Phil Lord & Chris Miller (PROJECT HAIL MARY), Vol. III

0:00From athletic stuff like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic stuff like a half mile stroll. Get those steps in. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic, Sierra's got it. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. bundling just another way to save with the personal price plan prices are based on rating plans that vary by state coverage options are selected by the customer availability amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state have you guys ever entertained or been offered a live action spider-man film yes which one like the actual spider-man or one of those any spin-offs?

0:56You know, okay, you know. Did you come close? Was it a serious, was it a serious consideration or did it just not? As you know, we love Spider-Man. Uh, we're fans of the, we're fans of the character and the world. Okay. We'll leave it at it. Yeah. Prepare your ears, humans. Happy, sad, confused begins.

1:19Hey guys, it's Josh. Welcome to another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused. today on the show, the brilliant filmmakers that are Phil Lord and Chris Miller talking Project Hail Mary and so much more. Hey guys, thanks as always for checking out the podcast on YouTube, on Spotify, however you're enjoying it. I appreciate you guys. Project Hail Mary coverage continues on the podcast because I love this movie. And when you have an opportunity to talk to the likes of Ryan Gosling and Lord Miller, you take it. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the Ryan Gosling episode last week. If you haven't checked it out, what are you doing with your life check it out and now we continue with lord and miller they are the directors of project hail mary it is now in theaters check it out if you haven't already check it out again i've seen it three times i love this movie of course based on andy weir's best-selling book it is a sci-fi adventure comedy drama thriller all the things most importantly it is a great cinematic experience and i so enjoyed having lord and miller back on the pod i believe it's their third time on they're just kindred spirits we're all men of a certain age grew up on certain kinds of movies talking about movies geeking out hopefully this will be like eavesdropping on yeah just three three dorky dorky guys talking about howard the duck yeah howard the duck comes up a lot in this conversation i don't know um before we get to warden miller though quick reminder as always patreon.com happy said confused if you were a patreon subscriber you would have gotten early access to this and Ryan Gosling to virtually every episode we do.

2:50You get bonus materials. You get access to our live events. Stanley Tucci coming up in May. All sorts of fun stuff. Autograph merch, autograph posters, all sorts of cool things. Patreon.com slash happy, sad, confused. Give it a shot. Why not? Okay. Warden Miller. Warden Miller. You know their resume. Do I really need to say Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, the Spider-Verse movies, so much television they produced. Solo? That didn't come to pass, but they did direct a fair amount of solo. And yeah, we talk a little solo in this conversation too. Always easy to talk to these guys.

3:29They are fun to nerd out with. They had a lot to say about the difficult but beautiful production of Project Hail Mary. This was a big Swing, a really difficult movie to make, but thank goodness they poured their blood, sweat, and tears into it because it really came out in the end. But we also talk lots of things about Jump Street, about Solo, about the Spider-Verse films, about their dalliance with a Flash movie way back when, and a lot more. This is a fun filmmaker geek out session. So I think you guys are going to enjoy this. Again, check out Project Hail Mary in theaters now if you haven't already.

4:03No real spoilers in this, so don't worry about that. And enjoy my conversation with Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

4:33All right. All right. Congratulations officially, Project Hail Mary. Look, we were at Comic-Con, that was a moment. I only saw like 20 minutes of footage. For all I knew, the rest of it could have been crappy. How did we do? Did we fall off a cliff? No. You lived up to it. I was saying to you before, we're taping this right before it comes out. The reception is in, critics have weighed in, everybody truly adores this movie. You can't ask for a better early reception. who acts as the pessimist who acts as the optimist in this relationship who brings two pessimists that's true oh no there's pessimist and even more pessimist I would say that's I'm the even more pessimist in this case yes I was going to say generally you guys have succeeded a lot in your career you would think by now you're kind of you take it I take it hard like even the good reviews there's one sentence that I can't so I've mostly the last couple of movies, my practice is I don't read anything.

5:34And I ask Chris, how are we doing in the streets? Because this guy knows. I'm like, we're doing real. I've got my ear to the ground. I was like, listen, you know, I got my sources. And then I wait if someone sends like a great, if something's really great, someone will send it to me. Right. Except. Then you can still find a sentence that's like, ah. Yeah, exactly. So there's clearly a history. There's a review that you still have in the back of your brain. Well, do you know that my lovely girlfriend Irene sent me a text like, I just read the most incredible review and sent it to me and accidentally sent the wrong one, which was one of - For this movie?

6:12Yes, one of very few mean reviews. And I had to go through the whole thing because I was like, well, obviously this gets good at some point. Yeah, you're waiting for the turn. And it never did. But anyway, that was the one. I got it out of my system. Oh my gosh. Yeah. But no, it's really nice. Like people are loving it. Yes. Like they're walking out of the theater and like tweeting about it. And it's like fun to see them like really be overwhelmed. Right. The emotional connection that people are having with it is really the thing that's like the most exciting about it. And I think, look, I mean, I've seen it twice.

