Making movies is all about compromises. This actor is unavailable, so you cast someone else. That location is too expensive, so let’s build a set. This shot is impossible, so let’s think of something better. At every step, the big, huge mechanism of filmmaking is always a work in progress. But on Project Hail Mary, directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord tried to embrace a new philosophy.
“What’s great about this movie is there are so many things that make it harder to make,” Miller said in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con. “All of the zero G, all of the centrifugal gravity, the characters have to have a wall between them because their atmospheres are different. Everything that a regular movie would be like, ‘Oh, we can change that,’ we were like, ‘Anything that makes it harder we’re not going to change.’ We’re going to stay true to it, and then that difficulty is what makes it interesting and makes it special.”
His co-director, Phil Lord, put it another way. “We kept saying, with respect, this movie is not a Mac, it’s a PC,” he said, to much laughter. “The movie is a machine, the ship is a machine; it can be beautiful, it just can’t be pretty.”
It is true that almost everything about Project Hail Mary makes it seem incredibly difficult to make. Most of the movie is set on a spaceship. That spaceship meets an alien race represented by a creature made out of stone that doesn’t speak English. Changing the setting or the character could’ve still conveyed the overall idea of the story, but it wouldn’t be the story author Andy Weir wrote in his novel. So everything had to be right.
So how did Lord and Miller bring that rock creature, nicknamed Rocky, to life? “We called our friend Neil Scanlan at the Lucasfilm creature shop, and we tackled it together,” Miller said. “We built a practical creature that was puppeteered by an amazing puppeteer named James Ortiz and a team of five, which we called the Rocketeers, and it was amazing having Rocky there on set every day so that we could have a real interaction and shoot the whole thing practically. Ultimately, it’s going to end up being a beautiful blend of creature puppetry and animation, and he comes alive in a way that you would die for this character.”
Sounds like it’s beautiful, but maybe not pretty, just like a PC.
Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, opens in theaters on March 20.
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