would move and these specific idiosyncratic quirks of his movement. And then complimented by Arslan [Elver] and the Framestore team that did animation of him. It ended up being about 50/50 puppetry and animation. And you really can’t tell which is which. It’s so seamless. In post, we would get confused, going, “Is this animation or is this a puppet?” And they wouldn’t even know sometimes.
What were your early discussions about the challenge of making this inert-seeming thing as lovable as he ended up being? Lord: One of the X factors is Ryan and his belief in the other person in the scene with him. So the first thought we had was, it’s gonna be a puppet. It has to be, because we need a scene partner for Ryan. We can’t fake the relationship. You can’t fake the delight when somebody says something you don’t expect. We kept thinking, it’s gonna be like doing a movie with a child actor where that actor’s gonna do things that throw you off and are surprising. And the best version of that is the movie star has to think on his feet. And watching someone do that is so charming. So when you’re seeing Ryan delighted by Rocky, that’s real. Because he’s watching a real puppet and it’s doing something and it’s magical when it comes together.
Miller: There’s a scene where he’s messing with a tape measure and the puppeteer is wrapping the tape around himself. He is really reacting. You can feel that it’s really happening.
Lord: It’s movie magic. And what’s wonderful about seeing it onscreen is you’ve got a character who’s cynical and beaten down and now suddenly he’s feeling like a child and optimistic in a way that as adults we very rarely have access to. We rarely get to experience wonder because we know too much. But if you go to space and you meet an alien friend and he’s doing the Watusi [dance] or whatever, you get that.
You mentioned Harold and Maude as a reference. Miller: Unlikely friendship, very funny, but about death.
Lord: A funny movie about death.
Miller: Trying to talk about the human condition. It’s not the most obvious connection, but it’s a touchstone movie for us in a lot of things.
At what point did that reference come in? Lord: Pretty early. It’s one of our favorite movies, we’re always thinking about it. But we had so much to rely on with the book and the script that it wasn’t like we went around referencing movies. Paper Moon I guess we talked about, because Ryan O’Neal is playing low status to his daughter the whole movie. And we often think — some of our favorite movie stars, like Tom Cruise, is not popular because he’s always winning. He’s popular because his back is always against the wall. Even in Rain Man. He’s low status in all his iconic roles. He’s in trouble. And one of the things I love about watching Ryan is he always elevates the other person in the scene over him. He’s Warren Beatty or Robert Redford. Warren Beatty only wanted to play characters that were low status, even though he was the sexiest man alive. And so Ryan is always going, “You know who I want to elevate this time?” — the scene with Lionel Boyce as the security guard, and he’s going to invite him into this story with him and make him his equal. He’s going to take Rocky and look up to him like “he’s cooler than me and I want to impress him.” He’s playing “get on the team” that whole time.
Miller: It’s “I’m really looking forward to working together” — that’s why it’s moving. It is not the, “I’m a person who thinks he’s better than you.”
Lord: And when he’s complaining about Rocky being a tough roommate to live with, he’s conferring all this power onto Rocky. He’s expressing his helplessness. And Rocky’s in there against his will and he is bossing him around.
The novel does a better job than, say, Armageddon in establishing why a non-astronaut would be in space. If you’re familiar with the Ben Affleck commentary on that — Miller: One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.
Lord: I love that movie. And one of the things I love the most about it—
Miller: He’s clearly drunk in that audio commentary.
Lord: And have you heard the audio commentary with all the scientists? It’s the rare Michael Bay movie to make an appearance in the Criterion Collection. And there’s six audio tracks. And one of them is the scientist talking about all the things they told Michael wouldn’t work. And he said, “Shut up.” And he did them anyway.
How worried were you about scientific accuracy beyond what the novel established? Lord: We were pretty uptight. We tried to treat the novel like it was a nonfiction book. And that everything in it is true and we are trying to represent it as accurately as we possibly can. So we were always having specialists on set.
Miller: Thankfully we had Andy [Weir] on set quite a bit, and every time we were like, “Oh, we need Ryan to write some equations on this board — what would they be?” He would write out the equations. And then we would feed what [Andy] said in [Ryan’s] ear so that Ryan could write the actual math based on the size and scale of the ship from the movie — which is a different size and scale of the ship from the book. So he redid all the math and figured it all out.
Lord: If there’s inaccuracies in how he’s doing the science, it’s from editing. On the day, he did every single thing.
Were there moments when Andy’s feedback on set was impactful or surprising? Miller: All the time. Making a movie is a different venture than writing the book, where you can have a chapter about how we turned the ship around. This was a situation where we’d be like, uh-oh, we need to figure out a way to get from here to here in a simpler way. And his whole bag is — you have a problem that needs to be solved, I’ll come up with five different ways to solve it. All his books are people solving problems creatively. He’d be like, “OK, you could do this, or you could do this, or you could do this.” And we’re like, “That third one’s perfect, thank you.”
Was there weight attached to picking which film you’d direct next after all this time? Lord: We were certainly in a mode after making the Spider-Verse stuff and The Afterparty, looking for what we were gonna direct next as a feature. But this was a surprise that it showed up. “There’s a new manuscript, read it tonight. Ryan’s attached. Are you in or are you out?” And we talked about it very quickly with Aditya [Sood], who runs our company and discovered Andy as a self-published novelist and built The Martian. And we brought Drew onto The Martian, so he was like, “Guys, this is what it feels like when a movie comes together. This is the one.” And for us reading it, it was like, it has everything I want. It has impossible filmmaking challenges — the character with no face. There’s a million obstructions for us to overcome, which is what gets us excited. And it’s about friendship. In order to save the universe, you have to make a friend. And we know how to tell that story. A lot of times how we assess it is, is this something I want to spend two years thinking about?