6:45I'm going to see it again at your premiere. Like it is one of those things that like it is an emotional experience. It's like a ride. Like it's like thrilling. It's emotional. It's, I know this is what you guys, I think, aspired to. like one of those kind of movies that like is hopefully going to be something for a generation that's a repeatable movie that's like i mean that's a high aspiration right but that was we go into movies even you know if we're doing 22 jump street we're going like we're going to make we want to make the funniest craziest comedy of all time yeah we we're always trying to be superlative with the stuff that we're doing and this one was like we knew from the beginning from the from the source material that it was it was a ride reading it was like you're laughing you're crying you're excited you're at the edge of your seat you're like what's going to happen i stayed up until five in the morning trying to finish this book yeah so i was like what's going to happen to rocky and i was like why do i care about a rock and and you know we wanted to take people on that on that type of thing when you have something that feels that special you want to you want to do it to excellence was there a challenge you didn't anticipate because there a lot of like obvious things that seem like this is for a thousand reasons going to be a challenge what looking back surprised you about the process hardest thing we didn't guess is it the glass i mean the glass is all the reflections like there's always a wall between grace and rocky and you're like oh man and you know we had puppeteers and it was like the reflections of the puppeteers in the glass that we weren't anticipating but that was that wasn't 90 of the the bug is removing them from the glass.

8:19It's quite a bit of lovely work done to make the glass look great. We knew that Rocky was a challenge, but we knew that we had a plan to do it and do it great. The zero G was hard, but we also had a plan to do it well. I would say the power supply for the rotating sun was unanticipated. Just the amount of power you need. Yeah, so we had like - When you said this, you shut down a whole grid or something at some point? No, so we built a tunnel that was the length of the largest stage at Shepparton. And because they had gravity from this centrifugal spinning, that meant that this translucent tunnel that we were in had to be lit, but with a rotating light, which meant that we had to build this array of lights, 360 around this entire tunnel that took so much power that we had to build a bridge to the stage across the street and take wires to steal the power from that other stage just to shoot the scenes.

9:25That was more of a thing than we thought. They don't teach that in film school. But I think the surprising, sneaky, hardest thing about this movie was the book has a lot of science that Grace does and because it's narrated from inside of his brain, he can tell you what he's thinking. but for the first third of this movie, he doesn't have anybody to talk to about it. Totally. So how do we show the audience what he's doing and make you understand and care about it without him narrating the thing? That was actually just a writing challenge for Drew and a cinematic challenge for us. Yeah, choosing the plausible moments.

10:05I'm going to talk to Drew about this too, of when would he actually say something to himself that doesn't feel like a leap? He almost never does. And we have a great lead actor who will not do anything fake. That feels false, right? So great that way. That's very helpful. No, no, no. I mean, his face obviously can tell you everything you need to know, but he wasn't going to be like, he would bust you on it if you're trying to get him to say something to himself out loud. You know, that feels fake. And now I will put two CCs. So it just meant that we had to do it cinematically, which was like a really fun and interesting challenge.

10:44We built these experiments with advisors, and he does them all, and he does them properly, and we just tried to make it look cool. You told me once that I feel like every, I think you said every film of yours has had a disastrous test screening, where it's like an early in the process, you're like, oh, God. Oh, we got that out of the way early. We never did, like our first official test screening went great, but we do a lot of early screenings for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers. And this movie was massive. And when we finally got the assembly down to under four hours long, we subjected some filmmaker friends of ours to a three-hour, 45-minute cut of the movie, which was embarrassing.

11:33So what was the major note besides cut an hour? Get it way shorter. Yeah. I just think that you could just, you know, you just don't know how the scenes are going to land with a lay audience. You know, for us, we thought everything was charming. But some of those charming things didn't land. So really, it made it a lot, it made it really easy to get down to three hours. Right. And then we had to slowly, slowly work our way down to two and a half hours. My sense is you are kind of like Edgar Wright's, like a friend. You're part of kind of that group of, I'm sure you have a group of filmmakers you trust.

12:07They trust you. So can you say who is in that group who was helpful for you in this process or has been? I mean we had we many many many people I don't want to leave anyone out but Trying to think who was in that first screening was true Yeah, exactly Dave Callahan yep, Jason Jeff Jeff Rowe yep from Ninja Turtles and Mitchell's versus machines sure It was just like, who will give us thoughtful advice? Jason Reitman was there. Jason came. Who gives thoughtful advice but will understand what this is right now? You know, like they won't. They're going to understand that it's very long and they'll give us the right advice.

