Project Hail Mary’s Phil Lord, Chris Miller on Directing Ryan Gosling

The last time Phil Lord and Chris Miller directed a film, Netflix, Amazon and Apple weren’t making movies, COVID hadn’t changed theatergoing habits and the existential threat of AI wasn’t upending the industry. (Sony, which released Lord and Miller’s 2014 feature 22 Jump Street, hadn’t even been hacked yet.) Twelve years have passed since Lord and Miller helmed a movie, and on March 20, they’ll be blasting back into theaters with their most ambitious directorial effort yet, Amazon MGM Studios’ $200 million Project Hail Mary.

It’s unusual for directors who’ve spent that much time out of the director’s chair(s) to remain prominently at the forefront of the business. After being dismissed amid creative differences with Lucasfilm over their helming of 2017’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, the duo quickly rebounded, winning an Oscar as the producers of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and taking the franchise to new heights with 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse, which grossed $690 million globally, almost double the original. They are already deep into writing and producing 2027’s trilogy capper, Beyond the Spider-Verse, as well as a slew of spinoffs, including the Nicolas Cage starrer Spider-Man Noir series (bowing on Amazon in May).

When not actively working on adding to their global box office haul of more than $4 billion, they serve as respected sounding boards for the slew of filmmakers they call friends. “I’ve been showing them unfinished cuts of my films since Baby Driver,” notes Edgar Wright. “They’re both incredibly astute and, most crucially, constructive.” He adds: “A lot of the time you get notes that are hard to address or action, but their feedback is always creative and practical. I remember Chris once said about some unnecessary exposition, ‘It’s the answer to a question no one is asking.’ That’s stayed with me ever since.”

Project Hail Mary, based on The Martian author Andy Weir’s 2022 novel, stars Ryan Gosling as a schoolteacher sent light-years away on a mission to save humanity — a logline that mirrors Lord and Miller’s conviction that originality can save Hollywood from an over-reliance on AI (they have a lot to say on the subject).

Aditya Sood, president of the duo’s Lord Miller banner, discovered Weir’s self-published novel The Martian in 2013 and helped usher it to the big screen as the 2015 Ridley Scott movie. He notes that lessons the Spider-Verse masterminds learned with their animated work informed how they shaped the visuals of Hail Mary. “They’ve challenged expectations visually of what you’re going see in one of these movies,” he says of their animated work, which also includes Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie.

During a visit to THR’s offices in early March, Lord and Miller revealed the half-dozen movies they’re eyeing as directing vehicles, why they had Gosling dance with a mop and Cage’s surprising mantra for Spider-Noir.

Ryan Gosling had the rights to produce Project Hail Mary. Then you boarded the movie in the early weeks of COVID. Did you read an early manuscript?

CHRIS MILLER In one sitting.

PHIL LORD In 2020, when we’re all standing around going, “What are we going to do?” Here’s a book where it step-by-step outlines what to do in a [different kind of] crisis. Very simple, mundane tasks.

Mike De Luca hired you to make this for MGM. Then he left when Amazon bought the studio in 2022. While it seems like a Jeff Bezos-friendly movie …

MILLER He loves space.

… it’s still an expensive, big swing. Were you worried it wouldn’t happen?

MILLER For sure, because Mike and Pam [Abdy] had been big proponents of it, and they really believed in it.

LORD But we didn’t skip a beat. And then of course our old [Lego Movie] comrades [from Warner Bros.] Courtenay Valenti and Sue Kroll wound up over there.

With the Spider-Verse movies, you famously worked on the scripts until the end of production. You can’t really do that with live action, right?

MILLER We did still.

LORD You just never stop problem-solving. I think by the time we finished, we had screened it 13, 14 times maybe.

MILLER Sometimes for filmmakers and writers, sometimes just for friends and family.

LORD We’re always going, “Oh, they didn’t understand this. They didn’t follow this. They laughed here. They didn’t here.”

