By Tom Snyder
The filmmakers behind PROJECT HAIL MARY, a science fiction adventure adapted from Andy THE MARTIAN Weir’s popular novel, aimed for creating an exciting, but intimate, and funny movie for as many moviegoers as possible.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the filmmakers behind such acclaimed and beloved movies as CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, THE LEGO MOVIE, 21 JUMP STREET, and the Spider-Man SPIDER-VERSE movies, recently showed about 30 minutes of clips from PROJECT HAIL MARY to the press at the IMAX headquarters in Playa Vista, Calif. off the beautiful Pacific Ocean coastline of Los Angeles.
The clips looked marvelous and played wonderfully, with some heartfelt, funny, dramatic interactions between the characters, including an unusual alien who appears in the story. Amazing special effects in space added some delicious icing to this cake.
In the story, Ryan Gosling plays a microbial scientist and high school teacher who discovers the biological characteristics of small microbes in outer space that are infecting many stars in the galaxy, including Earth’s sun. Humanity sends him and two other astronauts to outer space to find out why one nearby star seems to be immune to the microbes. German actress Sandra Hüller, of ANATOMY OF A FALL, TONI ERDMANN and THE ZONE OF INTEREST, plays Gosling’s superior on the Hail Mary Project.
“The whole movie is a very emotional experience,” Christopher Miller said, “and casting Sandra Huller was a big part of that. She’s the best. We love her very much.”
“She’s also very cool,” Lord said. “So cool that everyone wanted her to think they were cool, but luckily, I disabused myself of that immediately.
“She would sing in between takes, and she had a beautiful singing voice,” Miller noted.
“There was a karaoke scene, he continued, “and Ryan was like, why isn’t she singing? Shouldn’t she sing? We rewrote the script so that she would. She could sing in the movie also but she was up for anything and was really thoughtful about everything and was just such a pleasant person. You just want her to be your best friend and be super playful. She is good at jokes.”
“That’s the irony,” Lord said. “She’s such a good actor, she can play someone who’s not good at [telling] jokes.”
“And the two of them really played off each other in an amazing way,” Miller added.
Lord and Miller not only sang Sandra Hüller’s praises. They also had nothing but really good things to say about Ryan Gosling too.
“He’s so boundlessly creative he does something different on every take,” Lord said. “He has such a dynamic range in his performance because he’s really funny, he’s really sweet, he’s really strong, he can be really brave, he plays engagement really well.
“We wanted to make sure the movie gave him enough opportunities to show all of those moves. He was surprising us constantly because he was doing things that were spontaneous. That’s the main thing when you’re shooting. Like, can I please have one moment happen today that I didn’t expect? Then, it’s not surprising at all because that’s just how the guy works.”
“What’s really interesting about this movie,” Miller said, “is that it is so massive in its scale and the epic visuals, but the story is so intimate. It’s so big and so small at the same time, and that’s what’s really compelling about the story. That’s why I think it makes the movie extra engaging because it’s not just big grandeur and epic battle scenes. It has this massive scale, and I can’t wait for you guys to see some of the other cinematography in the movie. That’s really gorgeous. But, at the end of the day, it’s very, very intimate, this movie.”
“We wanted to make this movie about forces of nature,” Lord noted. “Physics and the way we share common things like numbers and laws of time and space. But, one of the laws of time and space is love. And, that’s what I think that ultimately the movie is about. It’s one of the things we share across species.”
“It’s fun, but you hopefully will cry at least a few times as well,” Miller added.
PROJECT HAIL MARY will be released on hundreds of IMAX screens and on thousands of other movie screens on March 20.
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