12:54It's interesting because obviously you've worked so much in animation over the years and the nature of that is a very iterative process. And this is a very FX heavy film. and I think you can only be so iterative. I mean, you can edit down, you can cut. Right. Au contraire, my friend. Educate me. You can build things. Yeah, and so we shot most of this movie virtually before we got on stage. Shot it for real. You know, on a motion capture stage that we built, during prep, while we're building the sets, we have this, we're spending like every morning on this stage with - Greg Fraser, our cinematographer, and he has a virtual camera on his shoulder.

13:35And it was originally sort of like, let's make sure that the sets that we're building for the spaceship are the right dimensions. And if we need to do a move that we can know where we need to cut a section of the ship and is the exterior of the ship, what area of the ship do we need to build and all that type of stuff. So we were just like, but it gave us a chance to play around, experiment in a way that was a lot easier than when you're like on a set with everybody and it's really expensive. So it was great having that like as like a little test kitchen to try 100 different things. And then we cut that together in little animatics and we were like, okay, this scene works.

14:16And so we had a good feeling. But then we'd show up on the day and then other new ideas would come. And you have to like plan, plan, plan, know exactly where the wires are going to go for the zero gravity, all of that stuff but then be flexible to like adjust what a better idea comes along you have to plan to be flexible right and the sense of play has to like pervade the whole production it means that like you've created a culture where like you know Gary props can pitch you an idea I built this thing and I was thinking oh great idea and so that that way it never gets stale a movie that gets planned for six months can get stale so we're always just trying to here.

14:55How can this movie have as much personality and spontaneity as possible? More Happy Sad Confused coming up.

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18:31Well, it's interesting. I've talked to so many filmmakers about the challenges of space movies, including no less than Danny Boyle famously. Oh, yeah. Sunshine almost broke him. Right. He said something to Dan Pemberton, I think. He said that, yes, every director wants to go to space. And most of them never go back. Would you go back? Do you understand what he's talking about? I do, but we would go back. Yeah, it was a challenge, but it was a joy challenge. Like Greg and Paul Lambert, a VFX supervisor, like in the middle of, after the first month of shooting, came to us like kind of joyfully going like this is the most complicated movie we've ever worked on and we just finished making two dune films and so and they were like just can you believe what we're doing can you believe what we're getting away with and it was like you know putting like right in a harness to be on wires for like day seven in a row is like you know like all right okay here we go you know again the vomit comet wouldn't have been that much fun to make this Yeah, it's called Bomb and Comet for a reason.

19:38Yeah. And you only get, on that thing, you get like... You get like 10 seconds. Yes. Do you match? So it's hard to make the movie 10 seconds at a time. Right. Or 30, I guess. And on a very small piece of set that you would be able to have. But, you know, we ended up using this thing called a spin ring that allowed him to move his hips around and spin himself any which way he wanted to, so he wasn't just gliding along like a high school Peter Pan production. and he's such a gifted in addition to being an actor with an insane range. He also is a great physical performer because he can do anything and he's super handsome, but it's fine.

20:15Set that aside. It's fine. No jealousy. No, it's super fair. But it would allow him to improvise in the air, like doing air parkour, and we'd set up this path and be like going from here to there, but you're bad at zero gravity so whatever you would do and then you sort of like work out with the guys who are like pulling them left and right on the on the wires he'd try some stuff and then you would kind of improv like being clumsy in zero gene that's the kind of thing where you're like planning a lot right but giving a space for creativity and invention yeah it doesn't seem fair that like the guy that can be literally the coolest guy on the planet right and drive can also roll off a table like Will Ferrell.

20:58Exactly. You're like, that's such command. The thing that's most remarkable is that he's willing to do that. That's half the battle up there. And that is what makes that guy special. It's like he sweats the details, he cares about everything, he wants it to be great, and he's willing to throw his body on the floor. If it'll make it great. He wants to please the audience on some level. He wants to give them something. Okay, so we talked a little bit about Rocky. Let's talk a little more. Because, I mean, this movie doesn't work without Rocky. And it's really a genuinely hugely emotional relationship to see Ryland and Rocky in this.

21:36And Rocky is a challenge for a thousand different reasons. Doesn't have a face. Yeah. E.T. had eyes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yes. There are a lot of Muppets without much of a face. Okay. You mean like the Swedish chef just has eyebrows or whatever, right? But he does have a mouth. He does have a mouth. Most of the Muppets have mouths. And noses and rocks. He has none of these things. It's true. Go back and look at E.T. and Empire and figure out how they did what they did. Interestingly, the first person we called was Neil Scanlon from The Creature Shop. He helped make Yoda. Exactly. Bit of a legend.

