‘Project Hail Mary’ directors on making outer space feel like home

0:00Phil Lord:From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:15Phil Lord:Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's been a while since I had our old friends Phil Lord and Chris Miller here to do the show since 2014, I think. Fortunately, they haven't directed a movie since 2014. They've done a bunch of other things since then, but they are back behind the camera for the adaptation of the novel, Project Hail Mary. First of all, guys, thanks so much for coming back.

0:36Chris Miller:We're glad to be here. Happy to be back.

0:39Phil Lord:In reading the book, there's so much of the book that I have forgot that I thought I had forgotten until I saw the movie again. And there's this kind of sense that I want to talk to you guys both about this, of playfulness and dread that the book has that you're able to capture. because it's basically his spoken narration and we don't know where we are. And what you guys really get across is that kind of sense of sort of psychological dislocation in the film.

1:07Chris Miller:Yeah, we wanted you to wake up the way you wake up in the novel, disoriented and in the first person. The novel has the benefit of having the main character, Rylan Grace, narrate the entire story. so we had to figure out how to do that cinematically the other thing the book does so well is it you know the book is friendly as much as it talks about hard things there's something about the tone of Andy Weir's writing that's very playful and funny and so we wanted the movie to kind of signal early on like you're in trouble but the movie believes in you and so that was very deliberate and when we made it too spooky it sometimes felt like it was punishing you instead of um calling you to greatness and calling the main character played by you know ryan gosling to greatness believing that he's he's going to get better and yeah that's what we kind of loved about the book and what we were trying to accomplish with the movie is having it both ways, having these massive stakes, the world's at stake, but not feeling bleak.

2:23Chris Miller:And I think the novel did a great job of that. And I think what's interesting is that life kind of is, can be like that, where you can feel two things at the same time. And so the movie has a bit of a genre defying quality to it, but that's, you know, that's part of the human condition.

2:44Phil Lord:It's funny because I think that Andy Weir has kind of created his own genre, which is this sort of thing of self-exploration through characters talking to themselves, which is not even an easy thing to pull off in prose form, let alone in film. And I think that tone of these guys sort of constantly asking themselves questions and seemingly letting themselves off the hook until midway into the book, that's a hard thing to pull off too.

3:10Chris Miller:I mean, there's really nothing about this movie that was easy to pull off uh it was you know the scale of it was it was enormous uh like the just like on a you know spectacle level you know and dealing with things like zero gravity and wires and and and creature puppetry and uh various forms of gravity and and all these things every aspect of the of the production was really, really tricky. And then not the least of it was like capturing the tone and the spirit and the soul of the book.

3:46Phil Lord:I guess I would like to hear too, your first conversations with Ryan Gosling about doing the material, because you ask a lot of him. He comes through, but you certainly ask a lot of him.

3:58Chris Miller:You know, he was the one who had the rights to the manuscript from the beginning and called us up. And we had a previous relationship with Andy Weir through our producer partner, Aditya Sud, and we were all just smitten with this book. And it wasn't really a big surprise that it became a giant bestseller shortly after we decided to work together on it. But Ryan was very thoughtful about the character. He knew what a big load it was and how he was going to have to carry the film on his shoulders because it's all him. He's in every scene. He is, you know you are with him through highs and lows and what's great about ryan is that he's relentlessly creative you know he like embodies this character thinks about it very deeply down to like the details of like what his shoelaces would be and he also is one of the few actors who can pull off something like this that can make you laugh and make you cry make you scared make you excited sometimes all in the same scene and the and the switching back and forth from the sort of dramatic work to being funny, to being like physical, the physical demands on it were massive.

5:14Chris Miller:So, you know, very few people I think could pull off what he was able to do. We once heard that Sidney Pollack, when he started a movie, would call his department heads and ask, do you want to get scared? And I'd say that the two of us and Ryan are all people who like to scare themselves and challenge themselves as filmmakers. And in that way, I think we were all really copacetic.

5:43Phil Lord:You know, between Lego Movie and Spider-Verse, these are stories about people who just more than anything want to have normal lives and are forced into these situations that ask demand that they be extraordinary. And you guys like to both sort of play around with that and play with the genre, but also there are real sort of serious dramatic demands of these things. And clearly this material fit into your wheelhouse, didn't it?

6:09Chris Miller:Yeah, I mean, one thing that I love about this character, Rylan Grace, is that he isn't like Mr. Awesome, super confident, I'll go run into the burning building guy. I can never quite relate to that guy. He is vulnerable. He's scared. He feels like how we all would be if they were thrust into an extraordinary situation. You know, that's what grabs you about the book from the beginning when he like wakes up in space and he doesn't know who he is or what's going on. He's scared. And so, you know, he has to, what it can says about humanity is that like if we are put into the position where we have to do something heroic, it's not the first thing that we're going to do.

