By Michaela Gordoni
PROJECT HAIL MARY directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord sat down with Movieguide® to talk about insightful aspects from their movie, including components of laughter and tears.
The movie stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher who becomes an astronaut. He’s pressed to rely on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to solve the riddle of a mysterious substance causing Earth’s sun to die out and meets an unexpected friend along the way.
“We never understood why you couldn’t laugh and cry in the same movie,” Lord said. “Every great drama I’ve ever seen makes me laugh. Every great comedy I’ve seen makes me cry. I weirdly don’t understand why they don’t belong together.”
“It’s part of the human experience,” Miller added. “We feel a lot of different things. We’re multitudes as people.”
So they wanted to make a movie that relates to that.
“And so having a movie that takes you on a journey, that lets you laugh and lets you cry and lets you get excited and scared and on the edge of your seat,” Miller said. “All of those things. You come out of that movie feeling like, oh yeah, that was an experience.’”
“To be able to put those things next to each other and make people cry and then laugh through their tears, that’s like gold for us,” he added.
They faced a challenge in the movie to create an expressive character who didn’t have a face.
Miller explained, “And also not being able to use like earth body language expressions, right? You have to have he has to have his own, you know, cultural way of expressing things, but that feel universal to all living things. And that was really interesting to have those conversations and then figure out how to express that in a way that would be moving for an audience.”
In the movie, Ryland isn’t willing to sacrifice himself for the planet but was willing to make sacrifices for someone close to him. It’s a strange dynamic.
“Saving the planet is abstract,” Lord explained. “You know, like when Superman saves the planet. When Superman saves Lois Lane, like you’re like, ‘Oh, he better hurry.’
“And so that’s kind of what we wanted to think about, like you need to save one person. And who is his person? You’re talking about a lonely guy, who doesn’t quite fit in on Earth and finally finds somebody that he’s willing to sacrifice for.”
Movieguide® gave PROJECT HAIL MARY a -1 rating.
Part of the review reads, “PROJECT HAIL MARY is a terrific space adventure with lots of humor and heart. It’s a thoroughly uplifting movie with little objectionable content such as two minor references to evolution. Those mentions are counterbalanced by the movie’s Christian title and a lovely reference to God and faith midway in the story, which set the tone for PROJECT HAIL MARY’s exhilarating finish.”
You can watch PROJECT HAIL MARY in theaters on March 20.
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