Miller: Are we the right people to tell this story?
Lord: And could someone else do a better job?
Miller: And this one we were like, no — this is literally a story about friendship that’s funny and emotional with massive stakes and big scale, and a character that needs someone who has animation brains to realize in a way that will be as emotional as it needs to be. In addition to the fact that the book was just — we were smitten with it. It had all of the pieces of things that we care about and like to do.
“Animation brain” is interesting, because it’s not just “we know how to do Rocky.” Even in 21 Jump Street, there’s things like the drug-effect scene — one of the greatest things ever made, frankly — where you can feel that animation brain coming in. Miller: There’s a visual language. It’s a tone. One of the things we learned on the Spider-Verse movies was, with those characters being able to walk on walls, we were able to move the camera and orient the camera all sorts of crazy ways in those movies and the audience went with it. And first thing we think is, oh, there’s no up or down in space. We should be freed of having to have our camera upright all the time. And so we talked with Greig [Fraser] about that and he was really excited to find interesting ways to twist the camera around to project a mood. It became a thematic of how we did the movie. When you’re trying to make an animated movie, you want to give people a visual spectacle they haven’t seen before and a visual language they haven’t seen before. And we were like, OK, we’re gonna be in space. How are we going to show space in a way that doesn’t feel like every other space movie?
Lord: And when you make an animated movie, you’re building everything from scratch. You’re designing outer space. You’re designing the light. Every single thing is driven by the story. So we bring that into live action. The ship is made by every country on Earth. So it’s a quilt. Every room should look different. It should feel like it was a custom quilted blanket for a person who was just born. Space is usually really inhospitable in movies, and cold and scary, and we do that, but ultimately space is the place where he is from. It’s where we live. So as the movie goes on, we turn up the volume on the house — bright and colorful — the stars, so that the thing gets warmer and more inviting.
You had a particular experience with Solo. What lessons or scars did that leave? Lord: We have many spectacular failures in our career. That’s just one that people know about. What’s really interesting is we shared so many department heads on this movie with that movie. No matter what happens, they can’t take away what you learn. We shot almost the whole movie. We learned so much. We worked with the greatest people in the world. And a lot of teammates that we brought onto this one. The main feeling was it was a reunion.
Miller: One of our first calls after getting Drew on board was to Neil [Scanlan] and the creature shop team we had worked with on that movie. We were like, it has to be Neil and his team. Nobody else will be able to do it the way he will. It was the same sound team, same costume people. We were able to amass a lot of the same folks. We learned a great deal making that movie and applied a lot of it to this one.
But it’s not like you thought you were doing anything wrong on Solo. It’s not like, “We made these mistakes, this time we won’t do that.” Miller: I think it was just a different situation. That’s a big franchise and this is an original movie that is its own standalone piece. We wanted to make it as great as we possibly could so that they don’t go, “OK, we’re not doing this type of thing ever again.”
Lord: We approach all these movies the same way. How can this feel different? How can it have the soul of the source material and expand upon it? How do we design a production so that it gives everyone space to hand-make the movie, so that you feel everybody’s fingerprints on it? It feels like the work of 200 human hands, not a system or a company, but rather a troop. We have a live Rocky performance in front of Ryan so that they can play and discover as the movie happens. Our department heads know that we work well with people with ideas — ideas that are different than ours. They’re welcome to come and be like, “Hey, I thought of this,” even if it’s right before we shoot. So we try to have a movie that — while it is meticulously planned — accommodates spontaneity. Which is unbelievably rare at this scale.
Did it take you a while to get back to being able to enjoy Star Wars after that experience? Miller: It was Andor, honestly. That brought me back to Star Wars. I was like, this is just really well-executed storytelling. It was a different vibe, but also we’d be like, “Oh, I recognize that prop because we designed that.”
Lord: For me it was the pandemic. I finally caught up with Rian [Johnson]’s Episode Eight [The Last Jedi], which itself is a “burn the scrolls” movie. It’s a “let’s make our own new thing” statement about how to take these legacy things into the future.
Where are you guys with Beyond the Spider-Verse? Miller: We are in the middle of that process.
Lord: Dead center. We’re moonlighting on this tour.
Miller: While we were editing this film, we set up our editing offices in the building where Sony Animation was moving so that we could spend mornings over at Spider-Verse and then spend the rest of the day editing this movie. The day after we finished color and sound on this movie, we were back in the offices again, where we will be for the next calendar year.
So it’s being written and being animated? Miller: It’s being animated, there are storyboards, there’s animatics of the whole thing, but it continues to evolve. We’re on schedule. And the movie’s very emotional — the most emotional of the three. We’re doing a bunch of crazy visual stuff that’s even wilder than the first two. The team is an all-star team. And this is the first time we’ve been working with a live-action DP in animation — Alice Brooks. The two worlds are converging.
Last time we talked, right when the last Spider-Verse came out, you guys were saying it was gonna take a while. And Sony was insistent that the next one was coming out in, like, 10 months. Lord: Maybe you guys don’t need to have announced a specific release date. It’s your money.
But it wasn’t physically possible. Lord: No, it wasn’t physically possible. But it did make for a really interesting movie.
Is an Archie movie still happening from you guys? Lord: Yeah. There’s a really great idea and script for that.
Miller: Or outline, I guess, well on its way to being a script.
Lord: It’s nice when a good idea walks in the door.
I recently rewatched the 21 Jump Street movies and they are so good. Now I know you blew up all the sequel possibilities at the end of the second one — Lord: Or we left a roadmap!