MILLER “Oh, I think they’re confused. We can rewrite this line so it’s clear.”

Ryan spends most of his time onscreen with an alien, Rocky. Did you know from day one Rocky would be a puppet on set?

MILLER The whole movie lives and dies on the chemistry between Ryan’s character and Rocky. We did chemistry read auditions with Ryan and several different puppeteers. We had a temporary puppet for them to work with, and James Ortiz came in with his own. It was clear he was Rocky right from the start.

Was all of it puppeteered?

MILLER About 50 percent puppet, 50 percent animation. Some of the scenes we couldn’t get puppeteers to do, like being inside a ball rolling around that set. Framestore did the animation for Rocky. The animation team built on what the puppeteers did and tried to make it move in the same way so that you couldn’t tell what was different.

LORD Even when we couldn’t get the puppet to do what we needed it to do for a shot, we had James Ortiz in a recording booth onstage with an earwig to Ryan so that he was always present.

You got Meryl Streep and others to cameo as different voices on a menu for Rocky. How’d that go down?

LORD Most of it was on set. We gave Ryan an earwig and James one. And then we had different people on set come up at the microphone and didn’t tell Ryan who it was going to be. His kids were on set, so they started doing silly voices.

There was no greenscreen in this movie, which is unusual.

MILLER We built the sets for the [space] ship vertically and horizontally for the two different modes of gravity. We had to shoot with the set tall like a lighthouse and then turn the set on its side like a train car and shoot the other half of the scenes that way. At one point, [DP] Greig [Fraser] and [visual effects production supervisor] Paul [Lambert] were like, “This is the most complex film we’ve ever worked on, and we just finished making two Dune films.”

What does it take on the VFX front to do a movie like this ?

MILLER It’s a massive undertaking, we had 2018 VFX shots on this movie. Led by the brilliant Paul Lambert and Mags Sarnowska. 

LORD It’s a huge team of people lead by several different really wonderful VFX vendors, some of the greatest companies in the world including ILM, Framestore, Sony Imageworks. All of these movies take a village and this one is no exception. James Ortiz, the lead puppeteer and the voice of Rocky, and Arslan Elver, the lead animator at Framestore, spent a lot of time together on set. Arslan also spent about two months embedded with us in edit during post production. That way we had a lot of continuity and feedback between the practical and digital effects teams and it really became one performance. 

MILLER ILM did all of the spaceship exterior stuff and wide outer space shots. They built digital versions of the Hail Mary ship exterior and Rocky’s ship and all of the planet Adrian and the Aurora. They did everything that happens outside during the fishing trip sequence and did an amazing job of making that absolutely beautiful. This movie couldn’t have been done without all of this amazing work, led by Paul Lambert and Mags Sarnowska.

How do you protect your leading man, given the demands of this role, as he’s the only human onscreen for much of the movie?

LORD You’re trying to do the tough stuff in the morning, the stuff that requires a lot of creative thought. The afternoon is stuff that is still challenging, but you’re not writing as much.

MILLER Ryan is always looking for a scene partner. Even in the parts where he was alone, he still was looking for a scene partner. So we had Armando, the robot arm, which was a puppet that was operated by three people. Mary, the voice of the computer — we had Priya Kansara on set in a little voice booth in his ear. We even made a mop for him to dance with for a beat.

It’s been a while since you directed a movie. Were you surprised by how technology has changed?

MILLER One thing we did on this with Greig, and we’ve started incorporating into this final Spider-Verse, is doing virtual prep with the Unreal Engine and a virtual camera. We had most of the space scenes pre-shot as a virtual animatic.

LORD Josh Wichard, who was an improv performer and an actor, was willing to wear the immodest suit with the ping-pong balls all over it. We’d just improvise a bunch of scenes with Josh and work out blocking and figure out if it worked [long before we got on set].

There is a show-stopping scene that was not in the book in which Sandra Hüller sings a Harry Styles song at karaoke.