6:53Chris Miller:And real bravery is overcoming that fear and doing it anyway.

6:57Phil Lord:Or maybe not overcoming that fear. Not to give too much away is the treatment. Yeah, exactly. Are the guys who direct the new film, Project Hail Mary, Phil Lord and Chris Miller. It's a pleasure to have them back. You'll also hear the show at kcrw.com slash the treatment. But for me, though, it really is this kind of fascinating thing, you guys. These characters who are, and this even gets to me, the Lego movie. These guys who determined to have their feet on the ground in these extraordinary circumstances. And that, to me, kind of gives this story, gives Project Hail Mary, in the way that you rendered it, a really kind of an epic emotional feel.

7:33Phil Lord:Because I can't think of another big film like this if somebody's just determined to be as normal as he can possibly be. I know.

7:42Chris Miller:I don't know. I always think people are motivated mostly by social reasons. You know, like they're looking for their place in the world. and the abstraction of saving the world is just that it's that it's intellectual it's hard to for that to motivate someone because it's so big but i can be motivated by like saving my friend chris you know i can be motivated by saving one person and that's kind of what we were trying to say in the movie i guess is is you know the heroism has to start at home and it's to start with like your everyday actions. It has to start with the people that are in your eyeline.

8:25Chris Miller:Yeah, you have to find someone to be brave for. And honestly, it's the same in Spider-Verse where Miles ultimately does what he has to do for his family. And Emmett in the Lego movie is thrust into a situation out of his control, but ends up doing it for the friends that he's made along the way. And so I think the relationships in this movie are the heart and soul of it. There's sort of two main relationships, one with Ryan and Sandra Huller's character, Ava Strat, on Earth. And then in space, it's Ryan's character and Rocky. And those are the sort of beating heart of the film.

9:10Phil Lord:We'll take a moment to continue with this dialogue with our old friends Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who are finally back behind the cameras for the new film, Project Hail Mary. it's the treatment there's more to come stay with us

9:23hey y 'all

9:24Chris Miller:each week on the Sam Sanders show from KCRW we ask big questions and share hot takes about the pop culture we love now that we have YouTube we don't need any more biopics if they've been alive such that I can watch them on YouTube I don't need it I don't think that music is getting worse I think y 'all just don't listen to artists who aren't in the mainstream Taylor Swift retire it's time to retire

9:46Phil Lord:the Sam Sanders show from KCRW, wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.

9:55Phil Lord:Welcome back. And all roads lead back to Stiflin Ali. It's the treatment of Elvis Mitchell. My guests are our old friends, Phil Lode and Chris Miller. I brought this up to them when they first came here a long time ago, in 2014. They're back behind the camera directing their newest film, the adaptation of Project Hail Mary. But as we were talking before the half, I guess I was thinking, too, that these protagonists that we're talking about that you guys create measure themselves against people who are bigger than life. You know, it's Sandra's character or Lionel here, or it's Elizabeth Banks in the Lego movie.

10:32Phil Lord:I mean, these characters who are kind of these heroic avatars in some way who these guys don't want to be like, but they do want to connect with them. And it fascinates me that it's about people asking questions about themselves that they're forced to really sort of examine when they're away from these people who they kind of measure themselves against.

10:53Chris Miller:Yeah, it's funny, like, because there's two of us, the mythic idea of a filmmaker as someone from whom ideas come down in like thunderbolts, you know, who they always have the answers. it's just not something we experience you know like we both get a lot of ideas but our filmmaking is rooted in dialogue it's rooted in a conversation between the starting with the two of us in this case it's the two of us and ryan and andy and drew goddard the screenwriter and our producing partners and then from there goes to the hod's and of the rest of the cast and suddenly you're on set and you've realized like this movie is being made by like a thousand people.

11:48Chris Miller:We've just never related to that sense of a director as some kind of titan stomping around. I would bet that most filmmakers don't relate to that idea either. It is, you know, one of the most collaborative art forms there is. It requires, you know, hundreds of people to accomplish it. And a movie like this requires even more. So the most successful versions of these are ones where you have great partners and teammates who can bring all their own ideas and everyone can row in the same direction and make something that's so like a unique collection of all these personal specific observations that no one person could have done on their own.

12:36Phil Lord:I think for me, part of the way the frame works is that his head is continually on a swivel. And that's something you guys do anyway. I mean, I think Miles is constantly just turning around too. And when I asked you guys about that, there's almost a sense of these guys, the camera being on a gimbal and you're spinning around. The characters are almost dizzy because they're so busy looking around. And that's something that runs through the work too, isn't it?