22:16And he was sort of saying like, if you look at it, Yoda is like not that expressive of a puppet. But because Mark Hamill like believed Yoda was real and acted like he was real, then you, the audience, believed it. And Frank Oz had something to do. Frank Oz, pretty great, for sure. But that was partially like we knew that the secret weapon was going to be Ryan and Ryan believing in it. Ryan caring so that we care. But because we had our partnership with Neil and his team, we built this puppet and we designed it. It took us a year to get him into shape and get him right and put all this detail on his body and these carvings that had history and culture and things that made sense to us but we never explained to the audience.

23:02And then we had casting. We did auditions and chemistry reads with a bunch of puppeteers. and James Ortiz was just blew everyone away and his dynamic with Ryan, even in the chemistry read, was like, oh, there it is. That's Rocky and Ryland. And so we knew we had a scene partner and we were able to shoot everything with James on set with the puppet team and the Rocketeers, the five people it takes to operate that thing. and we kind of tried to shoot as much in order as we could because at the beginning, they still were trying to figure each other out. But then as it went on, they were bonding because they were the only ones that were talking to each other and they would go back and forth, improvise so many spontaneous moments that wouldn't have happened if he was just talking to a tennis ball on the stick.

24:02Was he always going to also be voiced by James? No, that was not. we were just sort of like we need to see it's like a parlor game like who's gonna who would we get yeah it feels like we can never really land on anything where we were like that's obviously the answer and then ultimately it just everybody fell in love with James we started testing the movie and they were like who's that voice that's so good right and also the idea that were we gonna like bring somebody and just copy what James already did and the thing that we actually captured on the day it seemed crazy like he was Rocky and I mean the last secret ingredient is a frame store that did the animation that complemented the work that the puppet team did.

24:39It ended up being about 50-50, and there are shots back-to-back where no one can tell which shot is animated, which shot is puppet, because they mimicked the puppetry so perfectly that it was seamless. There's also a real benefit that James is, to the audience, is a stranger. Right. You know, that you're not going, oh, it's Danny DeVito. Oh, there he is. No, hey, Bill Hanks, again. You know, I don't know if you'd feel the same way about him. Totally. Harder to get the music rights, Harry Styles, or John Williams' Close Encounters? Like, what's the... Close Encounters? I literally... There was so little drama about it that I had to ask on the mix stage, like, we've cleared this, right?

25:24We've cleared this, right? Right, Close Encounters. I expected to get so many phone calls. It was a pitch that Steven Spielberg pitched to us right before we left for London. He was like... We were talking to him about the movie, He was like, so the alien speaks in song? We're like, yeah. He's like, you should have him do the Close Encounters theme. Wouldn't that be funny? And we're like, well, if you said it, Matt. If you said it, then I'm calling that a green light. You say that it's okay. Verbal contracts are binding. I think I said to him in the meeting. So anyway, yeah. So that was really easy.

25:53And Sign of the Times, the thing about it is we had to clear it in 24 hours. Right. So this was not in the script. Yeah, not in the script. And as you well know, this is one of the emotional high points of the film. It's incredible. Well, and it's embarrassing that it wasn't something that was initially designed into the movie. But it came out so great. And one of the reasons is that Sondra was like, I'll sing, but I get to pick the song. So the serendipity, it's not serendipity because she's a great artist with a great brain and she's a great filmmaker. So she picked a great song. But I can't take any credit for it.

26:27Right. We were just like, when she said it was going to be the song, we're like, oh, that could be expensive. that we're like, maybe we should think of a backup in case we can't clear that. But then we had her go do it because we were on this ship that we were shooting on and shooting in a real officer's bar on a real naval ship. And it was our last day there. And so we were like, you know, we got to do it before the sun goes down. And she came in and we shot the reaction shots first. And nobody knew what she was going to do. That's crazy. And you can see everyone's jaws on the floor because they're like, oh, my God.

27:00Yeah. And the poignancy of the thing and like after that before we even turned around to shoot her side We were like, well, we're not gonna do a backup. That's for sure. That's in the movie It doesn't like doesn't matter what it is. That's amazing. Do you can you take credit for having directed Meryl Streep? Technically now? Yeah Technically technically it's pretty sus Yes, yes, of course On her resume? Listen, if she wants to put us on her resume, that's just fine. Is that literally a voice note she sends over? When you get the headshot of Meryl Streep on the back of us, all the directors she's worked with.

27:33We rejected Rocky voice with her number one claim to name. I guess let her in. I guess let her do it. The funny part was she was like, could you give me a line read? And everyone was like, I'm not going to give Meryl Streep a line read. She asked us twice. How about you? Would you do the line read? Which one of you is more of an actor? We're like, neither one of us is going to do that. That's like when the devil asks you, you know, like, just to, yeah, what's the big deal? Just do a quick library. I think she was testing you. Yeah, so who's God testing us? You're like, right. And we passed. Yeah.