MILLER Sandra has a beautiful singing voice, and she would sing in between setups. Ryan came over to us and said, “It’s crazy that we’re doing karaoke and that she isn’t singing. Isn’t there a way that we could have her sing?” But we only had two more days on this set that we were shooting on. We figured out that it could work, but it’s not our favorite thing to ask an actor, “Hey, would you mind singing a song in two days?”

LORD And she said, “Only if I get to choose the song.” And one of the fun parts was to see the entire apparatus around the movie scramble to clear a Harry Styles song in 36 hours.

Bezos tweeted how much he liked the movie. Did you get word that he liked it before that?

MILLER We heard that he and Andy [Jassy, Amazon president and CEO] had seen it and they loved it, which was good. Better than the opposite for sure.

I heard that on Spider-Noir, Nicolas Cage had his whole season memorized on day one. Is that right?

MILLER Every time he walked onto the set, he had that episode fully memorized. And he had basically the whole season memorized.

LORD His big idea [for the character] is, he said, “I’m a spider pretending to be a person.”

That AI video of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting caused quite a stir, including a respected screenwriter positing that some day, a kid with the taste of Christopher Nolan will come along and make something incredible with AI.

MILLER I don’t think that’s true. AI can only regurgitate the average of things that have come before it. And one of the great things about Christopher Nolan, and what we try to do, is make something that feels like you haven’t seen it before. I don’t think AI could have made that first Spider-Verse movie because there was nothing like it to have taken from. If you look at [Gosling’s character] Ryland Grace’s wardrobe, it’s a combination of these very specific things. Ryan had experiences with a fox, and he wanted to have a cardigan that had foxes on it. He wore science T-shirts based on the joke science T-shirts that my son wears. Everything is a personal [detail].

LORD What you really experience are the stacking of individual artists’ hands and idiosyncratic taste, piling on top of each other and becoming a virtuous cycle, compounding one another.

What kind of projects can cut through in this age with so much competition for our attention?

LORD When we were working on an animated movie once, the studio that was making it was nervous about how to make an animated movie into a commercial success. So they commissioned a firm to study animated films and to figure out what the common denominator was of the movies that were successful. And after $1 million, the answer that came back was all the successful animated movies had one thing in common. They were original. (Laughs.) And I’m so glad someone else had to spend that money, but that was a very critical lesson for us. And what has played out. Every one of our strange [filmmaker] friends, their biggest success was their most specific and idiosyncratic one.

You are in the marketplace selling projects. Are you concerned about consolidation and Warner Bros. being swallowed up?

MILLER As creative people and filmmakers, you want to have as many people to sell to as possible.

LORD Yeah, and our minds are on the people that might lose their jobs.

So once you get this out into the world, is the next year of your life on Spider-Verse?

MILLER Yes. The day we wrapped the sound mix and the color for Project Hail Mary, the next day we were back in the office. No rest.

Are you itching to direct after Spider-Verse is done? No more 12-year gaps?

MILLER We’re trying to line something up so that we can start prep shortly after.

LORD There’s a backlog of like seven or eight things that we want to do.

Andy Weir’s previous novel, Artemis, is something you’ve been attached to for years. Is that still in play?

MILLER There is an Artemis script, it’s delightful. The thing that was holding that back for years was, how do we execute one-sixth gravity? The story takes place on the moon. We think we’ve figured it out. That’s one of the ones that’s possible.

Have you guys become close to Weir?

MILLER When my son had science questions I couldn’t answer, I would be like, “Maybe Andy will know.”

What kind of questions?

MILLER “If you had a metal rod that went from here to a star system five light-years away and you pulled on the rod, would the person feel it right away or five years later?”

And the answer?

MILLER It would be five years later, because nothing can move faster than light.

What do you tell people trying to start out as filmmakers today?

LORD There is no overnight success. If you chase the prominence or you chase the win, you often fail. If you chase quality, that wins out over time. It might not be as fast, but it’s more lasting.

A version of this story appeared in the March 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.