13:01Chris Miller:Absolutely. And that was something we learned from Spider-Verse was that, you know, those characters, because they can walk on walls and hang upside down, the camera doesn't need to be always oriented with an up and down. And in space, there is no up and down. So it was a big idea and concept for the whole movie to be from spinning and upside down and on its side and make you feel disoriented the way the character starts, but understand that in space, you have a chance to see things from a new perspective. And also when you meet someone new, they turn your world around. They give you a different point of view, reflect something back new about yourself, that the excitement and terror of making a new friend is that you have to rebuild your sense of self and so that's why like when rocky's ship shows up into the story ryan literally does a 360 and the camera goes with him one of the things we learned on spider verse 2 is that your persistence of vision is so strong.

14:11Your desire, your body's desire to make two disparate things agree is so

14:20Chris Miller:strong that I can change the color of the background every single shot, like in Spider-Verse, and you'll just, you won't even notice it because you're following the story. So we were really confident that even if the editing felt a little jumpy, that would be exciting, that bridging those gaps would give you pleasure and make you feel smart instead of disoriented.

14:48Phil Lord:We're talking about the terror of meeting a new friend with our old friends, Phil and Chris Miller. Their new film as filmmakers is the adaptation of Project Hail Mary. It's the treatment. Almost with everything you guys have done, especially as directors, we don't exactly know where we are at the very beginning. I mean, there's a lot going on. You throw a lot of information at us. You assume that we can keep up. And then you sort of back into the story. And that's definitely what Andy Weir does as a writer, too.

15:16Chris Miller:Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think people these days, especially for blockbuster movies, talk down to the audience too much. They give them no credit. And I think audiences are smarter than many people think they are. And, you know, we test these movies a lot as we're making them. We go through many rounds of friends and families, other filmmakers, writers, and then general public just to see and make sure that everyone stays engaged in this following. And if it is too obtuse, we'll change it. But people follow more than you think. And they want to be treated with respect. And I think they appreciate that, as long as you're not going over everybody's head in a blur.

16:05Chris Miller:And so I think that if more movies did that, I think they would find that audiences would go along with them.

16:11Phil Lord:I think this presents you guys at that. People don't want to be bored. We have low thresholds for boredom ourselves as storytellers, So we're going to assume that people want what we want.

16:24Chris Miller:You want to be respectful of the audience's time. This is a big book with a lot going on, and it's hard to get it to fit into the size of a movie. You know, there's been plenty of navel-gazing space movies that are slow and isolating. But that's not really our style. Well, they'd get you an A-plus at film school. Right. But that's not the grading method. And so we spend time thinking about like, how do I make space warm? In a way, it's like uninviting, but it's also like where we're all from. So how do you make it feel like it's home? That seems like an unusual tactic. and so we're always looking for like oh what's the spin on this that hasn't already been put on it right and also making it optimistic and hopeful despite the end of the world being at stake you know we have this mantra that people are 51 percent good uh in general uh and so our movies should be just, you know, not cloying, but just a little bit more optimistic and hopeful than Bleak.

17:50Phil Lord:I guess I want to ask you, too, because you do offer kind of a point of entry at the beginning of the movie, but it's also a point of entry that fits into these things you guys are talking about, where it's optimistic. I mean, because he's surrounded by kids, and you can't not have that. I mean, so that's, I think, again, And this is what you guys sort of do with the frame and the way you populate the frame. That sort of lays on that foundation of optimism you're talking about. Because, again, it's not only that asks a lot of your star, but it asks a lot of audiences as well.

18:24Chris Miller:One of the things that's so precious is when people are in a theater together and you have their undivided attention. It's like such a gift that we never want to take for granted. And so because you only make so many films in a lifetime, every time we make one, we try to make something that helps people imagine goodness. It's something we learned on this movie, Mitchell's Versus Machines, directed by this wonderful guy, Mike Rianda. And he wrote a movie about his family and how they loved each other and they were always arguing. And one of the adjustments we made together is we realized that the movie could not be about people arguing.

19:10Chris Miller:It had to be about people trying to get along, even if they were failing. And that's like a really minute distinction, but it's a huge difference. And it speaks to the fact that, in my view, our experience, what's spectacular is watching people get along. It's so fun. And anytime I write a scene and I can't figure it out, like why it's not working, I just make everyone try to be nice to each other, even if they have really different points of view. And I find that that really sticks to the screen. Like one of my favorite scenes in this movie is Sandra Huller, you know, whose job it is to marshal all these forces and send some people on a suicide mission to space.

19:55and it means she has to be, she has to suspend her care for them, or apparently does.

20:03Chris Miller:And then she does this wonderful thing, which is they're all in this bar on a ship and sing karaoke. And, you know, Ryan asks her, like, why aren't you down there? And she's like, that doesn't help me, all that camaraderie. He kind of challenges her on it and leaves the scene. And then a few minutes later, she drops down and sings this song at the karaoke bar that basically is saying to her whole crew, like, I love you. I believe in you. You're going to be okay. And if I had a different job, I would be here too. And my sacrifice is that I can't experience this all the time. And I think that's such a lovely take on a character who might just seem like a tough customer in another actor's hands.